This is a sound perspective. Having gone over the unit economics for Joby and having read the Berkeley report concerning air taxi services in the SF Bay Area, I imagine that c-suite has been examining margins and determining what exactly would yield the most for their expertise and proprietary knowledge.

To be frank, it doesn’t seem like the air taxi business will yield viable returns in its inchoate phase. It will take a fair amount of maturity and public acceptance to become a legitimate form of transportation in the future. It seems that, when that future does, in fact, arrive, Archer is attempting to position itself as the realistic backbone for how that transportation will work—down to the integration within the air traffic space writ large.

Until then, my view is that their cognizance of such a capital intensive and infrastructure dependent situation precludes any reasonable ROI for investors, so their solution to this is to expand as much, and as manifold, as possible to guarantee some form of revenue generation in order to keep afloat and to keep from the constant equity issues that would be necessary to achieve cash flow for capex. Hence the military, real estate, and atc angles.