Joby Aviation announced today that the specifications for the universal charging interface developed for electric aircraft will be made freely available to the industry.

Joby’s number one goal is to make sustainable air travel as widely available as possible and, by sharing the progress we’ve made over more than ten years of research and development, we hope to make the transition to clean flight as rapid as possible.

Joby’s charging technology is already in use at the flight test center in Marina, California, and at Edwards Air Force Base, where Joby recently delivered the US Air Force’s first air taxi and installed the first on-base electric aviation charging system.

Importantly, the technology developed is optimized to support all types of electric aircraft under development today, from air taxis delivering short range city flights to more conventional electric aircraft flying longer distances — something that is not true of the alternative concept currently being proposed. This means that infrastructure developers and network operators will only need to install one type of charger to support the entire industry, significantly reducing the barriers to getting this industry off the ground.

Led by Jon Wagner, formerly a Senior Director of Battery Engineering at Tesla, the team has developed technology that builds on existing automotive charging technology standards but adapts them to the unique requirements of aviation and the urban air mobility market, unlike the repurposed automotive standard currently being discussed.

The Joby charging system brings the benefit of integrated battery conditioning, secure and high-speed data offload that is expected to meet the safety and cybersecurity requirements outlined by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the ability to simultaneously charge the multiple independent battery packs typically found in electric aircraft. Our solution is also expected to have a lower certification burden.

Per a Joby spokesperson: “We believe it’s critically important to avoid the fractured implementation of charging infrastructure seen in the auto industry - where a push towards the lowest common denominator has failed the market test - and we look forward to working with our industry colleagues and relevant standards bodies to deliver an approach to charging that is in the interest of every operator”.

For more information, please contact us at info@jobyaviation.com.