Joby Aviation flew an aircraft 3,199 miles (5,148 km) across the United States with zero control inputs from the safety pilot sitting on board, the company said Friday. The aircraft taxied, took off, navigated the route and landed on its own, supervised remotely from California and from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, at distances of up to 2,323 miles (3,739 km).
The aircraft was a converted Cessna Caravan, a single-engine turboprop flying on a type certificate the FAA issued in October 1984. Joby’s electric air taxi, the aircraft the company is known for and the one its share price rides on, stayed on the ground.
I spent an afternoon at Blade Lounge East on the Manhattan waterfront in May watching that air taxi work the East River, and shot the photos myself. This flight shares a logo with that program and not much else.
Joby Supervised the Crossing From California and an Air Force Base
Remote operators at Joby’s Autonomy Headquarters in California and at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina supervised the aircraft from as far as 2,323 miles (3,739 km) away. The onboard safety pilot made no control inputs. Taxi, takeoff, route navigation and landing all ran autonomously.
The eastbound leg departed Buchanan Field in Concord, California (KCCR), then worked through Phoenix Deer Valley (KDVT), Fort Worth Alliance (KAFW) and Shaw Air Force Base (KSSC) before landing at Dare County Regional Airport (KMQI) in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. On the way in, the aircraft flew a low pass near the First Flight Monument at Kitty Hawk.
Phoenix is the stop worth rereading. Deer Valley is one of the busiest general aviation airports in the country, a place where the radio never stops and the pattern is full of student pilots. Joby says the aircraft slotted into that traffic with no prior familiarity with the field, and rerouted around severe weather and thunderstorms in real time as it went. Autonomous cross-country flying in clear air over empty terrain is a demonstration. Deviating around live convective weather into an unfamiliar, saturated field is the actual problem, and it is the line in the release that carries the engineering.
“Autonomy has an important role to play in the future of flight.”
That is JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s founder and CEO, in Friday’s announcement.
The Already-Certified Airframe Is the Entire Strategy
Joby’s stated logic is that bolting an autonomous system onto an airframe the FAA has already approved gives it a scalable path into air logistics. No new type certificate, no new production line, no decade of flight test to prove a novel configuration. Certification already settled.
The Caravan is an unglamorous choice and a deliberate one. It has been hauling freight into short strips and small fields since FedEx took delivery of its first one in 1985, which means the maintenance base, the parts supply and the operator pool all exist. Joby designated its converted version the J208. Everything new on the aircraft is software and sensors.
The aircraft itself is older than the program flying it. FAA registry records list N101XW as a 1993 Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, serial 208B0382, registered to Joby Aero in July 2024 and carrying an experimental airworthiness certificate for research and development. The type certificate behind it dates to 1984. The airframe is 33 years old. The computer flying it shipped this decade.
That is the opposite of the bet Wisk Aero is making. Wisk is asking the FAA to certify an aircraft where the autonomy stack itself is the safety case, as DroneXL covered when its second Gen 6 airframe flew in May. Joby has taken the cheaper route to operations and, for now, the slower route to an empty cockpit.
Joby Bought This Autonomy Stack From Xwing in 2024
The software flying the Caravan came with Joby’s acquisition of Xwing’s autonomy division in June 2024, a deal built around a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan that had already been flying itself. Joby now counts more than 400 flights and 800 automated flight hours behind the system.
The defense record is the part with customers attached. The system has run in three US military exercises, including the Air Force’s Agile Flag, where Joby says it delivered replacement parts 24 hours faster than conventional logistics, and REFORPAC, where aircraft in Hawaii were flown by operators in Guam nearly 4,000 miles (6,437 km) away. Joby has been building that side of the business steadily, including its military-grade eVTOL work with L3Harris.
The Westbound Leg Adds Seven More Stops
The aircraft now turns around. Joby has published a return route through Raleigh (KRDU), Fredericksburg and Washington, D.C. (KRMN), Louisville (KSDF), Wichita (KICT), Oklahoma City (KOKC), Salt Lake City (KSLC) and Portland (KPDX), continuing the 2026 Electric Skies tour that opened over San Francisco Bay in March.
The flights are tied to state programs rather than pure marketing. In North Carolina, they support NCDOT’s eLIFT-NC initiative for statewide healthcare logistics. Out west, they feed UDOT’s multi-state uFLY coalition, which is evaluating high-altitude and extreme-environment airspace integration on the FAA’s behalf. The Fort Worth stop coincided with Joby’s first air taxi flight under the White House-backed eIPP program, hosted with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Senator Ted Cruz.
DroneXL’s Take
Joby named the Caravan in the second paragraph of its own release, so nobody is hiding the airframe. What gets lost in the headlines is which half of this company is closer to earning money.
The S4 air taxi is the half everyone watches. I covered the first point-to-point eVTOL flights in New York City history in April and stood at the Manhattan demo the week after to watch it land. It is genuinely impressive and it is still in type certification, which means it generates press and no revenue.
The autonomy business flies a 1993 airframe on a type certificate the FAA signed in 1984, into airports that already exist, for customers who already buy air freight and medical logistics. State DOTs and the Air Force are not proofs of concept. They are budgets. I’d argue the Caravan is the more valuable half of Joby today, and that the coverage has it backwards, this publication included.
The westbound route stops at Fredericksburg, Virginia, which is an easy drive from the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. Back in March we called Joby’s New York stop before it was announced, on the logic that the company flies where the decision-makers are. Watch who turns up at KRMN.
One number is missing from all of this. Joby published flight counts, automated hours, exercise names, airport codes and a seven-city return route, and no date for taking the safety pilot out of the seat. The aircraft is still flying experimental, on a research and development certificate. That date is the whole business case, because a Caravan with a pilot in it is just a Caravan.
Source: Joby Aviation
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
