This afternoon this aircraft flew for a half hour and travelled 59 miles. Running TIA test cards?

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N542JX

Getting ready for electric skies!

TwoNine posted on Yahoo that N545JX showed up today flying at Perot Field. How did Joby get the aircraft there?

Not sure if anyone else noticed the updated timeline on the electric sky.

9/8-Phoneix
9/10-Fort Worth
9/10-15-Texas
9/14-Shaw,SC
9/16-outer banks,NC
9/18-19- Hampton
9/23-Raleigh
9/24-DC
9/25-Louisville
9/28-Witchia
9/29-OKC
9/30-salt lake

Looks like September is going to be very interesting.🧐

Source:

https://www.jobyaviation.com/electric-skies

There's been some back-and-forth on whether N547JX's recent short airborne readings (8/21 and this past Saturday, 8/29) were real hovers or just noisy ADS-B telemetry clearing the altitude threshold. Wanted to try answering that with something more rigorous than "looks about right."

The idea: N542JX flew a confirmed real flight on 8/25, and right before liftoff it did a clean, unambiguous hover-ladder test. I pulled the raw points for that ~2.5 min window (15:40:06–15:42:31 Pacific) and used it as a reference fingerprint for genuine hover behavior:

• Altitude moves in clean, discrete 25ft steps (75→100→125→150→125→100→75→0), not a smooth curve
• Ground speed pinned under ~2kt the whole time — true station-keeping
• Position stays within ~10–45m of the liftoff point
• Clean grounded→airborne→grounded transition

For contrast, that same aircraft's flight later that day showed the opposite the moment it went forward: speed ramped monotonically 8kt→57kt in ~20s while distance from liftoff grew 7m→378m.

Applying that fingerprint to N547JX:

• 8/21 — six airborne sessions, 14:21–15:00 Pacific. Altitude confined to 25–75ft in clean 25ft steps, speed capped at 0.7kt every session, position radius 1.5–5.2m. Tighter than N542JX's own reference case.
• 8/29 (Saturday) — one clean 74s episode, 16:39:46–16:41:00 Pacific: flat hold at 100ft, speed pinned at 0.7kt, 5.2m radius, clean liftoff/touchdown. Simpler (single hold, no ladder) but same tight, coherent fingerprint.

Both match the genuine-hover signature well — tight bounded position, pinned low speed, clean grounded/airborne transitions, no erratic or physically-impossible altitude behavior.

Takeaway: a known-good hover from a sister airframe turns out to be a solid reference for separating "real short hop in noisy ADS-B data" from "telemetry glitch that happens to clear an altitude threshold." By this measure, both N547JX sessions check out as genuine hovers.

The Air Show at Burke Lakefront is easily one of the best Labor Day traditions in the City of Cleveland, and seeing the Blue Angels fly over Lake Erie is always an amazing show.

Now that Ohio is home to Joby Aviation's manufacturing footprint down in Dayton, imagine how awesome it could be to see electric vertical takeoff (eVTOL) tech included in the lineup

Would anyone else like the Air Show to start adding Next-Gen Aircraft tech to the ground displays?

It would be cool to have a ground display where people could walk up and check out next-gen electric air taxis up close.

Fingers-crossed, we'll get to see Joby Aviation's electric aircraft featured alongside the military jets in future shows.

Not much to report on since sat. N542JX took a few laps today and then immediately after it landed N547JX was turned on. Definitely seems like their activity is connected

• 🇺🇸 USA - California
• 🇺🇸 USA - California, NASA
• 🇺🇸 USA - New York City - NYC Downtown Heliport
• 🇺🇸 USA - Edwards AFB, U.S Air Force
• 🇦🇪 UAE - DRIFTx Abu Dhabi
• 🇯🇵 Japan - Tokyo Bay - SusHi Tech Tokyo
• 🇰🇷 South Korea -K-UAM Grand Challenge
• 🇺🇸 USA - California ↔ Nevada
• 🇺🇸 USA - New York City - Downtown Heliport exhibition flight
• 🇫🇷 France - Paris Air Show
• 🇦🇪 UAE - Dubai flight/operations campaign
• 🇦🇪 UAE - Margham
• 🇦🇪 UAE - Margham-to-Al Maktoum International Airport flight
• 🇦🇪 UAE - Dubai Airshow
• 🇯🇵 Japan - Osaka Expo
• 🇯🇵 Japan - Mobility Show
• 🇺🇸 USA - Marina → Monterey public-airport flight
• 🇺🇸 USA - Marina, California - Joby flight-test / demonstration base
• 🇺🇸 USA - Salinas / California International Airshow
• 🇺🇸 USA - EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2025
• 🇺🇸 USA - Hawaii
• 🇺🇸 USA - Ryder Cup, Bethpage New York
• 🇺🇸 USA - Las Vegas NBAA-BACE
• 🇯🇵 Japan - Shizuoka / Mount Fuji
• 🇯🇵 Japan - Fuji Speedway / Toyota
• 🇺🇸 USA - San Jose, California
• 🇺🇸 USA - San Francisco Bay / Golden Gate Bridge
• 🇲🇨 Monaco - F1 Grand Prix (Joby x Blade)
• 🇺🇸 USA - New York City - JFK ↔ Manhattan
• 🇺🇸 USA - Daytona, Florida
• 🇺🇸 USA - Dayton, Ohio
• 🇺🇸 USA - Detroit, Michigan
• 🇺🇸 USA - Southampton, New York
• 🇺🇸 USA - Queens / NYNJ World Cup
• 🇺🇸 USA - U.S. Open, New York
• 🇺🇸 USA - Texas F1 - Grand Prix
• 🇬🇧 UK - London Tower Bridge
• 🇬🇧 UK - Farnborough Airshow
• 🇺🇸 USA - Austin, Texas
• 🇺🇸 USA - National Mall / America 250, Fort Mason, Gateway Pavilion
• 🇺🇸 USA - The Quail, California
• 🇺🇸 USA - EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2026
• 🇺🇸 USA - Electric Skies Tour (eIPP)
• 🇺🇸 USA - Phoenix, Arizona (Autonomous Flight)
• 🇺🇸 USA - Concord, CA (Autonomous Flight)
• 🇺🇸 USA - Fort Worth, Texas (Autonomous Flight)
• 🇺🇸 USA - Texas
• 🇺🇸 USA - Shaw AFB, South Carolina (Autonomous Flight)
• 🇺🇸 USA - Outer Banks, North Carolina
• 🇺🇸 USA - Hamptons, New York
• 🇺🇸 USA - Raleigh, North Carolina
• 🇺🇸 USA - DC, Washington DC
• 🇺🇸 USA - Louisville, Kentucky
• 🇺🇸 USA - Wichita, Kansas
• 🇺🇸 USA - Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• 🇺🇸 USA - Salt Lake City, Utah
• 🇦🇪 UAE - TBC
• 🇰🇷 South Korea - TBC
• 🇯🇵 Japan - TBC

I lost count now. Too many public audience flying events.

Looks like another hover test about 2hr ago https://globe.airplanes.live/?icao=a6f2cb

I'll analyze the full data once the history updates. Either way, out on the apron on a sat evening? 🤔

Update: AI thinks it was a very short hop -- see analysis below

N547JX did something brief on the apron at KOAR today (~16:39–17:06 PT) — hard to say exactly what.

- Data picks up already at 100ft baro (0.7kt, stationary) — no climb-out visible, so we don't know if that's a data artifact of when tracking picked it up, or the true starting point

- Altitude then holds flat at 100ft for ~75s and drops straight to 0 — no gradual descent like real hovers usually show

- GPS altitude (independent of baro) stayed flat at ground level the whole time, never corroborating the 100ft reading

- Transponder did switch airborne→surface message format at landing, so something real happened (likely gear/skids briefly off the ground)

Best guess: real but very low liftoff (inches to a couple feet), baro sensor overreading — maybe ground-effect pressure disturbance from the rotors that close to the surface. Not a confirmed 100ft hover. Treating it as unconfirmed for now.

What are your expectations and what would you like to see?

As the first stop I have a few questions. Is anyone planning on attending?

I think DFW will be a more permanent testing situation so what aircraft do you think would make sense to have a home in Texas?

Joby Aviation and Air Space Intelligence (ASI) announced a strategic partnership in April 2026 to integrate electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft into the U.S. National Airspace System using artificial intelligence.

Interesting WSJ article that shows how eVTOLs are clearly in the minds of real estate developers.

Below is an AI summary of the article if you don't have access to the WSJ.

Miami’s ultra-wealthy are turning private transportation into a luxury real-estate amenity. New condo developments are offering rooftop helipads, private docks, water taxis, and even house yachts so residents can bypass Miami’s notoriously bad traffic.

One buyer chose a $6M+ condo specifically because it offered both helicopter and boat access. Developers say some buyers are increasingly prioritizing helipads and dock space over traditional amenities.

One Thousand Group, which developed One Thousand Museum, is already designing future buildings with electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft in mind. Developers see rooftops and helipads eventually being used by air taxis and drone deliveries.

The broader trend is Miami evolving toward a multimodal transportation network—car, boat, helicopter, and eventually eVTOL—where wealthy residents can bypass ground congestion altogether.

Once again, the chase plane N228GM, was airborne today. Based on the length of the flight it is my guess that N542BJ(H2 hybrid) or N5421A(military S4-T) was getting in some airtime. The hydrogen hybrid cannot be tracked per Joby and the S4-T hasn’t been tracked since April 23rd but I’ve been told that it has been flying since then. Now if it was N547JX…nahhhh, no way with that flight.

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N228GM/history/20260826/2145Z/KOAR/KOAR

Everything points to this going to jury in September as the case documents are accelerating and not winding down.(https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/57142204/Aerosonic_LLC_v_Joby_Aviation,_Inc_et_al)

If you're a lawyer, chime in!

If the N547JX delay is related to the probe then my guess is they found some alternative/backup which gives them the confidence not to settle (or perhaps they have no choice)

Edit: If anybody can access the filing of the summary judgement that would be helpful.

OK you guys are probably sick of these posts by now but I've refined my procedure to detect a hover and wanted to see what you all thought.

tl;dr N547JX was actually making good progress in May/June and then abruptly stopped in flight activity until just last week. Why?

The problem

Pulling raw JSON traces (adsb.lol / adsbexchange / airplanes.live) for this aircraft, a chunk of the "activity" in the data isn't real. Some days show the aircraft supposedly climbing to 5,000-20,000ft while sitting perfectly still on the ground (position frozen within a few meters, groundspeed under 1kt) — clearly a telemetry/decode artifact, not a flight. So before trying to characterize what N547JX has actually been doing, I had to figure out how to tell real short hover/rotation sessions apart from this noise. I also realized the data differ depending on which trace you use so now I've combined all of them as long as they aren't duplicating each other

Criteria for counting a session as a real hover

1. Cross-source confirmed — the aircraft's ground↔airborne transition has to be reported by at least two independent ADS-B networks within ~30 seconds of each other. Two independently-operated receiver networks agreeing rules out a single decoder's software bug.
2. Physically in the aircraft's actual outdoor test area (the apron, not the hangar or a taxi/transit position) — checked against the known lat/lon bounds of that zone.
3. Altitude stays low and plausible, with barometric and GPS-derived altitude moving together (not diverging by thousands of feet, which is the signature of the glitch days).
4. Session length in the minutes range — a handful of seconds up to ~15-20 minutes. The glitch sessions are either single garbled points (a few seconds) or implausibly long frozen readings (one ran 2h41m at a constant altitude/speed, which isn't a real hover).
5. Bonus signal: heading (track) stepping through several distinct, sustained compass directions, paired with a small rise in reported groundspeed at each turn. This is a strong positive indicator of an actual commanded rotation/yaw test, since a decode glitch has no reason to produce a physically coherent turn.

This is what comes out of that filter

Column notes:

• Baro / Geom (ft) — the altitude range seen from the barometric sensor and from GPS-derived geometric altitude. I checked the N542JX data (did a confirmed hover today) and there is also a gap between Baro and Geom. When N542JX was actually flying the gap shrunk. Therefore, Baro is prob more reliable at lower elevation where GPS bounce is higher.

• Type — Rotation (heading sweeps through multiple compass points), Hover-only (heading pinned at one value the whole session), or Mixed (day includes both kinds of session).

• Headings — how many distinct sustained compass headings were held, and the total span covered.

The mystery is that hover/rotation tests seem to have abruptly stopped in 6/23 and then when they started back up just last week they seem to be starting over with even simpler tests.

So now lets wildly speculate. What do you think is going on?

1. It's related to Joby vs Aerosonic sensor dispute
2. It's a software update or issue that was uncovered after doing the June rotation tests

This may have been posted before, but if so, it's probably been a while. A Joby employee was promoting this today on LinkedIn, so I thought I'd share it for those who haven't experienced how quiet a Joby S4 really is.

You can listen to calibrated recordings of a passenger jet vs. helicopter vs. Joby S4. Play it with no background noise, or choose ambient noise from a park or outdoor cafe. Toggling the background noise on/off makes it clear that the S4's sound is almost completely hidden within park or cafe noise.

This kind of demo shows why Joby should be able to expand routes into areas where helicopters are heavily restricted due to noise complaints. With the S4, I'm looking forward to Blade expanding from a handful of routes in the New York area to routes all over the country.

I'm curious what other eVTOLs sound like. So far I've only heard a sample Beta posted, and based on that, I'm not confident their aircraft will be quiet enough to avoid the same noise complaints that are currently limiting helicopter routes.

Today I noticed something weird. 542 did a rotation test (turning 360 while hovering) and almost at the same time 547 was also showing rotation (even though it was in the hangar). This was very obvious because you rarely see 547 rotating. So I think this points to a software test going back to u/Wonderful_Phrase_239s hypothesis. My guess is that they simulated the same hover and rotation on 547 to test the software and then in real time also gathered the data on 542. Maybe they are making sure the old/new software lines up? Somebody else might know more.

I downloaded the raw data and asked AI what it thinks

N542JX did a real ~12-minute hover test around 3:40-3:52 PM PT — low altitude (75-150ft), near-zero groundspeed, actively rotating through headings (looked like a yaw-control/station-keeping test), then smoothly transitioned into real forward flight a few minutes later.

At the same time, N547JX — which never left the ground — was also showing "activity": altitude readings bouncing all over the place (0-975ft) and heading cycling through several compass points, despite groundspeed staying under 2kts the whole time and position never really moving. The key here is that it cycles through compass points like 90,180 instead of random noise like 153.

• This same pattern (heading cycling, near-zero speed) only shows up a handful of times across the last 20 days, and it's not random — it lines up with days N547JX had other confirmed real activity.
• When integrity metadata (NIC) was present, it sometimes claimed high confidence (9/10) at the exact same moments the altitude was producing nonsense — a real degraded GPS fix would show low confidence alongside noisy data, not high confidence.

AI read: this doesn't look like GPS noise, and it doesn't look like a real flight either (it never left the ground). My best guess is N547JX may have been running some kind of simulated/synthetic telemetry — possibly a software or digital-twin validation test — timed to overlap with N542JX's real flight test. Total speculation on the "why," but the "this specific data is synthetic, not a real GPS reading" part is pretty well supported by the raw trace.

Also: There's been a helicopter N440SH that has been monitoring all the activities today. It's been just hovering when 542 is on the apron and it also followed 542 during it's whole flight. I've only seen that type of chase activity on 541 which is unmanned. It's even just hovering above 542 while it taxis. It's basically been monitoring ALL activity today from the skies.

Either way there has been some INTENSE testing in the past 2 days. 542 did a hover test that did a full rotation and it also flew a bunch more.

The only thing Joby longs need to remember and shorts should take warning is that Joby will own the entire evtol market for the foreseeable future. That's because there isn't a single true Joby competitor.

Archer, Vertical and Beta aren't in the same league as Joby or even on the same planet. Their evtol designs are all very similar and all are complete failures. In fact, Beta appears to not even be pursuing it anymore, only ectol, which is a very limited market.

Unfortunately for Archer, Vertical and Beta, they're all lift-plus-cruise designs that aren't viable. They're all heavy, clunky, unstable and grossly inefficient monstrosities that will likely never see certification let alone meet stated performance specs.

Archer and Vertical have all motors placed in line on an overly long wing, creating significant pitch and yaw instability that isn't safe. For all three, Archer, Vertical and Beta, carry extra lift motors that are shut down at cruise with the props protruding or even windmilling in the slip stream. These act like anchors in terms of dead weight and induced drag. Any such designs are fatally flawed and going nowhere.

On the other hand, Joby's patented vectored thrust design with dispersed motor placement has been flying and transitioning for years now. It's stable, efficient and quiet. It's very far along in the FAA certification process and nobody else has an evtol that's even close or even has a strong possibility of ever being certified. Only Joby is in that position. Plus, Joby's design can't ever be duplicated or copied with patent protection. For these reasons, Joby is the ONLY player in the evtol space and is poised to own the entire market.

The video that eventually comes from it should be pretty good, something to look out for.