Air taxis (eVTOL): where the field actually stands
Joby has cleared four of the FAA's five certification stages, Dubai certified the first purpose-built vertiport, and EHang has been type-certified in China since 2023. Nobody is flying paying passengers at scale, and the field's binding constraint is cash against a certification clock.
The eVTOL field carries four metrics and 8 milestones here — the fewest milestones of any active field on the tracker, which is itself informative.
Certification is the metric that matters, because it is the actual finish line before US passenger service. The FAA's type-certification process has five stages; Joby completed Stage 4, the airworthiness conformity review, in March 2026 — the most advanced US position in the field. Archer sits at Stage 3, with means-of-compliance accepted and roughly six to twelve months behind. Stage 5 is the certificate itself, and nobody has it in the US.
China is a separate track and got there first. The CAAC type-certified EHang's autonomous EH216-S in October 2023, the first passenger eVTOL type certificate anywhere. The designs differ enough that this is not a straight comparison: EHang's autonomous model has a 30 km design range and Volocopter's VoloCity about 35 km, aimed at short urban hops, while Joby and Archer both design for about 161 km piloted — long-range air taxi economics rather than cross-town shuttles.
The second metric is liquidity, and it is unusual to track cash as a frontier indicator. It is here because these are pre-revenue companies burning capital against a regulatory clock, and running out before certification is the field's characteristic failure mode. Archer reported about $1.7B in liquidity in 2025; Joby holds roughly $810M in cash plus Toyota's $894M commitment. Volocopter is the cautionary example — it went through insolvency and a Wanfeng buyout before resuming its EASA path with more than 2,000 test flights logged.
What actually moved in 2026 was infrastructure and airframe variety. In July, Dubai's GCAA granted operational certification to Skyports' VDX — the first purpose-built commercial vertiport anywhere to clear a regulator, a four-storey building with two landing areas, rapid charging and a stated capacity of up to 170,000 passengers a year, with Joby holding a six-year exclusive for the Dubai market. A certified place to land is not a service: no commercial passenger flights operate from it yet.
In August, Eve Air Mobility (Embraer) flew the first partial transition for a lift-plus-cruise air taxi, firing its rear pusher propeller in flight and holding a stabilised 27 knots for a three-minute hop. The aircraft has not yet flown fully wing-borne, but the step validates the no-tilt layout Eve bet on instead of the tiltrotors Joby and Archer fly. Joby itself demonstrated the use case directly, flying between JFK and Manhattan's heliport network in April after the first piloted eVTOL flight between two public airports in August 2025.
The locked milestone is scaled, profitable passenger service. Joby targets a Dubai launch, but at-scale economics remain unproven — and on this tracker, an unproven economic model is not a milestone.