“The aircraft we are certifying will have a fully-qualified pilot on board, but we recognize that a future generation of autonomous aircraft will play an important part in unlocking our vision of making clean and affordable aerial mobility as accessible as possible,” JoeBen Bevirt, founder and chief executive, said in a statement Tuesday.
Joby makes and flies electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (”eVTOL” aircraft), sometimes called “flying taxis.” Founded in 2016, Xwing has been flying autonomous aircraft since 2020, using the company’s “Superpilot” software.
Superpilot enables uncrewed operations, supervised from the ground, and is the world’s first fully autonomous gate-to-gate flight technology, Joby said.
With 250 autonomous flights and more than 500 auto-landings completed, Xwing became the first company to receive an official project designation for the certification of a large unmanned aerial system (UAS) from the Federal Aviation Administration in April 2023 and the first to receive an Air Force Military Flight Release in 2024, Joby also said.
Joby said it expects the technology to “play an important role in accelerating the execution of existing contract deliverables with the U.S. Department of Defense and expanding the potential for future contracts.”
In September last year, Joby said it planned to build a facility capable of delivering up to 500 aircraft per year at the Dayton International Airport, supporting up to 2,000 jobs.
In early March, Joby said it acquired an existing facility at Dayton International Airport and begun hiring in support of its initial manufacturing operations at the airport.
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