Uber as soon as this year will add a quiet, all-electric, aerial complement to its ground-based ride-hailing platform.
Uber and Joby Aviation on Thursday unveiled “Uber Air”—a new, on-demand service using Joby’s four-passenger, electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxi. Joby said it expects to carry its first passengers later this year in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where the partners shared a first look at Uber Air during a product and flight demonstration.
“With Uber Air, riders will be able to book Joby’s electric air taxi through a simple and familiar, one-tap experience on Uber, seamlessly connecting every leg of their journey—making ground-to-sky travel even more effortless,” said Sachin Kansal, chief product officer for Uber, in a statement.
At the heart of Uber Air will be Joby’s eVTOL air taxi. The all-electric model is designed for a pilot to fly up to four passengers and four carry-on bags, with a top speed of about 200 mph and zero in-flight emissions. Per Joby, it can fly up to 100 miles on a single charge while producing 45 dBA of noise—equivalent to the humming of a refrigerator—during cruise from 1,640 feet away.
Propulsion comes from four lithium-ion battery packs. These power six five-bladed propellers, which provide vertical lift during takeoff and hover but swivel forward to support cruise flight.
The air taxi has a carbon fiber composite frame and is controlled using a fly-by-wire system.
Per Joby and Uber, riders will be able to enter their destination on the Uber app. They will see an Uber Air option if the service is available. A single tap prompts the platform to plan the entire journey, including ground connections via Uber Black vehicles.
The partners shared a sample trip that depicts an Uber Black ride from Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah to a nearby Joby vertiport. From there, an air taxi would fly the passenger to Joby’s Dubai International Airport (OMDB) vertiport, where another car would be waiting to take them to one of the airport’s terminals.
Joby plans to build four vertiports in Dubai, with one in construction at Dubai Airport.
Uber Tries Again
If this all sounds familiar, that’s because Uber has tried it before.
The company in 2016 created Uber Elevate, which it billed as an aerial ridesharing platform that would one day ferry passengers in cities such as Los Angeles or Dallas.
Elevate never came to fruition. Instead, Joby acquired it in late 2020. Uber also increased its investment in the electric aircraft developer from $50 to $125 million.
Veterans of Uber Elevate are the architects of Joby’s ElevateOS platform, which Joby believes has solved the issues that held back the defunct ride-hailing platform. If the Dubai passenger service moves forward in a few months as planned, the company could have its answer.
“2026 will mark a key inflection point for Joby,” said JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby, in a Wednesday earnings announcement. “After a year full of rigorous full-transition flight testing and meaningful progress across every part of our business, we’ve begun to shift our focus from how and when we’ll go to market, to how many aircraft we can produce and where to deploy them.”
Those operations would almost certainly happen before the FAA certifies Joby’s air taxi. The firm is building production-ready aircraft as it works toward for-credit type inspection authorization (TIA) tests, during which FAA pilots will evaluate their airworthiness.
Joby in a Wednesday earnings announcement said all aircraft required for its TIA are now in production, with the first “set to fly shortly.” But it added that FAA pilots won’t get in the cockpit until later this year, at the earliest.
Didier Papadopoulos, Joby’s president of aircraft OEM, in November said the company is pursuing a “qualification program” with the UAE’s aviation regulator, under which it may be “possible, depending on where things go” for the air taxi to fly passengers before being certified.
Eric Allison, Joby’s chief product officer, likened the arrangement to an FAA experimental market survey certificate that permits noncommercial passenger flights with precertified aircraft. Competitor Beta Technologies has conducted several passenger-carrying flights in the U.S. with its market survey permissions.
Allison, the former head of Uber Elevate, is among those who transitioned to Joby following the 2020 acquisition. He has been instrumental in creating ElevateOS, which like the Uber app is designed to match pilots with riders.
“We expect travelers to book on-demand and to be boarding an aircraft just minutes later, much like the experience of using ground-based ridesharing today,” Allison said in 2024. “That required us to totally rethink the software and the operations of these aircraft.”
On the pilot side, the system monitors fatigue, provides information about the aircraft, and enables preflight and postflight checks. An “intelligent matching engine” pairs the pilots with riders, who hail flights on a mobile app. A core operations system manages landing pad access, maintenance scheduling, and more.
Joby is already putting ElevateOS to the test. For about two years, it has shuttled employees on-demand using a Cirrus SR22, which like the company’s air taxi is designed for a pilot plus up to four passengers. Employees select a time, origin, and destination and are autonomously matched with other riders. The platform also enables payments, which Joby has tested with a handful of external users.
The company says it is permitted to deploy ElevateOS in commercial operations under its Part 135 authorization. It plans to use its Blade passenger service—acquired from Blade Air Mobility for $125 million in August—as a real-world test arena for the platform.
“We set out to build a new layer of urban transportation,” Allison said Wednesday. “Our focus has always been on creating a flight experience that operates quietly and integrates naturally into the rhythm of city life.”
Joby in September said Blade’s charter service could be integrated on the Uber platform as soon as this year. Users would be able to book flights out of Blade’s network of landing points and passenger lounges, four of which are in the New York City area. Joby intends to move Blade services into the Uber app and transition them to the air taxi once it is certified.
Blade has additional facilities and operations in Europe, particularly in the French Riviera. Elsewhere, it offers chartered flights on third-party rotorcraft, jets, and seaplanes.
