Joby Aviation’s all-electric aircraft is set to fly in NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign later this year — the next step in almost ten years of collaboration exploring electric propulsion in aviation.

Though NASA is most widely known for its achievements high above the atmosphere — landing humans on the moon and launching probes beyond the boundaries of our solar system — the “first A” in NASA has played a similarly pioneering role in aeronautics research and the evolution of flight.

Beginning in the late 2000s, NASA engineers recognized the potential of electric propulsion to transform aviation, offering greatly reduced noise and emissions plus improved safety over traditionally powered aircraft. For the past ten years, NASA has driven progress in the electrification of flight.

In those early days of electric aviation, our founder, JoeBen Bevirt, was also pushing the envelope, exploring airborne wind turbines as a means to harness the forces of stronger winds thousands of feet off the ground for renewable energy generation. It was the success of those efforts that led to the formation of Joby Aviation with the goal of building personal electric aircraft.

The paths of NASA and Joby began to cross almost a decade ago as the agency set out to explore electric propulsion systems and novel aircraft designs. In 2012, Joby’s work on the Monarch, a personal electric aircraft design, led to the company’s selection as a partner for the Greased Lightning and Lotus projects that explored long-endurance aircraft designs with vertical takeoff and landing capability.

Continue reading on the Joby Aviation website.

*In 2010, Joby publicly released its Monarch design, a single-seat electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.*

NASA and Joby: A Decade of Electric Flight