FARNBOROUGH, England — In a small side room in an exhibition hall at the Farnborough Air Show, JoeBen Bevirt, the founder, CEO and Silicon Valley-style evangelist for Joby Aviation, leans eagerly across a table, his eyes intense, to convey his dream.
What if you could fly through the air from Seattle to the San Juan Islands in a whisper-quiet, four-seat air taxi in 10 or 15 minutes?
“Seattle is an amazing market for this,” he says, “because there’s lots of water.”
Bevirt leads a reporter out to the Joby stand to put on headphones and listen to a recording to prove the noise from his air taxi is negligible.
And there before him is a mock-up of his electric dream, a battery-powered flying car.
It’s unfamiliar, like a small helicopter but with wings, or a smoothly curved giant insect. To the aviation people flocking around the stand, it’s so cool.
And though that’s a mock-up, Bevirt has made the technology real. Two of these machines are doing flight tests in California, near the manufacturing site south of Joby headquarters in Santa Cruz. Another is flying out of Edwards Air Force Base as the military assesses its potential.
He has more than 1,800 employees, about 80% of them engineers.
They’ve designed a machine that’s lifted vertically by six large rotors, two on each wing and two on the V-shaped tail, and hovers. Once aloft, the rotors swivel to the horizontal to become propellers and the machine flies like a plane.
Powered by lithium ion batteries, it is quiet. And there are no emissions. It can fly up to 100 miles, but most trips are expected to be much shorter, more like 20 miles.
Uber and Delta Air Lines are collaborating with Joby so that it can develop software that interacts with the Uber and Delta phone apps.
The idea is you book a flight to New York’s Kennedy Airport and an Uber picks you up and takes you to the air taxi, which whisks you to the airport. The integrated software systems seamlessly connect your Uber trip on the ground to your air taxi flight.
Joby hopes to begin service in Dubai by the end of next year. It has plans for service in New York City, Los Angeles and Florida.
This is clearly a serious effort backed by big-pocketed investors. But can it be made real? Listen to Bevirt’s pitch as it grows in fervor.
“My dream is that significant portions of the population are moving around in the air on a daily basis,” he says. “Aviation is not just for going across the country, it’s for being able to go across town.”
Then he deadpans: “My mission is to save a billion people an hour a day.”
Yes. His vision for that trip across Puget Sound is that lines of these machines would be constantly popping up into the air and crossing the water.
There would be takeoff and landing spots — like helicopter pads, but called vertiports in this nascent air taxi world — dotted all over Seattle and Eastside neighborhoods. And this would be replicated all over the world.
This will take decades, Bevirt concedes. But starting small, he says it will scale up to “thousands, and then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands” of these flying, swarming air taxis.
A billion people in flying cars.
And beyond that, he wants eventually to develop hydrogen-powered air taxis that fly further. Joby just flew one of its machines, a prototype stuffed with a hydrogen fuel tank, more than 500 miles.
That could carry you from Seattle to Portland, without ever going through the rigors of Sea-Tac Airport, he said, “from the suburb where you live in Seattle to the suburb where grandma lives in Portland.”
A different vision in Europe
Joby, founded in 2009, is now a public company and its financial filings show it lost $1.6 billion over the last four years.
Yet it’s the most advanced of the many air taxi startups, with multiple test flights flown and funding to keep it going as it works with the Federal Aviation Administration to get its vehicle certified.
At the end of the last quarter, it had $924 million left.
Still, the cool technology Joby’s engineers have produced may not be the determinant of whether the enterprise succeeds.
In an interview Wednesday at Farnborough, where multiple air taxi startups are displaying their wares, Christian Scherer was skeptical that Bevirt’s dream will flourish. The CEO of Airbus Commercial said the technology to create a “flying object” is not the hard part.
Speaking as “a manufacturer of flying objects,” he said the more difficult challenge is to build the needed infrastructure.
The flights must be integrated into the current air-traffic management systems, the vehicle certified to aviation’s high safety standards, and communities must work out the logistics of where it flies and where it lands.
“It’s the ripeness and the readiness of it being operable, that’s the key,” said Scherer, doubtfully.
Joby is the current leader in what is a wild startup environment with dozens of air taxi projects around the world, many with different, colliding ideas for this new business.
Klaus Roewe, former veteran Airbus program leader and now CEO of Lilium, an air taxi startup based in Munich, made a surprising and vehement opening remark in an interview at Farnborough.
“We are not an air taxi,” he insisted. “I hate this term air taxi. An air taxi is a stupid thing that can fly with few people short ranges.”
Lilium’s vehicle — let’s this once call it a jet, as Roewe prefers — is bigger than Joby’s. It seats six people and flies farther, about 110 miles.
His vision is regional or intercity air travel. Orlando to Tampa. Austin to Houston. San Diego to L.A.
He said Europe, with so many populous cities relatively close together, will be the biggest market.
And Lilium is also talking with Chinese authorities about connecting the huge cities around Hong Kong Bay: Shanghai, Guangzhou, Macao and Hong Kong.
One might get away with calling it a long-distance air taxi, though not in Roewe’s presence.
His vehicle also looks very different from Joby’s. Instead of rotors it has 30 small electric engines. They are ducted: enclosed in a pod like the engines on today’s airliners.
In order to provide vertical lift the entire wing swivels, as does a smaller wing at the back called a canard.
This configuration requires much more power to lift off. The advantage, Roewe says, is in level flight.
“The aircraft is very clean and we don’t have six or eight rotors standing in the wind,” he said, allowing the aircraft to fly longer and further at higher speed.
Lilium is also public, and its filings show it has lost $1.4 billion since 2019 and finished last year with just $212 million left.
“Yes, we have a short cash runway,” Roewe conceded. Lilium is in talks with both the French and German governments for funding to keep it going. Lilium would locate a production line in France if that comes through.
One detail inhibiting private investors from pumping in more money is that, unlike Joby, Lilium has not yet flown a full-scale model. It hopes to do so by early next year.
The plan is then to get certified by regulators in time to begin service on the French Riviera in 2026, ferrying wealthy visitors who currently arrive by helicopter from Monaco on to Nice, Cannes and Saint-Tropez.
The helicopters are hated by local residents for their noise. “All the mayors come and say, ‘We kiss your feet if you come with your aircraft,’ ” Roewe said.
But without the government funding, Lilium might not survive. Roewe said he finds it unfair that Joby got $600 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to explore military uses. (Joby press releases say the DoD work has a total potential contract value of $163 million.)
Trade magazine Aviation Week reported earlier this month that investor sentiment has dramatically cooled on air taxi projects as skepticism grows that they will ever make money.
Joby’s plan to start service in Dubai and Lilium’s in the Riviera suggests the initial market will be limited to the wealthy.
Bevirt would consider that a failure. He believes that if Joby scales up as he hopes it will, costs will fall.
“In 10 years’ time, is this something that’s going to be broadly accessible and broadly affordable?” he said. “That is the crux of what we are trying to accomplish and the crux of why I founded this company.”
Count Airbus’ Scherer a skeptic.
“I think a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.”
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