, Joby said after the aircraft arrives at Edwards, “it will be used to demonstrate a range of potential logistics use cases.”
“We’re super excited about taking this aircraft to Edwards Air Force Base in California to begin testing with the DOD,” the company’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt,. “That is just a spectacular opportunity for us to begin building the operational muscle and begin moving goods and people around military airbases before we have FAA certification.”
Joby’s production aircraft could be a way to transport cargo or people someday; it can hold four passengers, plus a pilot. The company’s goal is to carry people beginning in 2025. “I believe what we’re showing here is going to revolutionize aviation forever,” Wagner says. Joby also has a planned, which could provide a way for passengers to make a short hop from somewhere in the New York City area, for example, to John F.
Wagner says that the production aircraft that they’ve just unveiled appears, superficially, to resemble the pre-production aircraft the company has fabricated already. It “looks substantially similar to the very first aircraft we built, six years ago,” he says, “and especially [similar] to the last two aircraft we built.”
But he says that even if it looks similar, the flying machine that came off the production line has been subjected to iterations to improve it. “The biggest difference is that we’ve now invested in the manufacturing systems, and we can make multiple of these aircraft, over and over now, and that’s because we’ve gained the confidence in that design,” he says.The industry as a whole has seen setbacks, as has Joby. A company called Kitty Hawk, which was working on a, closed its doors last year.