Joby Aviation delivered an electric flying machine to Edwards Air Force Base, where the Air Force will experiment with different jobs for it.
to come off the company’s line in Marina, California, in June. “It’s massive” as a moment, JoeBen Bevirt, the company’s CEO, tells PopSci. “This is like a dream come true.”
All of the aircraft’s six propellers can tilt, to allow it to take off or land vertically, but then fly like a regular airplane.There are a couple ways that the Air Force might use the aircraft. One is to patrol the Edwards Air Force Base’s sprawling footprint, which spans more than 400 square miles. Because the base is so big, says Maj. Philip Woodhull, who focuses on emerging technologies in the Air Force, the people who guard it “have quite a time doing perimeter security management.
“One of the ideas that we’re thinking of—an experiment we can do—is using a Joby aircraft for security forces purposes to do these perimeter sweeps,” he says. Their plan is to fly the aircraft remotely at first, meaning that a pilot would be operating it from the ground, without humans inside. The Joby craft could also monitor a giant lake bed at the base, which Woodhull says measures 12 by 20 miles in size. That area “is a great resource for doing emergency landings, but it is a natural landscape,” he says. The weather can alter the condition of the designated runways in the lake bed, and so, Woodhull says, “we always have to check whether the runways that we have designated out there are actually usable.
While delivery of the Joby air taxi to the Air Force represents a milestone, Bevirt notes that it remains “a Joby asset” even in DOD hands. And another Joby aircraft should be delivered to the base next year.
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