NASA just took an important step toward making flying taxis a practical reality. The agency has started flight testing with Joby Aviation’s electric VTOL aircraft to help model and simulate future airspace with these taxis in service. The dry run began quietly, on August 30th, and will last through September 10th. The effort will include noise check using 50 microphones to gauge the “acoustic profile” of the air taxi throughout the course of a given flight.

This is the first eVTOL test as part of an Advanced Air Mobility campaign meant to spot gaps in the Federal Aviation Administration’s rules and ensure the agency is ready for commercial use of flying taxis alongside delivery drones and other unconventional aircraft. The data from the flight program will help with a fuller set of campaign tests in 2022 involving both other taxis and more complicated flight situations.

The overall program could better prepare the US for a glut of low-altitude air traffic if and when flying taxis enter widespread use. The early testing is also a minor coup for Joby. It’s ushering in crucial testing not long after buying Uber’s air taxi business and taking a $394 million investment from Toyota. There’s no telling if Joby will continue to play a prominent role, but this is clearly the kind of collaboration it was hoping for.

Drone delivery technology is ready to rock, says Alphabet’s Wing spinoff, ushering in a wild new era in which small deliveries can touch down within minutes of being ordered, traveling across town at highway speeds. The only holdup at this stage is red tape, and in the few places where that’s been cleared away – like the Australian city of Logan, Queensland – drone deliveries are already proving very popular.

Wing says it’s already made a whopping 50,000 deliveries in Logan, where it kicked off activities in2019through its own app and service, flying out coffees, snack packs, BBQ chickens, sushi rolls, hardware items and a range of other small packages on demand. Eleven local business are acting as suppliers at this point.

That volume, says the company, makes Logan the world’s drone delivery capital. Or at least, the world’s legal drone delivery capital, anyway. Operations in Christiansburg, Virginia, as well as Helsinki, Finland and Canberra, Australia, have kicked in a further 50,000 deliveries between them, and Wing says demand for the super-fast delivery service is growing at an impressive rate wherever it’s made available. The company tells us that deliveries grew by 500 percent from2019to 2,020 and that in Q22021it made more deliveries than in all of 2020.