Electric Air Taxis Take Flight, But Still No Passengers

It was the kind of spring day that makes you believe the future is finally here. On Monday, a sleek, egg-shaped aircraft with six tilt-rotor propellers lifted off from JFK Airport and glided west along the Brooklyn shoreline before turning north toward Manhattan. Roughly 14 minutes later, the Joby Aviation electric air taxi touched down at the West 30th Street heliport. It was a historic flight, and it was also completely empty of passengers.

The demonstration drew heavy inspiration from The Jetsons , officials name-dropped the 60-year-old cartoon at least three times. But beneath the nostalgia, the flight underscored just how far the electric air taxi industry still has to go before it becomes a commercial reality. Joby’s aircraft can carry five people, including one pilot, but Monday’s flight was pilot-only. Like every other eVTOL provider today, Joby is still waiting for final FAA certification to begin passenger services. After years of navigating the regulatory maze, the company is reluctant to predict when that milestone might arrive.

“The path to type certification is long,” said Bonny Simi, Joby’s president of operations. “We’re well on that journey, very well on that journey, and the FAA has been absolutely fabulous.” Yet when pressed for a timeline on final approval, Simi demurred. “I can’t speak on behalf of them,” she said, pointing instead to the recently launched eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) , a White House-backed initiative designed to accelerate the safe deployment of electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft in the U. S. “What’s interesting is what will this eIPP allow in terms of operations?” she added. “They have very expressly intended for it to have some type of commercial operation. We don’t yet know. We’re working together with the FAA to see what that might be. So, TBD.”

Notably, Joby’s first passenger service won’t even be in the United States. Later this year, the company plans to launch its first passenger-approved air taxis in Dubai, in partnership with the city’s Roads and Transport Authority. The FAA has been far more cautious in its approach to advanced air mobility than regulators in the United Arab Emirates. “The regulatory hurdles were a little lighter, not unsafe by any stretch of the imagination,” Simi said of Dubai’s authorities. “But the whole government was leaning in.”

While it waits in regulatory purgatory, Joby is focused on proving its technology to local officials and aviation authorities. This week, the company conducted multiple flights in New York, including one at JFK and another at the Lower Manhattan helipad. From the tarmac at JFK, observers watched the air taxi rise vertically, transition to forward flight, and then quickly disappear into the distance.

Joby says its air taxis are quieter than helicopters and produce zero emissions because they are electric. Simi described the noise profile as “like leaves in the wind,” though a helicopter hovering overhead during takeoff made that hard to verify. The ultimate goal is to connect Manhattan to JFK in under 10 minutes, a trip that currently takes an hour by car. Joby owns helicopter company Blade, which already flies similar routes, and maintains partnerships with Delta Air Lines and Uber.

Simi said Joby has flown over 50,000 miles in dozens of flights over the past nine years. The company is one of the few to demonstrate the ability to transition from vertical takeoff to forward flight, and one of the few to use pilots in its flight demonstrations. “Do you think the FAA would allow us to do this if we had just started doing it?” she asked. “So, we really are far ahead in terms of the amount of experience we have and the amount of operations we have.”

Joby went public in 2021 and recently expanded into defense contracting to generate revenue before receiving the green light for commercial operations. The company eventually plans to sell its aircraft to other operators while also running its own air taxi service. In addition to New York and Dubai, Joby has said it intends to launch in Miami and Los Angeles, the latter in time for the 2028 Olympics. (Rival Archer Aviation was selected as the official eVTOL partner of the LA Games.)

Will Joby have its final approval in time? “That’s the hope,” Simi said. And when it does finally take flight, you might just hear it happen , but only briefly. “The loudest it is is just as it takes off,” she said. “So you heard it for like three seconds. And that’s the absolute loudest. And it’s just like a whoosh.”