Earnings call transcript: Archer Aviation beats Q1 2026 forecasts, stock dips

Archer Aviation reported its Q1 2026 earnings, surpassing expectations with an earnings per share (EPS) of -$0.28, beating the forecast of -$0.30. The company also reported revenue of $1.6 million, exceeding the forecast of $1.54 million. Despite these positive results, the stock declined 1.39% in after-hours trading, closing at $6.39 from a previous $6.48. In premarket trading, the stock further dropped by 0.49% to $6.021.

Archer Aviation demonstrated robust financial management and operational advancements in Q1 2026. The company maintained a strong liquidity position with $1.8 billion, allowing it to fund strategic initiatives without significant debt pressure. Archer’s operational expansion at Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles and early revenue from its UAE operations contributed to revenue growth.

Archer Aviation’s actual EPS of -$0.28 was a 6.67% surprise over the forecasted -$0.30. Revenue also surpassed expectations by 3.9%, reaching $1.6 million against a forecast of $1.54 million. This performance marks a positive deviation from previous quarters, where results were more aligned with forecasts.

Despite the earnings beat, Archer Aviation’s stock fell 1.39% in after-hours trading, closing at $6.39. The stock continued to decline in premarket trading, down 0.49% to $6.021. This movement contrasts with the broader market trend, where eVTOL companies have seen mixed performances.

Archer Aviation projects continued revenue growth in Q2 2026 as operations at Hawthorne Airport expand. The company anticipates a Q2 adjusted EBITDA loss between $170 million and $200 million, driven by increased investments in civil, defense, and AI software platforms. Archer remains optimistic about reducing spend following certification milestones.

CEO Adam Goldstein stated, "Our strong liquidity position enables us to pursue strategic priorities aggressively while managing our capital efficiently." He emphasized the importance of the company’s progress in FAA certification and its potential to unlock significant market opportunities.

During the earnings call, analysts questioned the timeline for achieving full FAA certification and the potential impact of increased spending on Archer’s financial performance. Executives reassured that the current spend levels are temporary and aligned with strategic growth objectives.

Operator: I’ll now hand the conference over to Kate Kiewel, Head of Investor Relations. Kate, please go ahead.

Kate Kiewel, Head of Investor Relations, Archer Aviation: Welcome to Archer’s earnings call. This is Kate Kiewel, Archer’s Head of Investor Relations. Today, we will be making forward-looking statements that are based on current assumptions. We don’t undertake any obligation to update those assumptions as a result of new information or future events.

Risks and uncertainties may cause our actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. For more information about potential risks and uncertainties, review the risk factors in our SEC filings. Today, we will also be discussing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of those measures is included in our earnings release from today. Now, I’ll turn it over to Adam. Adam?

Adam Goldstein, Chief Executive Officer, Archer Aviation: Thank you and good afternoon. I want to start by stepping back because the opportunities unfolding across the aerospace and defense market right now are massive. The future is arriving all at once. The investments we are making across our civil, defense, and AI software businesses are forming a flywheel that increasingly reinforces itself. We are seeing that momentum unfold across the ecosystem.

The U.S. government is leaning in. President Trump, the DOT, and the FAA delivered the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program last year, creating real-world testing environments for next generation aircraft. Recently, Archer was selected as a partner in three of the winning eIPP applications across eight states. We are on track to begin flying under that program in U.S. cities later this year.

Simultaneously, this administration is targeting to deploy over $20 billion for ATC modernization, an investment that would unlock new levels of safety and throughput across the national airspace. Foreign governments are following suit. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Japan, and numerous others are building infrastructure and accelerating regulatory pathways to position themselves at the forefront of this new form of transportation.

The largest airlines worldwide are also recognizing this moment and stepping up. We already work with seven of them across our businesses, and our multi-billion dollar order book for Midnight continues to grow. The world’s biggest stages are eager to showcase this future. We are collaborating closely with the L.A. 2028 Olympic Games, DOT, FAA, surrounding communities, and other stakeholders to plan our launch of air taxi operations as the official provider for the games.

There will be millions watching as the future is being built in America. Let’s focus on our air taxi progress. The reason we are positioned where we are today, a leader in the industry, traces back to the decisions that we made on day one. Archer’s path to commercializing eVTOL has always been rooted in a first principles approach, designing a safe passenger-carrying aircraft purpose-built for rapid back-to-back trips of 20 mi-50 mi in urban environments at low cost with a low noise profile.

When I entered this sector, most of the competitors had spent a decade cycling through configurations. Archer committed very early on to a partial tilt architecture designed for the air taxi use case and for FAA certification from day one. That discipline has compounded. Eight years in, no one else in the eVTOL industry has moved as fast as we have.

While the majority of our team is battling day to day to get through the final phase of certification and bring this new mode of transportation to market, I am focused on ensuring we future-proof our ability to scale. A type certifiable design is not enough. It requires us to solve two additional challenges.

The first key unlock is industrial scale. We need to continue pushing our entire industrial base forward here in the U.S., which will deliver meaningful cost and performance improvements with each new generation of Midnight. Advanced materials, new manufacturing processes, further advanced propulsion systems, and components built for volume production on the scale of autos. We have to prove out these innovations before the FAA will allow us to use them in commercially certified aircraft.

We will deploy them first in autonomous attritable dual-use aircraft for cargo and defense, and then flow these technologies back to future iterations of Midnight, helping unlock step change improvements in cost and performance. This is just one example of how our three business lines compound on one another. The second key unlock is modernizing our national airspace. America’s airspace today is a limiter on America’s GDP growth, and we have to give it the ability to scale.

While it can likely safely handle the additional traffic we expect over the next three to five years, the long-term scale of air taxis and AAM will require the U.S. to rework the infrastructure and software underlying air traffic control. The good news is this administration, and in particular, Secretary Duffy and Administrator Bedford, get this and are tackling it head-on.

Today’s system was not built for the volume or the kind of traffic that’s coming over the next decade. This is why we’ve partnered with category-defining technology leaders, including Palantir, which was recently down selected as a finalist for the FAA’s SMART program, as well as NVIDIA and Starlink, both of which will bring next generation capabilities to Midnight.

We are focused on bringing the most innovative technologies to address the challenges we face. These are not adjacencies. They are the imperatives that will drive the flywheel, unlocking massive scale. They are years-long efforts. The time to invest is now, and the good news is we are already executing against all of them. Let me turn to how we executed this quarter. We had a banner quarter on certification.

Archer became the first eVTOL company to close Phase 3 of the FAA’s 4-Phase type certification process, and we have been advancing Phase 4 in parallel for some time now. Coupled with that exciting progress, this was also our most expansive quarter for our flight test program. With piloted VTOL and CTOL flights across our expanded Midnight fleet on a nearly daily basis, and often multiple times a day. This quarter, we also took over operations at Hawthorne Airport in L.A.

We have begun modernizing it so it can serve as an air taxi and mobility hub for the city of L.A. and its surrounding communities, and as our innovation hub for the next generation airspace technology we are developing with our partners. On the defense side, our work with Anduril continues to accelerate. As I discussed in my letter to the shareholders, defense procurement is a performance and cost equation.

You cannot retrofit your way into the right solution. You must take a first principles approach. Our partnership with Anduril is doing just that. We chose to partner with Anduril because, among other strengths, they deeply understand what the U.S. and its allies need in next generation of VTOL aircraft, beyond the legacy programs that have been entrenched for 50+ years.

Together, we have designed and begun building our clean sheet hybrid aircraft, drawing on the technologies Archer has developed for Midnight and the IP we acquired from Karem, Overair and Lilium. The window for these decades-long programs of record are approaching fast, and we will be ready. I continue to be amazed by what our teams can do. I firmly believe the Archer Anduril team is one of the greatest aerospace teams of this generati