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US air taxi group Joby Aviation is looking for take-off locations in London and northern England as it seeks to launch its first European services in Britain well before the end of the decade.
JoeBen Bevirt, founder and chief executive, said the company will shortly begin “engaging with real estate owners, local community groups” to build support for locations for its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles.
“We have had some preliminary conversations but that work will be accelerating in the next stretch,” he told the Financial Times at the Farnborough air show last week.
The company, he added, was “incredibly bullish” about opportunities in the UK, noting that it had taken him “close to two hours to get from London to Farnborough and two hours to get back in the evening”.
Apart from the capital, Joby plans to target key areas in the north where, according to Bevirt, you have “limited connectivity, maybe less access to high-speed rail [and] where . . . building out new take-off and landing locations is much more affordable”.
Joby has published marketing material showing a potential network for the north of England and the north Midlands which would link cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds. It claims that a zero-emission journey from Manchester airport to Leeds could take 15 minutes, instead of the average of 90 minutes by road.
A commercial service, said Bevirt, would initially be priced at a comparable cost to Uber’s premium “Black” service, with plans to lower the price to that of a regular taxi over time on a per-seat mile basis. A trip from London to Farnborough in the most expensive type of Uber cost £292 earlier this week.
He declined to specify precisely when a UK commercial service would launch, but said the company’s target was “substantially sooner” than 2030. Joby expects its first commercial passenger markets to be Dubai and the US and plans to start operations as early as late 2025.
The California-based company is among several start-ups and aerospace incumbents hoping to make the vision of emission-free “urban air mobility” a reality. Several companies have been forced to tap investors for more funding and push back certification milestones.
Founded in 2009, Joby listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2021. It has raised more than $2bn in funding from investors and other backers, including carmaker Toyota which is also a manufacturing partner. Joby ended the first quarter of 2024 with $924mn in “cash and short-term investments”.
Its aircraft is the first eVTOL to have had its certification plans accepted by the US aviation safety regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, and it is now working towards full approval. It has so far completed three of the five certification stages, said Bevirt. Joby began the process to certify its eVTOL with the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority more than two years ago. The CAA said last year it had set a target date of 2026 for having a vehicle licensed.
Despite the industry’s challenges and repeatedly missed milestones, Bevirt said he remained confident that there was now a “global momentum” behind it.
It was becoming clear, he said, “that there is a real need, that traffic is getting worse and trip times are getting longer and that it takes a long time and costs a lot of money to build new roads, bridges, tunnels, trains”. Clean, quiet air taxis can “really change the game for a lot of people”.