Shown here is Archer’s six-rotor Midnight eVTOL. The company hopes to shuttle VIPs at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. [Archer Innovation]
The company making the craft, Archer Aviation, hopes to enable 10–20 minute flights between vertiports. The Midnight air taxi can fly up to 150 miles per hour with a range of roughly 100 miles.
But don’t expect air taxis to be a strategy for the masses in 2028. Archer’s Midnight eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft can carry up to four passengers.
Why air taxis would likely be a niche option for LA28
To put this into perspective with some back-of-the-envelope speculative math: Even if Archer ramps to, say, 100 Midnights in service, each cycling every 15 minutes would ferry about 1,600 people an hour. That would come to around 16,000 a day if the craft flew 10 peak hours. That scenario would equate to about 2% of the spectators at the busiest day of the Paris 2024 Olympics. That would be a negligible share considering the 15 million visitors LA28 expects over the full Games.
For context, the Paris 2024 Olympics had more than 9.5 million tickets sold with 743,000 people attending the peak day (July 30).
Archer’s four-passenger air taxi is planned to serve vertiports at Olympic sites such as SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), the Coliseum, and other hubs spanning from Santa Monica to Orange County.
The idea of air mobility at the Olympics is not new. The 2024 Paris Olympics had planned an eVTOL debut, but regulators could not certify them in time, as BBC noted.
Safety considerations
As of mid-2025, no eVTOL aircraft has achieved full FAA certification for commercial passenger service. Archer is currently pursuing the agency’s five-stage type certification process, a path that can take years and has no guaranteed timetable. While the FAA issued new operational rules for “powered-lift” vehicles in late 2024 and companies like Joby have cleared Stage 3 milestones, the final certification stages involve thousands of tests to prove every system meets commercial aviation safety standards. For LA28 to succeed, Archer needs FAA approval by roughly 2026–2027 to allow time for pilot training, fleet preparation, and operational testing.
Archer is already working on its safety story. Its U.S.-assembled eVTOL aircraft features redundant, fault-tolerant systems with 12 total engines and propellers. The company notes that it is aiming for certification with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) “at similar levels of safety as commercial airliners.”
The FAA has been working to adapt its certification process for eVTOL aircraft, which it classifies as “powered-lift.” That’s the first new category of civil aircraft in decades.
Battery performance is arguably one of the top technical constraints for electric air taxis. Energy density, power output, charging speed, and lifecycle demands are more stringent for eVTOL aircraft than for electric cars. Today’s best lithium-ion cells (roughly 250–300 Wh/kg) yield limited flight ranges (often in the tens of miles range on a charge with reserves) for current eVTOL prototypes.
Beyond chemistry and safety, thermal management adds challenges. Batteries must not overheat or incur thermal runaway, especially given the high discharge rates during vertical lift. Weight is also a constant trade-off: every kilogram of battery is useful for range but subtracts from payload.
A potentially significant grid draw
One reality that has gotten little attention is the substantial electrical load Midnight would pull from L.A.’s grid. Archer’s specs place each Olympus battery pack at 142 kWh with a target rapid-charge turnaround of roughly 10 minutes. While the exact energy consumption per flight isn’t public, even a modest recharge between 20-mile hops would require significant power infrastructure. Each aircraft’s maximum power output reaches 1,300 kW during flight operations. Charging systems would thus need sizable capacity. Further complicating matters, a fleet of air taxis conducting rapid turnarounds at vertiport hubs would create concentrated electrical demand spikes. In turn, that would require upgraded grid infrastructure, high-capacity chargers, and smart load-balancing systems.
