Joby begins month-long US tour with autonomous J208 aircraft

Joby Aviation has begun a month-long tour across the country: the autonomous J208 aircraft, a converted Cessna Grand Caravan, is flying from California to the East Coast and back with stops in ten states. The flights are part of the Electric Skies 2026 program, and the company presented the tour on September 10.

The point of the trip is to show that the technology already works in real conditions and is suited to two tasks at once, civil and military. The company lists commercial cargo transport, medical transport, disaster-response operations and defense logistics. The demonstrations are part of the White House-backed eIPP program; on the Texas leg of the tour, the aircraft was displayed in Fort Worth at an event hosted by US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

The aircraft is not fully autonomous, however. Joby describes its model as supervised autonomy: the pilot in command is a remote pilot on the ground. That person monitors the flight, updates the plan and talks to controllers over the aircraft's own radios. On certain operations, an observer pilot is on board.

The route covers ten stops. Among them are Fort Worth with its cargo hub, Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, the Outer Banks near Kitty Hawk — close to the site of the Wright brothers' first flight, Raleigh, the Washington area, Louisville with UPS's largest automated sorting center, Wichita, where the original Caravan airframe was built, Oklahoma City, Salt Lake City and Portland. Some of the stops involve partnerships with state departments of transportation and the five-state western uFLY coalition, which is studying autonomous flights over high terrain and deserts.

According to the company, the aircraft has completed more than 400 flights and 800 hours of automatic flight in controlled and uncontrolled airspace. The technology has already been tested in three US military exercises. During the Agile Flag exercise, the aircraft delivered spare parts, allowing another aircraft to return to service roughly a day earlier than a standard logistics flight would have allowed. In August 2025, during the REFORPAC exercise in the Pacific and Hawaii, it was controlled from a ground station on Guam — nearly 4,000 miles away.

The autonomous stack for the aircraft was originally developed by Xwing, and became part of Joby after the 2024 acquisition. The bet is on putting the autonomous system on an already certified airframe: that offers a relatively fast and scalable path to autonomous air logistics. Joby Aviation is a California company, and its shares trade on the NYSE under the ticker JOBY.

Image: Harlan Huntington Public domain

Translation editor: Салтанов А.