He added that the aircraft also has six propellers, to be used in case of emergency. According to the company, a ride in the SUV-size flying taxi will cost the equivalent of an Uber Black, the most expensive option offered by the ride-hailing app.
Technically it’s not a door-to-door service, however. After hailing the aircraft using either Uber or Joby’s own app, the aircraft will pick up and drop off up to four passengers off at specialized take-off and landing points known as vertiports. Four are planned for Dubai, including in the city’s Al Maktoum International Airport. Once they land, customers will be transported to their final destination by car.
With no traffic and speeds of up to 200 mph, the company says a 45-minute journey from the airport to downtown Dubai can be cut down to just 10 minutes.
JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s CEO, said the engineers spent 16 years “optimizing this aircraft to be incredibly quiet.” This meant it was “dramatically quieter than a helicopter” when taking off and landing, and “nearly silent when you’re flying overhead,” he said.
“Instead of the wop-wop of a helicopter, it’s more of a whoosh,” he said, adding that he “wanted it to sound like the wind in the trees” from his childhood.
He added that, since it is a battery-powered aircraft, “we need a charger at any spot where we want to do frequent operations.” He added that the company could “do multiple flights between charges but the operational cadence is optimal if you have charging at each unit.”
While he thought Dubai would be the first to launch this type of service, Bevirt predicted American cities will not be far behind. “As we understand it, there’s going to be at least five that are selected to be pilot cities,” he said.
In June, President Donald Trump signed three executive orders that the White House said in a statement would “accelerate domestic drone production.” The statement added that “create a pilot program testing flying cars,” including air taxis.
But Los Angeles-based aviation expert Robert L. Ditchey said he didn’t think an air taxi service “was ever going to happen” in American cities because of both the volume of air traffic and the cost of running such a service.
Ditchey, a former U.S. Navy pilot who went on to serve as an executive on four American airlines, added that there was “a risk of collision in and around the airports that air taxis are flying from. The other thing is you have homes and houses and buildings and businesses.”
“They’re dangerous. We have had helicopters fail and crash on top of buildings in Los Angeles. We’ve have had helicopters fail at take off and landing in airports. They’re dangerous not from a fire point of view but in terms of landing on top of people and buildings,” he said.
“So there is very little opportunity to operate a reasonable size helicopter service to and from an airport,” he said, adding that a similar service had been tried with helicopters in New York some time ago but had ultimately failed.
Ditchey also questioned whether they were economically viable. “They cannot be developed in enough numbers with enough usage to make them economically viable unless they are subsidized by a government,” he said.
China, he said, was not developing air taxis like this and it had both the ability to create and subsidize the infrastructure required.
However, Bevirt said that his company had “dedicated counterparts in Manhattan,” which were already being used for helicopters. “We have one on the West Side, we have one on the East Side, we have one on Wall Street,” he said.
“The biggest challenge right now is ramping manufacturing. We are seeing massive demand in the U.S. and around the world,” Bevirt said. “The more demand there is, the more frequent the cadence of air taxi flights can be, and therefore the more seamless that transition is,” he added.
