Joby Aviation

In early 2023, Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority (RTA) announced that Dubai will be the first city in the world to introduce an air taxi service – a move that it believes will transform urban mobility as we know it. As soon as 2025, passengers will be able to travel from Dubai International Airport to Palm Jumeirah in just ten minutes, in an electric air taxi traveling at 200 miles per hour (322 kph). The same journey would take around 45 minutes in a car. 

The company facilitating Dubai’s ambitious plans? California-based Joby Aviation. “We’re building the world’s first all-electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) air taxi,” said Eric Allison, Joby Aviation’s chief product officer. “Our aircraft can take off vertically like a helicopter, and then fly like an airplane. It can hold four passengers and a commercially rated pilot. It will transform how we move around – integrating into mobility-as-a-service so, you can open an app on your phone, select ‘Joby’ through our app or via one of our partners, and then get to where you want to go faster than any other way.”

Joby engineered its entire operations from the ground up, by leveraging Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE® platform from the outset. “We want to be best-in-class in everything we do,” Allison said. “So, we were looking for a best-in-class 3D solution with a long heritage of use in aviation. There was really only one choice.” 

Building an eVTOL aircraft certified for commercial flight is no mean feat. It has taken Joby 15 years of engineering, prototyping and refinement as well as close collaboration with industry leaders such as NASA and Toyota. The company also works with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on how to bring this new technology – which is a set of new technologies – to the market in the most expedient and safest way possible, adhering to the regulator’s high standards.

“To launch this service and to make it possible to move in this transformational way, we have to certify our aircraft,” Allison said. But this isn’t a simple process. “We have to certify electric motors. We have to certify the battery systems. We have to certify the fly-by-wire electronics that enable pilots to fly these amazing new machines. That’s a lot of work. We have to work with the regulators to define the safety requirements for this new class of technologies. We have to define how we’re going to meet those safety requirements. And then we have to work on all of the myriad of tests, all of the test plans, all of the things we have to do to show compliance with that set of rules that we’ve agreed with the regulators. We’re deep into that process right now.”

Joby couldn’t achieve what it has to date without adopting the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as a collaborative environment, through which it carries out a range of activities such as composite design, additive manufacturing, verification through simulation, data management and more. “Dassault Systèmes has been a fantastic partner,” Allison said. “Our entire digital engineering is built around its 3DEXPERIENCE platform, and we are doing all of our design work in CATIA. We are tracking all of our engineering data in ENOVIA.” 

With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform offering digital continuity from concept to flight, Joby takes a vertically integrated approach to designing and manufacturing its aircraft. “That means we have engineers working across different disciplines,” Allison said. “We’ve got engineers working in composite structures. We have engineers working in small electronics. We have engineers working in motor design, battery design, and integrated vehicle design. We have to bring all of those disciplines together.”

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables Joby to do just that, and then allows it to connect engineering to manufacturing so that it generates the required data to not only transmit to its manufacturing systems and build its amazing aircraft, but also enable full traceability.

“This is really a big advantage for us, that we have a best-in-class system that we can use to track, manage and ultimately act on, manufacture and bring to market what started out as data and turns into the real world,” Allison said. “To create world-class technology, you have to use world-class technology.” With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, that’s precisely what Joby has got.  

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