Dayton, Ohio, could one day become an electric air taxi manufacturing stronghold after developer Joby Aviation picked it as its production hub in 2023. The hometown of the Wright brothers isn’t producing any eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft just yet.
But this weekend, residents and visitors can try out an eVTOL simulator.
Joby’s mobile flight simulator will be open to the public at the 2026 Dayton Air Show on Saturday and Sunday at Dayton International Airport (KDAY), giving attendees a glimpse of the technology before it enters commercial service. The activation is the latest in the company’s Electric Skies Tour, which it said includes more than a dozen planned stops in 2026.
According to Joby, the mobile simulator—which is less complex and more intuitive than the two CAE devices it intends to certify for pilot training—will give attendees a “guided preview of the connected, passenger-first experience” the company envisions for the future, in partnership with Uber and carriers such as Delta Air Lines.
Once the air taxi is certified, Joby intends for the Dayton site to support production of 500 units annually. Currently, the facility produces individual parts, such as propeller blades, and full prototypes are assembled in California.
How It Works
The air taxi swaps many of the knobs and levers of a conventional cockpit for a simplified fly-by-wire system, mainly comprising joysticks and Garmin’s touchscreen G3000 flight deck.
The model is designed to cruise at up to 200 mph with a pilot and as many as four passengers. Its tiltrotor propulsion system enables helicopter-like vertical takeoffs and fixed-wing cruise flight, combining the advantages of both categories.
Joby in January received and began installing the first of two flight simulators it developed in partnership with CAE. The fixed-base device, intended for training at the company’s Marina, California, location, is built around CAE’s 3000-series model for helicopters. Joby plans to certify it as a Level 7 flight training device.
Later this year, the company expects to receive a 6-axis, full-motion CAE simulator that it will seek to certify as Level C.
According to Joby, the CAE devices are “equipped with the same simulation technology used to train pilots for the world’s leading airlines.” CAE’s Prodigy image generation system uses gaming technology—the same used in popular video games such as Fortnite—can simulate landscapes with a 300-by-130-degree field of view. The simulators will immerse pilots with audio cues, turbulence, and vibrations and be capable of simulating what the aircraft may encounter in the real world, such as the flow of wind around skyscrapers.
“The level of realism is unmatched in a commercial training device,” Tim Middleton, who works on Joby’s flight simulation training device integration program, said in a recent LinkedIn post.
Middleton previously spent 15 years with FlightSafety International.
“The pilot steps into the flight deck the same way they do in real life, through an actual aircraft door,” he said. “Once they sit down at the real flight controls, they have an uninterrupted field of view of the outside world, including through the window of that same aircraft door.”
The simulator in Dayton, however, will be far less complex and only for public demonstrations, a Joby spokesperson told FLYING. It has a static seat and 180-degree panoramic screens and uses a standard simulator rendering.
Joby in 2024 received FAA Part 141 authorization to open a flight school and train people outside the company. Per Aerospace America, it costs about $60,000 per pilot.
The company said in January that in the future, it will be able to train pilots to fly the air taxi in just six weeks. But that would entail the use of the Level C full-flight simulator (FFS), for which Joby does not yet have Part 142 authorization for training non-company pilots.
Joby has said the two CAE simulators will support training for up to 250 pilots annually. Because they combine features of helicopters and fixed-wing models, eVTOL air taxis fall under powered lift, the FAA’s newest category of aircraft. Compared to conventional aircraft training programs, the FAA’s 2024 regulation on initial powered-lift pilot training permits a greater portion of training to be completed in a Level C FFS, in part because many manufacturers designed aircraft without dual controls.
More to Come
Americans from coast to coast will have a chance to see Joby’s aircraft and mobile simulator themselves.
The company’s 2026 Electric Skies Tour began with a flight over the San Francisco Bay in March. The following month, FLYING was invited to John F. Kennedy International Airport (KJFK) to watch the air taxi prototype kick off a four-day flight demonstration campaign in New York City, during which it flew into bustling Manhattan.
In May, Joby brought its mobile simulator to the Florida AAM Symposium and a full-scale demonstrator to America250’s America Innovates event in San Francisco. Earlier this month, the simulator stopped in North Carolina, where airport personnel, state transportation department officials, and local high school students gave it a spin. Joby plans to bring the demonstrator to EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh in July.
Planespotters as soon as September could see Joby’s air taxi in up to 12 other states. The company was one of several manufacturers picked for the FAA’s 26-state eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), under which manufacturers intend to fly their precertified aircraft over cities and into airports.
Joby was selected for five of the eight eIPP lead projects. Per its Electric Skies webpage, Utah, Texas, Florida, and North Carolina could be next on tap for demonstrations.