Joby achieves milestone manned transition flight
April 29, 2025
Californian eVTOL developer Joby has achieved what it terms a “testing landmark;” making its first series of full transition flights with a pilot onboard. Conducted from Joby’s flight test facility in Marina, California, a series of preparatory flight tests were also conducted at Edwards Air Force Base to confirm the aircraft design’s redundancy.
An undeniably important part of an eVTOL aircraft’s flight testing programme is its ability to successfully demonstrate ‘transition flight’: that is, moving from vertical lift to forward cruise and back again. Seen by many as a major milestone in an eVTOL’s ongoing envelope expansion, Joby has now added this landmark to its growing list of capabilities, with its first transition flight achieved on 22 April 2025.
Having taken a methodical approach to what Joby president of aircraft OEM Didier Papadopolous described as “long-planned,” Joby first demonstrated a full-scale, remotely piloted transition flight in 2017; becoming the first eVTOL developer to do so. In the ensuing years, Joby has since completed more than 40,000 miles of test flights “across multiple aircraft, including hundreds of transitions from vertical take-off to cruise flight as well as more than a hundred flights with a pilot onboard in hover and low-speed flight,” explained the company.
In preparation for the manned flight, thousands of hours in Joby’s ground-based ‘Integrated Test Lab’ were augmented by a series of ‘real-life’ flight tests conducted at Edwards Air Force Base (where two of Joby’s fleet of five test aircraft are based). Undertaken to “confirm the redundancy present throughout the aircraft’s design,” these included simulated in-flight events such as simulated motor-out and battery-out occurrences. In all scenarios, Joby’s aircraft “performed as expected” and was able to “continue safe flight and a controlled, vertical landing, even when relying in just four of the aircraft’s six propellers”.
The first transition sortie was flown by Joby’s chief test pilot James ‘Buddy’ Denham, who joined Joby in 2019 after retiring from the US Naval Air Systems Command. No stranger to VTOL aircraft, Denham previously led the research and development of the joint US-UK Unified Control Concept that was successfully integrated into the Lockheed Martin F-35B. However, despite having piloted more than 60 different aircraft types, Denham said he was “honoured to have played a role in this historic moment”.
Yet with two other Joby test pilots having also performed the transition, Papadopoulos added that Joby has now moved from “one historic flight to routine pilot-on-board transitions overnight”. Crucially, this also “paves the way to starting TIA [Type Inspection Authorisation]] flight testing with FAA pilots onboard,” he added. (Joby has previously noted that TIA “is considered the final stage phase of aircraft certification ahead of commercial service”.) Joby also confirmed it remains “on track” to deliver its first aircraft to Dubai – an area set to represent its first commercial use case – in the middle of 2025 “to complete flight testing ahead of first passenger flights in the region”.
