We are tracking the trends that matter most for leaders planning the next 12 to 36 months. We organize trends into three categories based on their maturity and impact timeline:
Game Changers: Trends reshaping entire industries right now. These affect how businesses operate, how value is created, and how competitive advantage is built.
Foundational Breakthroughs: Scientific and engineering advances unlocking new possibilities. These create strategic optionality for the decade ahead.
Weak Signals: Early indicators of transformations that will dominate the late 2020s. These require positioning now, even if mainstream adoption is years away.
Today’s Foundational Breakthrough: air taxis, and what they could mean for how people and goods move, in cities and beyond.
Air taxis are closer than you think: What leaders should know
Electric air taxis and autonomous aircraft are moving from prototype to certification. These electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOLs, take off and land like helicopters but are quieter, electric, and designed to be cheaper to operate. That makes them useful well beyond dense cities, from suburbs to regional trips to places with no easy road access.
For decades, the flying car lived in concept sketches and science fiction. Now aircraft are flying real routes between real cities, regulators are writing the rules, and vertiports are being built. The first routes are in cities because that is where demand and money are concentrated, but the technology isn’t limited to them.
Dubai is furthest along. Joby Aviation recently addedhas added three additional vertiports to its Dubai electric air taxi network, at Dubai Mall, Atlantis The Royal, and the American University of Dubai. They join the flagship hub beside Dubai International Airport, which received regulatory approval this summer.
In its November 4 shareholder letter, Joby said the second vertiport in the network is now complete and that piloted operational flight testing across the network will begin later this year, with passenger service to follow. Once running, the service will turn a 45-minute drive from the airport to Palm Jumeirah into a flight of roughly 10 to 12 minutes.
Who’s building advanced air mobility
Joby Aviation is closing in on certification. Founded in 2009 by JoeBen Bevirt on his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Joby spent its first decade developing its aircraft largely out of public view. It is still headquartered in Santa Cruz, with Toyota as a major investor and manufacturing partner. Joby is now in the fifth and final stage of FAA type certification, with flight testing by FAA pilots expected to begin in the first half of 2027. It already carries passengers today through Blade, the helicopter passenger business it acquired, which flew more than 44,000 people last quarter. That gives Joby a customer base and booking channel ready and waiting for its electric aircraft.
Alef has begun production of flying cars. The California startup began hand building its Model A in December 2025: a fully electric vehicle that drives on public roads and takes off vertically, with about 220 miles of driving range and 110 miles of flight range. Alef reports more than 3,600 preorders, and its first units will go to a small group of early customers, no more than 10, who will fly them under tightly controlled conditions. Alef had targeted the end of 2026 for those first deliveries, but in late October CEO Jim Dukhovny said he now aims to deliver the first car in 2027.
Archer’s Midnight aircraft is completing key flight milestones. Midnight flew roughly 55 miles in 31 minutes on a piloted test flight in 2025, its longest at the time. This fall, Archer took the aircraft into real urban airspace with its “No Roads” tour, which culminated in piloted flights around San Francisco Bay, including an Oakland to Marina District hop of about 10 minutes, a drive that can top an hour in traffic. Archer has since unveiled planned air taxi networks for Austin, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth, and is preparing for early U.S. operations under the federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program as it works through FAA type certification.
Skyports is building the Dubai vertiports Joby will fly from, with earlier projects in Singapore and Paris. Its flagship vertiport, the Dubai International Airport hub where Joby’s network starts, spans four floors and 3,100 square meters, with capacity for 42,000 aircraft movements and about 170,000 passengers a year. It also includes a multilevel car park and sits a short walk from the metro. Vertiports designed to plug directly into existing transit are what turn a novelty into a network.
Why it matters
Think of early rideshare: niche at first, then part of everyday life. When rideshare launched, it was a premium black car service for a narrow slice of riders. Within a decade, it changed how people get to the airport, how cities think about parking, and what consumers expect from getting around: tap a screen, get picked up, pay automatically.
Air mobility looks to follow a similar path. Early routes will be premium, limited, and concentrated in a handful of places with the political will to move first. Those places won’t all be big cities. Regions with long drives, difficult terrain, or island geography have a strong case too. The pieces are coming together quickly. Joby air taxi trips in Dubai are set to be bookable directly in the Uber app, and autonomy is advancing in parallel: in September, Joby flew a converted Cessna Caravan 3,199 miles across the United States on its autonomous system, with the onboard safety pilot never touching the controls.
For leaders, the implications reach well beyond aviation. Real estate developers are already treating vertiports as a premium amenity. Airports, hotels, and corporate campuses will compete on air connectivity. Business travel, logistics, and emergency response will each find their own use cases as costs come down and networks fill in. Medical transport and cargo to remote areas are likely to be among the earliest.
Organizations that start planning for a vertical layer of transportation now will be ready when it reaches their markets, whether those are urban, suburban, or rural.
This is part of our ongoing look at the trends shaping the next decade. Explore the full 12 Tech Trends to see what else is on our radar.
