Archer Aviation's all-electric Midnight air taxi has completed several days of piloted flights in the Bay Area as part of the company's ‘No Roads’ flight tour. The flights included multiple trips around the San Francisco Bay, taking off and landing at Oakland International airport. Beginning in Salinas, Midnight's multi-city journey to the Bay Area took it to progressively larger cities with more complex airspace, with stops at Hollister, San Martin, San Jose, Mountain View and Hayward before landing in Oakland to complete multiple piloted flights over the San Francisco Bay.

The purpose of the northern California flights of Archer's tour was to showcase Midnight's ability to operate seamlessly in the complex urban airspace surrounding the Bay Area's three international airports, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, representing one of the busiest flight corridors in the country.

In addition to demonstrating airspace integration, the flights also gave communities across the Bay Area a chance to see the benefits of electric air taxis firsthand: low noise, zero operating emissions and the ability to skip over crowded highways, turning drives of an hour or more into 10–20 minute trips.

Midnight completed its flight from Oakland International to San Francisco's Marina District in around 10 minutes, a trip that can routinely take over an hour by car in traffic. During the multi-city journey, Midnight reached top speeds of 131 mph and flew over 200 miles across the region, flying into seven cities over a three day period.

Midnight has not yet received FAA type certification. Archer closed Phase 3 of the FAA's four-phase type certification process in April 2026, the first eVTOL manufacturer to do so.

“The Bay Area is the innovation centre of the world, but even here Americans lose multiple weeks a year sitting in traffic on bridges and highways,” says Adam Goldstein, founder and CEO of Archer. “Flying Midnight across multiple cities in northern California shows we can connect communities with no roads, no traffic and no emissions in minutes instead of hours. That's the future we're working towards bringing to the Bay Area, Los Angeles and cities across the country.”

Building on the close coordination with the FAA and state and local partners that made the northern California flights possible, these flights have opened the door for Midnight to continue demonstrating its readiness to integrate with commercial air traffic in the world's largest cities, with plans to fly in Los Angeles next as Archer prepares to operate under the White House's eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP). Archer's eIPP partners include the Texas Department of Transportation, the Florida Department of Transportation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The Bay Area flights are the latest in a series of ‘No Roads’ tour milestones for Midnight. In September, Midnight conducted several piloted flights for tens of thousands of attendees at the 2026 California International Airshow. Before flying for the hometown crowd, Midnight began the tour with multiple city-to-city roundtrip journeys from Salinas to Monterey and Hollister.

Archer's goal with its Midnight aircraft is to transform urban travel, replacing 60–90 minute commutes with quiet, all-electric flights that dramatically reduce travel times compared to traditional ground transportation. Archer's all-electric Midnight air taxi is designed around the urban air mobility use case with the ability to conduct rapid back-to-back flights with zero operating emissions.