Joby Aviation has delivered an air taxi to the Edwards Air Force Base in California about six months ahead of schedule, marking the first-ever delivery of an eVTOL aircraft to a paying customer in the U.S., the company announced Monday.
This is the first of up to nine eVTOL aircraft that Joby intends to supply to the U.S. Air Force under its $131 million Afwerx Agility Prime contract. The second delivery is on track to arrive in early 2024, Joby executive chairman Paul Sciarra said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Edwards on Monday morning.
“Today's delivery of a Joby aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base marks the culmination of seven years of a very significant public-private partnership between Joby Aviation in the Department of Defense,” Sciarra said. “It's a partnership that over time has extended across a wide range of stakeholders, including the Defense Innovation Unit, Afwerx Agility Prime, NASA, the Air Force, the Marines, and many others.
“The early interest that the DoD showed in Joby's capabilities had a profound impact on our company and, from my perspective, the future of electric flight here in the U.S.,” he added. “Today's delivery is a hugely significant moment for Joby and for our industry—but more than that, it's a validation of the long-term vision of the Department of Defense.”
The U.S. Air Force, which is exploring defense applications for eVTOL aircraft, granted military airworthiness approval for Joby’s five-seat eVTOL aircraft in December 2020. Since then, USAF test pilots have had several opportunities to take the aircraft out for a spin at Joby’s flight testing facilities in Marina, California, where the company has set up a pilot production plant. Last week, Joby announced plans to build a scaled production facility in Dayton, Ohio.
Now the military will begin testing flight operations with the aircraft on base, where it will be used to demonstrate “a range of logistics missions, including cargo and passenger transportation,” according to Joby. The USAF will also take the opportunity to train its pilots and maintenance personnel on eVTOL aircraft and their operations.
“Agility Prime’s stated objective in 2020 was to work towards an operational capability for transformative vertical lift in the DoD by 2023. The arrival of Joby’s aircraft at Edwards AFB is an important step towards achieving this objective,” said Col. Elliott Leigh, Afwerx director and chief commercialization officer for the Air Force.
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, which is at Edwards Air Force Base, will also be evaluating Joby’s aircraft alongside the USAF. “The focus of our testing here will be concentrated on how these types of aircraft can fit into existing airspace for everyday use,” Wayne Ringelberg, chief pilot at NASA Armstrong, said during Monday’s ceremony at Edwards.
Ringelberg said NASA will use Joby’s aircraft to “get a firsthand understanding of how these kinds of aircraft fly, and that understanding will inform our research in several areas to help support this emerging technology, including air traffic management, how these aircraft will integrate into a current airspace structure, what kind of ground-based infrastructure we might need, and also help inform standards makers for how we can certify these vehicles.”
While Joby has already begun delivering aircraft to the USAF, the vehicle will not be certified for commercial operations until 2025. However, the so-called “production-conforming” aircraft Joby is delivering to the USAF are essentially identical to the aircraft it intends to certify with the FAA. Joby said it finished submitting all its certification plans to the FAA in July and is on track to launch air taxi services in 2025, starting in major U.S. cities like Los Angeles and New York.
Meanwhile, a handful of other aircraft developers are getting ready to launch commercial air taxi services in 2025, and some of those competitors are also working closely with the USAF. California-based eVTOL developer Archer Aviation plans to supply up to six of its Midnight eVTOL aircraft to the USAF as part of its own contract with the Afwerx Prime program, although the company has not said when it expects to make the first deliveries. Beta Technologies, a Vermont-based electric aircraft developer, also recently announced that it will send one of its Alia prototypes to Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, where it is installing one of its electric aircraft charging stations.
