What a week for electric aviation!
Joby flying again in Dubai
N544JX, last spotted in Dubai in November of 2025, has now made two sets of circuits on the 20th and 21st respectively. While the Friday flight was 60 km in 20 minutes, the N544JX flight on Saturday racked up 100km in half an hour.
N547JX performs altimeter testing
Saturday morning at 3 AM Eastern I woke up, looked at my phone, and bleary eyed I noticed that N547JX was in the air over Marina. I assumed it was some kind of hover test, and posted as such on Reddit. Apparently my filters are not fully charged at 3 AM, as I would regret titling the post “Jobys conforming N547JX hover testing in Marina”. You can’t edit the titles of Reddit posts later, did you know that? Not even when you posted them at 3 AM, it still counts.
How did I even notice? Maybe one of our dogs was moving around and woke me up? Or, perhaps I can somehow feel the disturbance in the force from 2,000 miles away? In either case, I then spent ~ two hours looking at the data, and convinced myself that while the data certainly looked like really clean ADS-B data, it didn’t look like any flight I’ve ever seen.
The aircraft doesn’t move enough. Hover tests are rarely straight up - there is almost always lateral movement as it takes off.
The activity takes place at a hangar - and I don’t mean “the first few pings are in the hangar then it taxis to a runway”, it stays in the hangar - even as it climbs to 13,000 feet. And I don’t think Joby sent their multi million dollar aircraft straight up through the roof.
I remembered that I’d seen something weird very similar to this back in April, when N545JX did the exact same thing - and upon checking my records, it happened in exactly the same place. It also is one of the first few flights we saw from N545JX, continuing the pattern.
I was eventually happy about my embarrassing Reddit post, as a reader took the opportunity to teach me about the wonders of static pitot testing and FAR 91.411 and 91.413. It turns out that aircraft need their altimeters certified a) when the aircraft is built and b) every two years. Which makes sense, it’s important to know how high off the ground you are so that you can prevent colliding with other aircraft.
I immediately wondered how on earth you test that an altimeter works while on the ground without doing some kind of avionics hacking - and, no, it turns out they do not run a backpack full of running avionics up a 13,000 foot pole. It’s much easier than that - aircraft use two “pitot” ports, one that tests pressure of the air ramming in to the aircraft - this helps with measuring airspeed. The other port is designed to just measure the ambient barometric pressure. It’s simple math to figure out your altitude if you know the air pressure outside.
So the tests are done on the ground. A certified test kit made up of a highly calibrated air pump pushes air in to the static pitot port. This is usually done in conjunction with another test that tests the transponder - so, apparently when Joby does these we’ll keep seeing these stunning “flights” where an S4 appears to shoot straight up to 13,000 feet while sitting very still in a hangar. I’ll go teach my algorithm all about static pitot tests so that we can correctly categorize them in future.
Is this big news for N547JX, which is apparently the first “conforming” aircraft? Probably. Some Redditors are convincing themselves that it means the aircraft is nearly complete, and that this may also mean that certification is around the corner. While the first thing seems logical, I won’t get excited about the certification until we see the announcements like everybody else.
Lighter Than Air Research Pathfinder 1 over San Francisco Bay area wildlife refuge
N125LT is a 400 foot long airship capable of moving 5 tons at 65 kts with ranges in the thousands of miles. It’s stunningly cool, and apparently when they flew over the Golden Gate Bridge late last year I did not see it in the ADS-B networks for some reason.
However, they showed up this week, racking up 427 kms in 4 hours 58 minutes - mostly over Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge. One of my favourite features of the flight is how it just hung out in the same spot at 1,100 feet for 45 minutes at speeds under 10 kts ground speed - this is just something that airplanes and eVTOL can’t do.
While this is a fun mention, I won’t make them a permanent feature of EVTOL weekly. They are electric, and VTOL, but the missions they may fly are just different - while I could imagine the Pathfinder 1 carrying 5 tons of cargo 2,000 miles, I wouldn’t want to wait for one to take me to SFO.
Vertical Aerospace first appearance in the log
To continue the trend of learning stuff on Reddit, I noticed that the Vertical Aerospace fans have a neat trick up their sleeve - they track Kemble Cotswold Airports departures and arrivals board online looking for mentions of G-EVTA. I built a “sensor” to record this activity a few months back, but neglected to check it often enough - but it turns out that last week I missed an opportunity to record our first flight.
The arrivals and departures board doesn’t give me altitudes, ground speeds and so on of course, so this is somewhat limited - however, it looks like I can tell when the aircraft took off and landed - and, well, we know the rough location ahead of time.
EVTOL Weekly
2026 Week 8 (February 16th- 22nd)
So, today as we run down the weekly report, we’ll cover analysis for the usual suspects, Archer, BETA, and Joby - and then follow it up with a first; Vertical Aerospace.
Next we’ll do the flight logs, then the low precision report as usual.
Analysis
0️⃣ Archer
Nothing since October 2025
↗️ BETA
While not quite the high counts of last week (58 flights in 7 days is a lot), it was really great to see VTOL flight minutes again
➡️ Joby
Fantastic to see them in Dubai, and the altitude tests in Marina, but otherwise not a ton of activity
↗️ Vertical Aerospace
Making their debut appearance! Though, the “up arrow” really refers to last week, this week they were a 0️⃣.
Flight Logs
Archer (CTOL)
No flight activity this week.
