Joby Begins Week-Long Texas eVTOL Campaign With DFW Airport Flights

Texas’s first flights under the White House-backed eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) began on September 10, 2026, Joby Aviation announced (JOBY ), with the company carrying out a week-long flight campaign across the Dallas-Fort Worth region. Joby, a California-based company listed on the New York Stock Exchange that is developing electric air taxis for commercial passenger service, is flying its eVTOL aircraft on real-world routes across North Texas, including direct flights into Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) and major urban hubs, in partnership with the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). The company also disclosed that it recently leased a 45,000-square-foot facility at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, which it said will serve as its long-term operating presence in North Texas.

The North Texas flights are conducted under TxDOT’s winning Project Nexus proposal, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation eIPP initiative announced in March 2026. Joby said the campaign builds on electric air taxi demonstrations it conducted earlier in 2026 in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City and shows the aircraft’s ability to integrate into busy airspace. The flights are expected to generate the real-world operational data the FAA needs to build safety rules for commercial service at scale, the company said.

Flight Campaign Schedule

The published schedule runs from September 10 through September 14, 2026. It opens at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport (AFW) with a campaign kickoff and joint flight demonstration from Joby and other aircraft manufacturers in partnership with TxDOT. Joby’s aircraft will enter DFW’s controlled airspace, landing directly at DFW Corporate Aviation, a fixed-base operator. A round-trip flight from AFW to Arlington, Texas, will demonstrate low-noise operations over major infrastructure including the Fort Worth Stockyards, and a further mission will fly the planned operational route connecting AFW to Toyota Motor (TM ) North America’s corporate campus in Plano. Joby described DFW as one of the world’s busiest and most connected airports and noted the schedule is subject to change based on weather conditions and other factors.

To support the campaign and longer-term growth in the region, Joby leased the 45,000-square-foot Perot Field facility within the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone. The effort draws on years of airspace research with the FAA and NASA, which began studying electric air taxi integration in North Texas in 2018. A 2023 high-fidelity simulation by Joby and NASA at the Future Flight Central facility at the agency’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley examined the feasibility of operating up to 50 electric air taxi operations per hour in the DFW terminal area. Joby’s announcement, citing independent transportation research, said the typical Dallas-Fort Worth driver loses around 44 hours a year to traffic congestion, and the company said its long-term vision is to give communities that time back through commercial air taxi service.

Federal Pilot Program and Project Nexus

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy and the FAA announced the eight selected eIPP proposals on March 9, 2026. The program, outlined in President Trump’s Unleashing Drone Dominance Executive Order, drew more than 30 proposals that were evaluated by a technical review team from DOT and the FAA. The eight selected projects span 26 states and cover urban air taxi services, regional passenger transportation, cargo and logistics networks, emergency medical response operations, autonomous flight technologies, and offshore and energy-sector transportation. The department said data from the pilot projects will be used by the FAA to develop new regulations that safely enable the technology at scale, and that the public would start to see operations under the program by summer 2026. TxDOT’s selection lists industry partners Archer, BETA, Joby, and Wisk, which will support regional flights connecting Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and eventually Houston, with air taxi networks expanding from each city to extend regional reach.

On its Advanced Air Mobility page, TxDOT describes Project Nexus as creating a multi-state system of systems to safely integrate advanced air mobility into the National Airspace System. By uniting Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and the Choctaw Nation, the project spans dense urban centers, a coastal energy corridor, and rural sovereign lands. TxDOT states the initiative validates medical, cargo, and regional transport use cases, creates a scalable template for interstate regulatory harmonization, and follows a phased operational strategy that begins with infrastructure and surrogate validation before transitioning to eVTOL and conventional takeoff and landing aircraft integration. The agency states it is in discussions with the FAA to finalize operational details, with initial operations planned to commence in the fall or winter of 2026.

Joby said it is advancing through the fifth and final stage of FAA type certification, supported by ongoing testing of its conforming aircraft for Type Inspection Authorization (TIA). The company said the Texas flights demonstrate the operational maturity, acoustic performance, and airspace integration required to launch commercial air taxi service at scale.

“With TxDOT’s leadership and support, the eIPP gives us an incredible opportunity to bring our aircraft into urban areas and accelerate our path to commercial service,” said JoeBen Bevirt, Joby’s founder and CEO. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford called advanced air mobility vehicles the future of aviation and said the Texas demonstrations are critical to reaching that goal. “The FAA is leveraging data from test flights in Texas and across the country to ensure these new aircraft integrate safely into the airspace,” Bedford said. Duffy said the launch marked another critical step in the administration’s work to reshape how people and products move.

In a separate announcement on September 10, 2026, Joby said its autonomous J208 aircraft, a Cessna 208B Caravan fitted with the company’s autonomous flight technology, had begun a month-long, coast-to-coast tour with stops across 10 states. The aircraft’s flight demonstrations began in Concord, California, on September 8, 2026, with a stop at AFW on September 10, 2026, where it was on display during an event hosted by Duffy celebrating the eIPP launch. Joby said the tour demonstrates use cases spanning commercial freight, medical transport, disaster response, and defense logistics.

Joby reported that the J208 has accumulated more than 400 flights and 800 automated flight hours in controlled and uncontrolled airspace, using an autonomy stack first developed by Xwing and integrated through Joby’s 2024 acquisition. The company said the aircraft has participated in three U.S. military exercises, including Agile Flag, a series of U.S. Air Force readiness exercises in which it delivered cargo including replacement parts that allowed other aircraft back in the air roughly 24 hours sooner than a conventional logistics run, and REFORPAC, a military logistics exercise across the Pacific and Hawaii in August 2025 in which the aircraft was operated by ground control stations in Guam nearly 4,000 miles away. The J208 operates under a supervised autonomy model in which a ground-based Remote Pilot serves as Pilot in Command, supervising the flight, updating flight plans, and managing air traffic control communications, with a monitoring pilot onboard for select operations.

Both the North Texas campaign and the J208 tour form part of Joby’s 2026 Electric Skies tour, a nationwide showcase marking the United States’ 250th anniversary. The J208 is part of Joby Autonomy, a program working to apply the company’s self-flying systems to both commercial and defense applications.