Skip to main content

The future of aviation may be this Jetsons-like air taxi. I saw it fly over NYC for the first time. [Business Insider]

It was a crisp, hazy morning on the Hudson River, the kind where the Manhattan skyline looks like a painted backdrop. I was standing near Pier 86, coffee in hand, squinting up at the usual drone of news helicopters and commercial jets. Then, something different cut through the noise. It wasn’t a helicopter’s rhythmic chop, nor the distant roar of a 737. It was a low, electric hum—a sound more akin to a giant, angry vacuum cleaner than a flying machine. I looked up, and there it was: the Joby Aviation air taxi, gliding over the water like something straight out of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

This wasn’t a render. This wasn’t a concept video. This was a real, fully electric aircraft, zipping past the Statue of Liberty at 200 miles per hour. For the first time, a piloted eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft was flying what Joby calls a “cross-city” demo over New York City. And I had a front-row seat.

The Sound of the Future is Surprising

Let’s address the elephant in the room—or rather, the sound in the sky. If you’re expecting the whisper-quiet silence of a glider, you might be disappointed. But if you’re expecting the deafening, ground-shaking roar of a Sikorsky, you’re in for a shock. The Joby aircraft makes a sound that sits somewhere between a high-speed elevator and a distant swarm of bees. When it passed directly overhead, I could still have a normal conversation.

As it tilted its six rotors forward and transitioned from a hover to forward flight, the noise dropped even further. The rotors essentially “hide” the sound as they move forward, a phenomenon the engineers call shielding. For New Yorkers who live under the hellish flight paths of LaGuardia and JFK, this is the real selling point. You might not even hear your air taxi landing on a rooftop pad a few blocks away.

Why This Flight Matters (It’s Not Just a Gimmick)

Joby has been flying prototypes in rural California for years. But New York City is the crucible. This is the most complex airspace in the world. The flight—which took off from their facility in Marina, California, was disassembled, shipped to Manhattan, and then reassembled for a vertical takeoff from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport—proves one critical thing: the aircraft can navigate the same airspace as heavy metal helicopters and commercial jets without disrupting the flow.

During the demo, the Joby aircraft flew a route that roughly mirrors the route a future paying passenger would take: from the heliport downtown, up the East River, past the United Nations, and then a turn over Midtown. The entire journey took about seven minutes. By car, that same route would take 40 minutes on a good day, or two hours in a rainstorm. For a city that loses millions of man-hours to traffic jams annually, the math is compelling.

Pilot Perspective: Easier Than You Think?

I spoke with James “Buddy” Denham, the test pilot who flew the machine that morning. He looked surprisingly relaxed for a guy who just flew a prototype over the busiest airspace in America. “Honestly, the hardest part was the radio communication with air traffic control,” he laughed. “The aircraft flies itself for the most part. It’s a single-pilot operation, but the computer handles all the stabilization. You just tell it where to go.”

The aircraft uses six tilting propellers, each powered by a separate electric motor. If one fails, the other five can handle the load. If two fail, it can still land safely. The battery pack is designed to survive a crash impact. It is, by design, boringly safe. And boring is exactly what you want from a flying car.

The Reality Check: When Can I Ride?

Here is the part where I have to temper your “Jetsons” excitement. Joby has already flown these aircraft for thousands of miles. They have a contract with the Department of Defense. They have a partnership with Delta Air Lines to provide connecting flights from your house to JFK. But the regulatory clock is ticking slowly.

The current timeline, according to Joby CEO JoeBen Bevirt, is to start commercial service in “select cities” by late 2025 or early 2026. New York is definitely on the shortlist, but nobody is promising you can hail one from your rooftop next summer. The FAA needs to certify the aircraft itself (type certification), then certify the pilots, then certify the vertiports. It’s a multi-year process.

And then there is the cost. Initially, these rides will be expensive. Think Uber Black, not UberX. Joby expects the cost per mile to drop to around $3 to $5 per passenger mile over time, making it competitive with a black car service. It will take a while before it’s cheaper than a subway ride.

A City Transformed?

Watching that little white aircraft bank over the Chrysler Building, I couldn’t help but feel a shift. We have been promised flying cars since the 1950s. We have been given flying cars that were just ugly helicopters or crashed prototypes. This thing was different. It was quiet. It was fast. It was real.

The future of aviation might not be a giant airliner or a supersonic jet. It might be this: a silent, electric taxi, zipping you home from the office, over the traffic below, while you read a book or stare at the skyline. I saw it with my own eyes. It’s coming. The only question is whether the city—and our wallets—are ready for it.

Ahmed Abed – News journalist

Latest

Want to hire for your robotics startup? The autonomous vehicle industry is ripe for picking. [Business Insider]

Want to hire for your robotics startup? The autonomous vehicle industry is ripe for picking. If you are trying to build a robotics startup right now, you know the pain. You are competing against the defense industry, big tech, and legacy manufacturers for the same small pool of engineers. But there is a secret patch of talent that is suddenly, and somewhat unexpectedly, available. I’m talking about the autonomous vehicle industry. For the last decade, self-driving car companies hoarded talent. They paid six-figure salaries for people who could write a sensor fusion algorithm or calibrate a LIDAR array. But the tide has turned. The hype has normalized. The "robotaxi in every driveway" promise has been pushed back a decade. And as a result, some of the most brilliant hardware and software engineers in the world are looking for their next move. This isn’t about poaching desperate people. It is about recognizing that the AV sector has matured into a perfect training ground ...
Read more

In OpenAI trial, Elon Musk points to meetings with Barack Obama and Larry Page as proof he's serious about AI risks [Business Insider]

In a California courtroom last week, the ongoing legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI took a turn into the realm of high-stakes geopolitics and celebrity summits. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, testifying in a trial that could reshape the future of artificial intelligence development, pointed to two specific private meetings to underscore his long-standing warnings about unregulated AI. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and later left the board, is currently suing the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, alleging breach of contract and a deviation from the original non-profit mission. But in his testimony, Musk pivoted from the legal minutiae to a broader narrative: his personal, decades-long crusade to prevent an AI apocalypse. The Obama Meeting: A Warning at the Highest Level According to court transcripts, Musk recounted a private meeting with former President Barack Obama. The billionaire claimed he used this high-level audience to directly warn the 44th president about the exi...
Read more

Disney has decided to keep ESPN

It's official: Disney has decided to keep ESPN. After months of speculation, boardroom drama, and whispered rumors about spinning off the "Worldwide Leader in Sports," the House of Mouse has chosen to hold onto its most controversial—and profitable—asset. For sports fans, this is a seismic moment that deserves more than a headline. The decision, announced late Tuesday, ends a prolonged period of uncertainty. Analysts had been divided; some argued that ESPN's linear cable model was a dinosaur in a streaming world, while others insisted the brand still held immense value. Disney CEO Bob Iger, who returned to the helm in late 2022, has now made his stance clear: ESPN is staying in the family. Why the Change of Heart? To understand this, you have to look at the numbers. For all the talk about cord-cutting, ESPN still generates massive cash flow. It commands the highest affiliate fees of any cable network—around $9 per subscriber per month. That adds up to billions in...
Read more

Inside the rise of vibe coding's newest crowd [Business Insider]

In the sprawling digital landscape of 2024, a new kind of programmer is emerging. They don’t speak in Python or JavaScript. They don’t debug with breakpoints. They don’t even own a mechanical keyboard. Instead, they converse with artificial intelligence, describing their desires in plain English, and watch as code materializes before their eyes. This isn’t a dystopian future; it’s the present reality of "vibe coding," and its newest crowd is changing what it means to be a developer. Vibe coding, a term that first gained traction in niche developer forums, refers to the practice of using large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, or specialized coding copilots to generate entire applications based on natural language prompts. The "vibe" is the key ingredient. It’s not about precise technical specifications. It’s about the mood, the aesthetic, the feeling you want the software to evoke. A user might say, "Create a retro-futuristic weather app that feels l...
Read more

Tory Burch says she would 'never trade off' being a good mom while building her company — but something had to give [Business Insider]

In a rare, candid interview that peeled back the glossy veneer of entrepreneurial mythology, fashion mogul Tory Burch admitted that building a billion-dollar brand while raising three sons required a trade-off she never publicly discussed—until now. "I would never trade off being a good mom," Burch told a small group of journalists last week in New York. "But something had to give. And that something was my own sleep, my own health, and the illusion that I could do it all perfectly." The 57-year-old designer, whose namesake company is valued at over $5 billion, has long been held up as a paragon of work-life balance. Yet in her new memoir and in conversations surrounding its release, Burch is rewriting that narrative—not as a confession of failure, but as a realistic blueprint for the compromises that define modern motherhood and ambition. The myth of 'having it all' Burch launched her company in 2004 from her kitchen table in Manhattan, with three y...
Read more

What SaaSpocalypse? Atlassian, Twilio, and Five9 stocks soar as their AI moves deliver earnings beats [Business Insider]

In a tech landscape often painted with broad strokes of doom and gloom over software-as-a-service (SaaS) valuations, a trio of enterprise stalwarts just flipped the script. Atlassian, Twilio, and Five9—three companies that have weathered their fair share of market skepticism—delivered earnings beats that sent their stocks soaring this week. The common thread? A sharp pivot toward artificial intelligence that isn't just a buzzword in a press release, but a tangible driver of customer uptake and revenue growth. Forget the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative for a moment; these results suggest that AI might just be the lifeline the sector needed. Atlassian: The DevOps Darling Gets an AI Upgrade Atlassian, the company behind Jira, Confluence, and Trello, has long been the backbone of developer workflows. But its latest earnings report, released late Wednesday, showed that the company is successfully moving beyond its traditional "self-managed" roots into a cloud-first, AI-...
Read more

I planned to travel indefinitely — instead, I started a company in rural Japan [Business Insider]

It started as a simple fantasy: sell everything, buy a one-way ticket to Japan, and wander through its remote villages and mountain trails for a year or two. I had the backpack picked out, the minimalist wardrobe sorted, and a Google Doc titled “The Infinite Trip” filled with potential itineraries. I was a news journalist covering city council meetings and downtown real estate developments, and I was burned out. The plan was to escape the noise, the deadlines, and the endless notifications. I wanted to live in a place where the loudest sound at 8 PM was a rice field’s irrigation pump. Six months later, I found myself in a dusty, vacant kominka (a traditional wooden farmhouse) in the Tohoku region of northern Japan, surrounded by empty sake bottles, a laptop with a cracked screen, and an incorporation certificate from the local legal affairs bureau. I hadn’t gone on a single hike in three weeks. Instead, I had accidentally started a company. This is the story of how my “infinite tra...
Read more

Trump administration says its war in Iran has been 'terminated' before 60-day deadline

So, here we are again. You might have caught the headlines this morning: "Trump administration says its war in Iran has been 'terminated' before 60-day deadline." And if you’re like me, you probably did a double-take. A war? Terminated? Before a deadline? It sounds like a plot twist from a geopolitical thriller, except this is real life, and real lives are tangled up in the words. Let me break this down for you, because the phrasing alone is enough to make you wonder if someone’s playing with semantics—or if there’s something genuinely newsworthy beneath the jargon. What exactly happened? According to statements attributed to the Trump administration, the military campaign they’d initiated against Iran—yes, a campaign they themselves described as a "war"—has now been called off. Not paused. Not paused for negotiations. Terminated. And here’s the kicker: this termination comes well before a self-imposed 60-day deadline that was supposedly set for the ...
Read more

US company aims to resurrect bluebuck antelope that was hunted to extinction

Let’s be honest: when you hear the words “de-extinction,” your brain probably jumps straight to Jurassic Park. You know, the chaotic scenes of velociraptors testing fences and a T. rex wreaking havoc in the rain. It’s a fun movie, sure, but it’s not exactly a blueprint for real-world science. Yet here we are, in 2025, with an actual company—a US-based biotech firm called Colossal Biosciences—announcing they want to bring back a creature that humans wiped off the planet centuries ago. Not a dinosaur. Not a woolly mammoth. An antelope. Specifically, the bluebuck antelope. And before you roll your eyes, hear me out. This isn’t some Silicon Valley stunt funded by a bored billionaire with a god complex. Well, maybe a little of that, but there’s more to it. The bluebuck ( Hippotragus leucophaeus ) was a striking animal—a medium-sized antelope with a bluish-grey coat (hence the name) and long, elegant horns. It once roamed the grasslands of South Africa’s southwestern Cape region. But by 18...
Read more

Here's what's behind oil's 8-day climb back to Iran-war highs [Business Insider]

Oil prices have surged for eight consecutive sessions, climbing back to levels not seen since the height of tensions with Iran earlier this year. The rally has caught many traders off guard, but the underlying drivers are a mix of tightening supply, geopolitical risk, and shifting market sentiment. Here’s a breakdown of what’s really behind this sustained climb. The Supply Squeeze: OPEC+ Discipline Meets Global Demand The most immediate factor is the ongoing production cuts from OPEC+ members, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. Since late 2023, the alliance has trimmed output by roughly 2 million barrels per day (bpd). This isn't new news, but the market is now feeling the cumulative effect. Stockpiles in major consumer nations, especially the United States, have been drawing down faster than expected. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported a larger-than-anticipated crude inventory draw last week of 4.5 million barrels. When supply is tight, any additional bullis...
Read more