Joby Gets Certified, Stock Jumps

Dean Sigler Announcements, Electric Powerplants, Sky Taxis, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

“Joby Aviation has received a Federal Aviation Administration Special Airworthiness Certificate for the first aircraft built at its pilot production line in Marina, California, allowing Joby to begin flight testing of its first production prototype” according to Dan Carney’s reporting in Design News. Having visited the Woodpecker Ridge development site and written about Joby Energy and Joby Aviation since 2010, your editor has seen remarkable progress in the company.  JoeBen Bevirt had about a dozen engineers working in his design studio then, and that has steadily grown to around 1,300 employees today spread over several workshops and administrative offices along the central California coastline. What is This Thing Called, Love? From the paperwork in the Federal Register detailing Joby’s application for a Notice of proposed airworthiness criteria, Joby Aero, Inc. is asking for guidance on its Model JAS4-1 Powered-Lift. Since the craft is not described as an airplane, helicopter or with other terminology, the Register includes this note: “The Joby …

Joby “Unicorn” Gains Private, Military Backing

Dean Sigler Announcements, Batteries, Electric Powerplants, Fuel Cells, Hydrogen Fuel, Sky Taxis, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Joby Aviation is one of few “unicorns” in the electric Vertical Take Off and Landing (eVTOL) market, a billion-dollar enterprise.  With funding coming from Toyota, several venture capital investors, Uber and the U. S. Army, Joby seems poised to demonstrate Urban Air Mobility (UAM) in a serious way. In 2011 JoeBen Bevirt, founder of Joby Energy, Joby Aviation, and creator of those knobby-looking tripods you see everywhere, invited Patrick McLaughlin to visit his design studio.  Your editor got to tag along.  On Woodpecker Ridge, north of Santa Cruz, JoeBen’s barn-like studio housed about a dozen engineers and designers all working on electricity-generating kites.  He wore a T-shirt reading, “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.”  That edginess has helped him, in the last decade to be a major player, with now over 500 employees in the aviation sector.  JoeBen and Patrick discussed motor design and integration with a controller Patrick had built from off-the-shelf …

Need Electricity? Go Fly a Kite

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants Leave a Comment

What do JoeBen Bevirt and Benjamin Franklin have in common?  They both grew up without electricity and built kites to find it.  While being without electricity was the default condition in Franklin’s day, JoeBen was raised in a hippy commune in the Santa Cruz Mountains.  Neither man found the deprivations of his youth to be an impediment to creativity.  The phrase that keeps popping up in articles about JoeBen Bevirt, founder of Joby, inc. and Joby Energy, is “inveterate inventor.”  Inveterate has the sense of growing old in one’s habits, something unlikely to happen to a truly inventive soul such as JoeBen.  Deviser of a knobby-looking grip that can be fastened to almost anything, and which can hold cameras, lights, and other photographic gear, Bevirt has seen his Gorillapod become a huge success, and expand into Gorillamobile and Gorillatorch versions, hands-free flexible tripods to hold cell phones, flashlights, and other personal electronic devices.    Earlier, he designed robotic systems to aid in biopharmaceutical …