LA’s Olympic air taxis signal new era of urban flight

12th December 2025

James Day

When Los Angeles hosts the world in 2028, the Olympic Games will not only showcase athletic excellence but also reveal a bold leap forward in urban mobility. In an exclusive agreement, Archer Aviation has been selected as the official air taxi provider of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, deploying its Midnight electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to transport VIPs, officials and stakeholders across the vast metropolitan area.

Designed for short, high-frequency trips, Midnight offers journeys of 10–20 minutes that would take an hour or more by car — a transformative solution for a city where traffic is an everyday adversary. The partnership signals a major moment for eVTOL technology: not a test flight, not a demonstration, but full integration into one of the biggest sporting events on Earth.

A key step in this rollout is Archer’s acquisition of California’s Hawthorne Municipal Airport, which will become the operational centre of its Olympic-era air taxi network. The site will also act as an AI development testbed, where autonomous support systems, predictive maintenance tools and real-time airspace-management algorithms will be tested and refined ahead of 2028.

The approach mirrors established airline logistics but shrinks it down to a city-wide scale: fast turnarounds, rapid charging cycles and tightly coordinated departure windows managed by advanced software rather than human dispatch alone.

Archer’s Midnight eVTOL has been engineered specifically for repetitive short-range flights throughout the day. Key innovations include 12 electric rotors that transition from vertical lift to efficient wing-borne flight, a low noise profile — dramatically quieter than helicopters, for dense urban deployment — zero emissions and a real pilot until regulatory frameworks mature. Recent test flights have reached altitudes above 10,000 feet and covered distances exceeding 50 miles, marking meaningful progress towards certification and high-volume operations.

The LA28 Games are expected to attract more than 15 million visitors. Traditional road-based mobility alone cannot comfortably absorb this scale. Organisers emphasise that air taxis are not a gimmick and believe they will leave an Olympic legacy of a different kind, where the smart city blueprint could be adopted by other countries within a decade.

The leap toward everyday air mobility is something championed by FOS Future Lab presented by Randox, where aerospace disruptors such as Certo Aerospace showcased cutting-edge propulsion and technologies at the 2025 Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard. Goodwood has become a reliable early glimpse of future mobility breakthroughs, and you can expect to see more at the 2026 Festival of Speed.

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Images courtesy of Archer Aviation.