An electric air taxi company spent last week flying test routes across North Texas, and one of the routes on its schedule ended at Toyota Motor North America's headquarters in Plano.
Joby Aviation based its piloted electric aircraft at the Alliance airport in far north Fort Worth and flew it Sept. 10-14, the first flights in Texas under a federal program meant to work out how air taxis can share busy airspace. According to the schedule Joby published when the flights began, the week included a landing at the corporate aviation terminal at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, a round trip over Arlington and the Fort Worth Stockyards to show how quietly the aircraft operates, and a trip to Toyota's Plano campus on what Joby called a "planned operational route." The flights carried no passengers.
Joby has not published a flight-by-flight account of the week, and no report has described the Plano leg after the fact.
Why Toyota
The Plano stop reflects a long partnership. Aviation Week describes Toyota as Joby's largest single investor and its manufacturing partner, and Smart Cities Dive reports that Toyota had invested nearly $900 million in Joby by 2024 and is set to provide powertrain parts and other components for the aircraft. In June, the two companies announced a joint venture aimed at preparing the aircraft for commercial production.
Toyota Motor North America is Plano's fourth-largest employer, with 4,938 workers in the city, according to Plano's latest annual financial report.
The program behind the flights
The flights ran under Project Nexus, the Texas Department of Transportation's winning entry in the U.S. Department of Transportation's eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which federal officials announced in March. eVTOL is short for electric vertical takeoff and landing. Aviation Week reported that Project Nexus is one of eight projects in the federal program and that it also includes Oklahoma, Louisiana and the Choctaw Nation.
TxDOT has laid out three phases over three years: test flights without passengers, then medical and cargo flights such as carrying supplies or organs between rural hospitals and the big medical centers of Austin and San Antonio, and finally passenger flights connecting Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio and Houston. Dallas Innovates reported that the target for starting air taxi service in Dallas-Fort Worth and elsewhere in Texas is 2029.
Another Plano company is part of the effort. VertiPorts by Atlantic, which designs and builds landing sites for these aircraft, is supplying ground infrastructure for Project Nexus, Dallas Innovates reported.
