For Dubai visitors and citizens, flight-sharing will soon be just a phone tap away. Uber has just announced that rides from its all-electric air taxi service, Uber Air, will be bookable in the jet-setting United Arab Emirates’ destination this year. The futuristic transportation feat that’s been pondered and dreamed about for decades is finally becoming a reality through the ride-sharing service’s partnership with Joby, a California-based maker of taxis capable of electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL
The companies are promising an experience that sounds every bit as easy has hailing an automobile thanks to “one-tap booking” Integration with the Uber app. Riders will simply punch in their destination and book an entire multimodal journey that combines the Uber Black luxury car ground transport with Uber Air flights operated by certified commercial pilots.
Capable of accommodating four passengers, each Uber Air x Joby taxi utilizes six tilting propellers to perform vertical takeoffs and landings before transitioning into high-speed forward flight, reaching speeds up to 200 mph with a 100-mile range on a single charge. Joby engineered the aircraft specifically for urban integration with multiple levels of safety redundancies and an acoustic profile that promises to “blend into the ambient sounds of a city’s streets.” The company has previously claimed that the air taxi is “100 times quieter” than a conventional helicopter.
“We’ve long believed in the power of advanced air mobility to transform how people move through cities,” Sachin Kansal, Chief Product Officer at Uber, said in a prepared statement. “With Uber Air, riders will be able to book Joby’s electric air taxi through a simple and familiar, one-tap experience on Uber, seamlessly connecting every leg of their journey – making ground-to-sky travel even more effortless.”
“We set out to build a new layer of urban transportation,” added Eric Allison, Chief Product Officer at Joby. “Our focus has always been on creating a flight experience that operates quietly and integrates naturally into the rhythm of city life. By partnering with Uber, we’re making this new mode of transportation familiar and accessible, connecting the ground and the sky through a system designed to save people time and fit seamlessly into how they already move.”
This isn’t the first that Uber has tried going airborne. In 2016, Uber Elevate was announced as an aerial ridesharing platform that would operate in U.S. cities like Los Angeles and Dallas, as Yahoo! Finance points out. The promise never came to pass, and instead, Joby acquired the internal project, which included Uber’s aerial ridesharing software, in 2020. That same year, Uber upped its investment in Joby from $50 million to $125 million that same year. Now, the partnership has yielded a market-ready air taxi product.
“2026 will mark a key inflection point for Joby,” said JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby, in a Wednesday earnings announcement. “After a year full of rigorous full-transition flight testing and meaningful progress across every part of our business, we’ve begun to shift our focus from how and when we’ll go to market, to how many aircraft we can produce and where to deploy them.”
While no timeline has been announced for stateside Uber Air deployment, Joby did add that it’s pressing forward with an official U.S. launch: “The company has completed over 50,000 miles of flight testing and is currently in the final stage of the FAA certification process, marking a significant milestone in its path to carrying fare-paying passengers.”
