As soon as 2026, Uber plans to list seats on Blade-operated helicopters directly in its app, starting in the New York area and a few Southern European markets. The deal provides Uber with a shortcut into urban air mobility with proven, certified aircraft, but it also prepares the ground for Joby’s future electric air taxi services, which will draw on Blade’s hard-won lessons in the urban air transportation market and the operations, maintenance and customer service to deliver them.
What the partnership includes
As part of the arrangement, Blade’s supply of inventory from its network of Part 135 operator partners will be presented in the Uber app alongside premium ground options. Riders close to Manhattan heliports and airports — and en route to the sort of leisure routes in the French and Italian Riviera that make up Blade’s most popular journeys — can compare door-to-door legs of travel with a black car transfer, pay within the app, and schedule everything in one seamless flow, the company said.
The tie-up represents one of the first major consumer-facing efforts from Joby since it bought Uber’s Elevate unit several years ago and, more recently, ached to buy Blade’s passenger operations for up to $125 million, according to company disclosures. Uber also holds a minority stake in Joby, which helps align incentives as the business expands from helicopters to electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL).
A bridge to electric air taxis
Helicopters also provide Uber and Joby an immediate platform to demonstrate the model in practice: frequent shuttles to the airport, high-utilization corridors, time savings worth a premium in predictable operations. Joby has stated its intention to launch commercial eVTOL service in the Middle East before later expanding to North America and Europe once regulators approve. In the meantime, helicopters…and their egret-fed farmland-overflowing wet markets will give you a glimpse at what’s involved in dispatch, vertiport throughput, the customer-education process, and multimodal handoffs — all the choreography of operations eVTOLs will need.
Regulators are already moving in that direction. The FAA’s Advanced Air Mobility concept envisions early eVTOL operations will be supported by existing heliport infrastructure, while its European counterpart, EASA has also released guidance on vertiport design and aircraft type certification. In practical terms, making helicopters bookable at scale inside Uber will begin to standardize the playbook long before battery-electric aircraft arrive.
Routes, prices, and time saved
Early focus can be expected on Manhattan–JFK and surrounding airport shuttles, plus short leisure hop routes such as Nice–Monaco and other Riviera links where Blade already has dense schedules. All those hops add up to minutes, though — a Midtown-J.F.K. leg in 5-8 by air minutes vs. 60-90 minutes at peak times by road, according to regional transport agencies and operator schedules — so machines probably won’t take over for people’s work as the primary driver of prosperity.
Pricing will not be fixed, but we have some historical benchmarks to work with. Prices for Blade’s New York airport seats, and for Uber’s previous promotions of helicopter rides, have typically fallen between about $195 and $295 per person, with seasonal variation in Southern Europe. Bundled FAM transfers can add a level of convenience without adding significantly to the total travel time, particularly when the transfer is combined with airport security and lounge access.
Operations, limits, and oversight
These flights are operated by FAA Part 135-certified operators in the U.S. and equivalent European approvals, with professional crews, maintenance, and rigorously enforced duty time. And helicopters are still limited by weather minima and visibility; when ceilings lower or winds kick up, many trips will return to the ground. Trust will be a function of reliability metrics and upfront rebooking.
Local policy also matters. Capacity constraints and operating windows and noise rules are set by agencies including the New York City Economic Development Corp. and the Port Authority for New York and New Jersey. Bottle Necks On the continent, slots and curfews at coastal heliports can be a squeeze at peak times. Uber’s sheer scale is what brings demand, but it’s not enough to trump those constraints.
What it does to the Uber experience
Adding helicopters to the platform riders already use for airport pickups and premium rides could cut out plenty of friction. Look for things like upfront pricing, auto-generated car-to-helipad transfers, digital boarding passes and lounge notifications — the sort of end-to-end flow that has long been promised for urban air mobility, but that you only rarely actually see working at scale. For operator partners, a larger demand funnel would help load factors on scheduled shuttles, and even out demand on off-peak legs.
To Joby, every time a helicopter seat gets booked through Uber, it is a dress rehearsal. Route-level data, turn-time benchmarks and consumers insights flow directly into the eVTOL rollout, where quieter craft with lesser operating emissions will address the same corridors. Blade’s medical transport business is not included in the consumer integration and will continue to provide organ and clinical logistics.
Competitive and community context
The air mobility arena has experienced turbulence, as some would-be competitors have pared back programs or shifted focus, as certification timelines stretched and funding became more difficult to find. Amid that backdrop, combining Uber’s demand engine with the short-hop network Blade had established was a pragmatic way to get things moving in the category while electric aircraft finished the testing and approvals process.
Local worries will not go away — about noise most of all — and operators will need to be seen to address them through the planning of routes, curfews and open reporting. But if the model can prove faster, more reliable airport access with tighter operational discipline, it plows a credible on-ramp toward a quieter era for eVTOLs, the one that regulators, manufacturers and cities have been preparing for.
