Joby Aviation

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Joby Aviation leads the eVTOL certification race. Founded in California in 2009 — long before the air-taxi boom — and listed on the NYSE as JOBY, the company counts Toyota as its largest strategic investor and manufacturing partner. Over fifteen years Joby has grown from a garage startup into a company with its own factories in California and Ohio.

S4: speed and silence

The Joby S4 carries a pilot and four passengers. Six tilting propellers lift it vertically and transition it into wing-borne flight at up to 320 km/h — faster than most of its class. Working range is around 160 km with reserves. The engineers' particular pride is acoustics: in cruise the S4 is barely audible from the ground, which is critical for flying over cities.

Final FAA stage and launch plans

Joby is in the fourth and final stage of FAA type certification — Type Inspection Authorization testing — with more than a thousand test flights logged. Commercial launch is targeted for late 2026 to 2027: in the US with Delta Air Lines on routes to New York and Los Angeles airports, and in the Middle East through an exclusive air-taxi agreement in Dubai, where demonstration flights from vertiports have already taken place.

Compared with Archer, Joby's approach is more conservative and more vertically integrated: the company builds its own motors, batteries, composite airframes and software, leaving almost no critical external suppliers. That costs more and takes longer, but it secures quality and unit economics at the scale of thousands of aircraft. Joby also flies for the US Air Force under the Agility Prime program — years of pre-production operations that generate both revenue and real-world reliability data few rivals possess — and its acquisition of autonomy developer Xwing points at pilotless versions in the long run.

For Central Asia, Dubai is the nearest showcase: the vertiport-to-airport format will be proven an hour's flight from Almaty and Tashkent, in heat and urban density close to our own. JetHunter follows the Joby program, advises on future delivery terms and can develop an eVTOL route concept for corporate customers in the region — from feasibility study to dialogue with aviation authorities. For early movers this preparation matters: launch markets historically get manufacturer attention, training slots and spare-parts priority that late adopters wait years for, and the same pattern will repeat with air taxis.