Air Taxis (eVTOL)

On 3 Aug 2026 Eve's prototype fired its rear pusher propeller in flight for the first time, holding a stabilised 27 knots (30 kt peak) with the pusher up to 1,200 rpm — a 3 min 9 s, 0.84 nm hop at 90 ft over Embraer's Gavião Peixoto test centre. It is a partial transition: the aircraft has not yet flown fully wing-borne. The step matters because it validates the no-tilt lift-plus-cruise layout Eve bet on instead of the tiltrotors flown by Joby and Archer. Type certification and entry into service are targeted for 2027–2028.

Joby began flying on 10 Sep 2026 under the White House-backed eVTOL Integration Pilot Program — the first aircraft to do so — running a week-long campaign on real routes across North Texas, including a round trip into Dallas Fort Worth International and its controlled airspace on 12 September. The point of eIPP is to generate operational safety data before commercial rules exist, so this is flying inside the national airspace system ahead of full FAA type certification rather than after it. These are company flights on a published schedule, not a service: no passengers are being sold seats, and certification remains the gate.

Dubai's General Civil Aviation Authority granted operational certification to Skyports' VDX vertiport — the first purpose-built commercial eVTOL vertiport anywhere to clear a regulator. The four-storey, ~3,100 m² building has two take-off and landing areas, rapid charging and passenger handling, with a stated capacity of up to 170,000 passengers a year. Joby holds a six-year exclusive for the Dubai air-taxi market. A certified place to land is not a service: no commercial passenger flights operate from it yet.

Certified, routine, paid air-taxi service at scale — Joby targets a Dubai launch in 2026, but at-scale economics are unproven.