Joby, L3Harris team up to pitch new, hybrid VTOL aircraft to DoD

WASHINGTON — Joby Aviation, a startup known for all-electric air taxis, today announced that the company will partner with defense firm L3Harris to pitch a new, gas turbine hybrid vertical takeoff and landing aircraft for military customers.

The currently-unnamed platform will consist of Joby’s existing all-electric S4 aircraft but modified to include a gas turbine hybrid powertrain. L3Harris will missionize the optionally-piloted aircraft with features like sensors, payloads, effectors and collaborative autonomy and will market it to military customers, Joby Executive Chairman Paul Sciarra told Breaking Defense in an interview on Thursday ahead of the announcement. 

The US military is on the hunt for platforms that can operate in austere environments like the Indo-Pacific, where runways are sparse and potential threats from adversaries like China are severe. The S4 can takeoff and land vertically like a helicopter but rotate its propellers to fly like an airplane. 

Regarding potential use cases, “The sort of lowest hanging fruit there are probably contested logistics, counter-UAS [unmanned aerial systems] and electronic warfare,” Sciarra said.

Sciarra said Joby can produce the aircraft using its existing footprint, leveraging an expanding facility in Marina, California as well as a planned factory in Dayton, Ohio. Reasoning that the aircraft fills a “pretty big capability gap” at low altitudes for carrying “medium payloads” of roughly 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, Sciarra said the platform will be “significantly cheaper than a $30 million [AH-64] Apache.” 

Joby plans to begin flight testing the new aircraft as soon as this fall. The Joby and L3Harris team then aims to join government exercises in 2026. Pointing to established supply chains and manufacturing prowess, Sciarra said the aircraft will be “ready to go from customer demonstration to deployability as fast as the customer is ready.”

Joby has previously modified and flown a hybrid S4 powered by hydrogen-electric propulsion under a DoD contract, Sciarra noted, framing the partnership with L3Harris as the “next stage” for the aircraft’s development. Maturing the vehicle’s gas turbine hybrid propulsion system and autonomy features can “feed back into the commercial market,” Sciarra said, while the scale of commercial orders can similarly benefit Pentagon buyers. 

Under the Air Force’s Agility Prime program, Joby in 2023 also delivered its S4 to the Air Force for testing missions like moving cargo in what the company said was the first delivery of its kind. However, the Air Force has acknowledged that all-electric vehicles lack the range necessary for military missions and have expressed interest instead in hybrid platforms. The service also plans to transition the efforts for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) experimentation from the existing Agility Prime effort to a new program.

Acknowledging that the Agility Prime effort “has probably changed to be a bit more autonomy focused,” Sciarra said the program “was exactly what we expected it to be, which was like a stepping stone into the next phases of commercialization.” 

Joby plans to continue work on the eVTOL S4 in parallel with the new platform with L3Harris, Sciarra said, where company officials are “squarely focused on both certifying and then commercializing the all-electric market” that will serve the “vast majority of commercial customer cases.”