Joby Aviation flew its electric air taxi from Albert Whitted Airport in downtown St. Petersburg to Tampa International Airport on Friday morning, October 30, opening a week of piloted flights across Florida with the Florida Department of Transportation. They are the state’s first flights under the federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), and the route copies the one Tony Jannus flew across Tampa Bay on January 1, 1914, which Joby calls the world’s first scheduled commercial airline flight.
Joby’s photos of the aircraft over Tampa on October 29, the day before, show N545JX, now wearing a Florida decal under its registration. I watched that airframe land at the East 34th Street Heliport in Manhattan on May 1, at the end of Joby’s New York campaign.
Joby’s second-quarter results in August said it was targeting its first passengers in 2026. Two months from the end of the year, the company has published no air taxi fare and no booking date for Tampa Bay or anywhere else in Florida.
Joby Copied a Route That Sold $5 Tickets From Day One
The St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line crossed the bay in about 23 minutes and charged $5 one way. Former mayor Abram Pheil paid $400 at auction for the first round-trip ticket, and the line carried 1,205 passengers before its last flight on May 5, 1914, according to its Wikipedia history.
Friday’s flight began with a community event at Albert Whitted Park hosted by the City of St. Petersburg. After the landing at Tampa International, Gov. Ron DeSantis borrowed a line from Back to the Future, FOX 13 reported: “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” The same report notes that the price of a Tampa Bay trip and the date passengers could book one have not been announced.
Orlando’s New Airport Vertiport and Kennedy Space Center Come Next
Joby’s announcement lists two more stops this week, weather permitting. At Orlando International, the aircraft lands at a new vertiport near Terminal C and the train station. The final flight is at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center during the UP.Summit.
Joby says the Orlando routes and procedures came out of two years of simulation with the FAA, NASA, the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority and Orlando air traffic controllers. The aviation authority approved a vertistop near the train station on July 16, when it still needed FAA sign-off and aimed to finish construction by the end of October. Joby’s release does not name the pad, but the location matches.
FDOT’s project was one of eight the Department of Transportation selected in March, and it runs in three phases covering passenger transport, cargo delivery, automation and medical response. Florida also has House Bill 1093, signed in April, which lets FDOT fund vertiports. Florida is the last stop of Joby’s Electric Skies tour after the San Francisco Bay Area, New York and Dallas-Fort Worth, where Joby flew Texas’s first eIPP week in September.
N545JX Is Still an Experimental Prototype, Not the Aircraft Joby Is Certifying
N545JX is a preproduction aircraft flying under an experimental airworthiness certificate. The airframe that counts for certification is N547JX, Joby’s first FAA-conforming aircraft. Joby announced its first flight at Marina, California, on March 11 and called it the first of a fleet built for Type Inspection Authorization testing.
When N547JX first flew, Joby said FAA pilots were expected to begin “for credit” flight testing later this year. The Florida announcement says only that Joby is moving through the final stages of type certification, and Joby’s August results called the quarter its strongest yet in the fifth and final stage. Neither says whether FAA pilots have started flying N547JX. I first wrote about the gap between the two airframes after Joby’s Golden Gate flight in March, and in May I said to watch the Daytona and San Francisco stops for whether N547JX joined the tour rotation. Keeping a TIA test aircraft home in Marina makes sense, because every day it spends on a demo tour is a day it is not flying for certification credit.
Joby already has customers in the state. Its Blade subsidiary has flown passengers between the New York area and South Florida since 2015 and restarts its BLADEone jet service to Miami and Palm Beach in November in partnership with Aero.
DroneXL’s Take
The Jannus line worked as an airline because it sold $5 tickets from the first morning. Joby’s reenactment has a prototype and no price, and in August Joby said first passengers come this year. I have no problem with the demonstration flights themselves, because the FAA and FDOT get real data from them on airport integration, noise and vertiport procedures that a simulator cannot supply. But at the last stop of the Electric Skies tour, a fare would tell Floridians more than another retraced route. Joby reports third-quarter results after the market closes on November 4, five days after the Tampa flight. If the 2026 passenger target still holds, that call is where Joby should name the first city and what a seat will cost.
Sources: Joby Aviation, Joby Aviation on X, FOX 13 Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line (Wikipedia).
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo. Read our editorial standards.
