Joby Aviation to include pilot on board its eVTOL aircraft, as company expands flight test programme

Joby Avi­a­tion has expand­ed its flight test pro­gramme to include fly­ing with a pilot on board the air­craft, rep­re­sent­ing a crit­i­cal step on the company’s jour­ney towards com­mer­cial oper­a­tions.

Four mem­bers of Joby’s flight test team have now pilot­ed flights on board the com­pa­ny’s pre-pro­duc­tion pro­to­type air­craft, com­plet­ing a series of ini­tial tests that includ­ed free thrust­borne hov­ers and for­ward tran­si­tions to semi-thrust­borne flight.

The test­ing took place at the company’s Pilot Pro­duc­tion Facil­i­ty in Mari­na, Cal­i­for­nia, and com­ple­ments ongo­ing flight test­ing at Edwards Air Force Base announced in Sep­tem­ber, where both Joby and US Air Force pilots will demon­strate the aircraft’s capa­bil­i­ties in real­is­tic oper­at­ing sce­nar­ios.

To date, the major­i­ty of Joby’s flight test­ing has been pilot­ed remote­ly from a ground con­trol sta­tion (GCS), using state-of-the-art com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy and soft­ware. This has allowed the com­pa­ny to gen­er­ate a vast amount of data on the per­for­mance of the air­craft across a broad range of flight con­di­tions.

The pilot on board cam­paign was led by Joby Chief Test Pilot James “Bud­dy” Den­ham and designed to gath­er data on the aircraft’s han­dling qual­i­ties and pilot con­trol inter­faces. This will sup­port the devel­op­ment of the air­craft and lay the ground­work for future ‘for cred­it’ test­ing, as part of the company’s ongo­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram with the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA).

Den­ham said: “Hav­ing helped design and test flight con­trols for a wide vari­ety of air­craft, includ­ing all three vari­ants of the F‑35 Joint Strike Fight­er, noth­ing com­pares to the sim­plic­i­ty and grace of the Joby air­craft

“After com­plet­ing more than 400 ver­ti­cal take-offs and land­ings from the ground, it is a priv­i­lege to sit in the cock­pit of our air­craft and expe­ri­ence first-hand the ease and intu­itive nature of the design that the Joby team has devel­oped.”

Dur­ing the test­ing, Joby pilots assessed the ease of con­duct­ing a num­ber of tasks and manoeu­vres that pilots will be required to per­form dur­ing nor­mal oper­a­tions, includ­ing ver­ti­cal take­offs, accel­er­at­ing and tran­si­tion­ing to for­ward flight, run­way cen­ter­line track­ing, and decel­er­at­ing to a ver­ti­cal land­ing on a rep­re­sen­ta­tive land­ing pad.

Eval­u­a­tion of these mis­sion task ele­ments (MTEs) will sup­port the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Joby air­craft as well as the company’s ongo­ing work with the Depart­ment of Defense (DoD).

Den­ham joined Joby in 2019 after retir­ing from Naval Air Sys­tems Com­mand where he was an Esteemed Tech­ni­cal Fel­low focused on the research, devel­op­ment, test, and eval­u­a­tion of advanced flight con­trols and flight dynam­ics for a wide vari­ety of air­craft.

He led the research and devel­op­ment of the Uni­fied Con­trol Con­cept — a joint U.S. and U.K. project — that was suc­cess­ful­ly inte­grat­ed into the F‑35B STOVL air­craft.

Sub­se­quent­ly, he pio­neered a new flight con­trol con­cept for air­craft car­ri­er land­ings, called Pre­ci­sion Land­ing Modes, that dra­mat­i­cal­ly increased touch­down pre­ci­sion, low­ered pilot work­load and increased safe­ty for car­ri­er land­ings on the U.S. Navy’s F/A‑18E/F/G and F‑35C air­craft. His expe­ri­ence on both of these advanced pro­grams has been instru­men­tal in the devel­op­ment of the Joby air­craft flight con­trols.

Joby recent­ly announced it will locate its first scaled air­craft man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ty in Day­ton, Ohio, pro­duc­ing up to 500 air­craft per year.