Tag: Joby Aviation

The Innovations of Michael V. Ryan: Forming an important relationship with Joby Aviation that is the gateway to the future

The plan is for Joby Aviation to conduct some flight tests soon, as early as 2026, in the Miami Valley, where it has a new manufacturing plant in Dayton.  And the Vice Mayor of Hamilton, Ohio, Michael Ryan, wants Butler County to be part of it, as a member of the Hamilton City Council who has done a commendable job of restoring commercial viability to the historic city.  And he has some bigger ideas about helping Butler County as a whole by running for commissioner in an upcoming election, which coincides with the release of Joby Aviation’s new air taxis from its Dayton facility.  Michael recently met with the people involved in this expansion and reported some results to me as part of his campaign platform, which is quite ambitious.  I love the topic of sky taxis, or as they are known to President Trump, eVTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) vehicles.  Joby is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, and currently has five sky taxis that they are delivering to Dubai as the first flight destination.  As I’ve covered this topic extensively, I believe this is one of the most significant transportation trends to emerge from the human race.  Essentially, these eVTOL vehicles are personal vehicles, much like the Jetsons’ or the flying cars from Back to the Future.  But the technology is real, and it’s happening now, in 2025.  In Dubai, they have already built the infrastructure, which consists of four vertiports: one at the airport and three others located around the city.  They will essentially serve as an Uber experience, but instead of getting into a car and having a driver take you somewhere, you will get into one of these very advanced drones.  Initially, they will be piloted by a real operator.  However, they will soon be completely automated, and you will interact with the experience through your phone. 

In America, there are only three places seriously considering entering the eVTOL market: New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area in San Francisco.  However, Michael Ryan is trying to make Butler County the most obvious starting point, as Ohio is the birthplace of aviation, and the new Joby plant is just up the road along the Aviation Corridor.  There are few places in America as aviation-focused as the span of I-75 from Dayton to CVG in Kentucky, and making Hamilton and Butler County, in general, a hub for Joby interaction would be a tremendous commercial opportunity.  All Joby is waiting for is the FAA to complete their review and for some testing flights to occur around Dayton International Airport.  The Trump administration is ready to support this new opportunity, and it won’t take long for everyone to clamor for their own vertiports.  It’s good to see that Michael Ryan isn’t even the commissioner of Butler County yet, and he’s already trying to create opportunities that few in the world have seen yet.  The timeline will be fast; the Dayton facility plans to produce 500 air taxis per year, and it won’t take long for them to become as common as routine airplanes. However, eVTOL vehicles will operate under the flight levels of current commercial airlines and personal planes.  Traffic problems will be significantly reduced because traffic can be stacked in the air.  Infrastructure is relatively simple compared to railroads and highways.  Vertiports typically require an investment of $100,000-$ 200,000 for the pad to operate from, and a few million dollars for a multi-level stack terminal.  However, eVTOL vehicles can operate almost anywhere, including in dense cities, which will be demonstrated in Dubai before 2025 comes to a close. 

Speed is the wave of the future in communication, so the amount of time that people spend interacting with each other will need to increase.  The experimental trend that had been emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned out to be a bust: the work-from-home crowd did not turn out well.  Economic activity, aside from all the socialist experiments, occurs when people who can invest and produce manufacturing can communicate with each other easily, which is why so much industry ends up clustering along highway access.  It used to be railroads.  Starting in 2025 and beyond, access to vertiports will be available, and ultimately, person-to-person travel will be possible from your driveway to your employer.  Ground traffic will become a second-level option.  It will be like riding a horse as compared to a car.  When you can get anywhere within a city in 10 to 15 minutes, that speeds up human interaction, which emerging AI and a new space economy currently are constrained by traditional infrastructure that is much slower than it needs to be.  Many people aren’t thinking about these things yet, but Michael Ryan is.  He is a refreshing new Republican who fits in very nicely with the J.D. Vance generation, as well as Vivek Ramaswamy, who will soon be the governor of Ohio.  As Elon Musk develops Starship to emerge into this new commercial space economy, where SpaceX has just had a very successful test of their flight 10 Starship, things are going to move very fast, not years from now, but within the year.  Therefore, a political vision will become increasingly important in meeting those emerging market trends.  As a city council member, Michael Ryan and his team in Hamilton have been effective at staving off further taxation of a legacy economy that has largely shifted away.

One of the most impressive renovations to Hamilton is part of the good work that Michael Ryan and the Hamilton City Council have brought forth, namely the Spooky Nook Sports Champion Mill, which is America’s largest indoor sports complex.  It’s a fantastic facility right on the river, across from downtown Hamilton, and is a testament to what is possible when an old space is historically preserved and transformed into something that everyone enjoys.  The Joby Aviation air taxi technology would be ideal for this specific site, as it would enable people to get in and out of the area much faster than with a car.  It would take a one- to two-hour trip by car from the surrounding area, making it about 15 minutes, as Joby vehicles can travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour.  And they are now safe enough to consider them more reliable than traditional cars.  They will quickly prove to be the safest way to travel.  As Michael pointed out to me during our conversation, personalized sky travel won’t even be the most lucrative market.  Logistics will be revolutionized as drone technology soon delivers to our doors, as Amazon has been promising for a long time.  The technology is now here, making it viable to have distribution centers far away from congested traffic corridors.  Because the drones can fly over these areas, Joby technology will enable drop-offs from airports to these centers to occur much faster and more efficiently.  Things are about to get a lot faster, and Michael Ryan is looking to make Butler County the most attractive destination for this new Joby Aviation opportunity.  Michael Ryan has been a city council member in Hamilton since 2017, and it didn’t take long for great things like the Spooky Nook complex to emerge with new economic viability that is bringing new opportunities to the city of Hamilton, which is the best way to keep taxes down, to pay for infrastructure with financial viability, not personal property taxes.  And what Michael Ryan is doing with forming partnerships with Joby Aviation shows an opportunity on a much larger scale.  And he is far ahead of any other politician in the country, which is something to be very proud of. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Re-elect Mark Welch to West Chester Trustee: The excitment about the future of air taxis

It began with a discussion about the new Trump executive order on air taxis and exploring how West Chester, Ohio, could become part of this exciting new trend.  But halfway through our conversation, it became apparent to me that Mark Welch was up for re-election, and it would be a good idea to continue the discussion on camera so that people could see how the spaghetti is made politically, because West Chester is at a critical time.  It has been very prosperous, and Mark, as a trustee, has been exceptionally effective in contributing to that success.  He is what remains of a long-standing government relationship that balanced power and innovation in just the right way over an extended period, resulting in great success.  I don’t think he will have a difficult time re-winning his seat.  However, there are challengers, and quite a few of them lean toward Democratic politics, and we all know what that means.  It’s a second-generation kind of thing, where the governing we do ends up being second-generation concerns.  They know they like the success, but they don’t know how to earn more of it for themselves.  And under the traditional campaign platform approach, there isn’t much opportunity for someone with extensive experience and success, like Mark Welch, to demonstrate why he is so much better than everyone else.  During our conversation, I suggested to Mark that we record the rest of our talk on camera so people could listen in and see what goes into being a good trustee.  These kinds of races cost a lot of money, because you have to buy print media, do the yard signs in a big district, and do radio and television to maintain a brand expectation that the public has for a front-running political figure.  However, the best thing Mark Welch has in his favor, campaign-wise, is his own experience, allowing people to hear it for themselves without interruption. 

One thing that Mark has always been good at is understanding the passions that business owners have and embracing a go-forward path toward fulfillment, which is why we were discussing flying cars and a vertiport in West Chester.  Over the last 14 years or so, there were numerous decisions made, including Mark’s election as a trustee, that contributed to West Chester, Ohio, becoming one of the best places to live in the world. Welch knows his stuff.  Every time I speak with him, he rattles off an enormous amount of detailed information about the subjects we’re discussing, and he finds a way to get along with just about everyone.  So he was undoubtedly the right guy to talk about an abandoned property that I had been thinking about that could use a repurpose to be a vertiport for the new Joby Air Taxi service which would take visitors to and from the local airports, CVG to the south, and Dayton International to the north, to avoid the heavy traffic that is typically associated with both routes.  Joby Aviation has relationships with Uber, Toyota, and Delta Airlines to advance personal transportation along these frontiers. All they needed was a presidential administration like Trump’s to sign an executive order allowing them to proceed, and FAA certification to advance.  Mark and I were talking about what a shame it was that Saudi Arabia and, specifically, Dubai, were going to be the first to market for this exciting new transportation system.  This is no longer science fiction, like the Jetsons cartoon or Back to the Future.  These vertical takeoff vehicles are real, very efficient, and can safely transport up to four passengers right now.  All they need at this point is the FAA certification, which they are expected to receive later in 2025.  Now was the time to discuss how West Chester, Ohio, could become part of this exciting new trend.

The reason West Chester would be a great place to start an American hub is that Joby Aviation has a manufacturing facility where it will build thousands of these sky cars in the Dayton area for many years.  And as it stands, Toyota has invested over $500 million in a partnership with Joby, which means that Japan will be using these sky cars soon, as will China.  It would be a real shame to have all these far-away places using something that was being built right down the road from West Chester.  I have people who come from all over the world to see me often, and their number one complaint is that it takes too long to get to the area airports from West Chester.  They’d rather not worry about renting a car once they get to Cincinnati to visit a business associate in West Chester.  They’d like to fly in on Delta, catch their direct shuttle service to the Joby air taxi at the Delta hub, and fly directly to West Chester, so they can walk to their hotel without worrying about traffic.  West Chester has a lot of hotels, but the other complaint is that they are always booked, so there is a genuine business need to solve this transportation problem.  It’s great to have such excellent highway access as West Chester does.  But the hour spent either to the north or the south getting to the airport could be used in a much better way, and these Joby Air Taxis are just the right thing. 

Air taxis will play a significant role in the future American economy.  The best way to deal with traffic is to fly over it; as a result, many parts of America will likely utilize air taxis after just visiting Washington D.C. I can say that they will be instrumental in flying people in and out of the city from many directions, as the traffic on the highways is always so thick.  People don’t travel long distances for business meetings only to sit in traffic.  And it happens all the time in West Chester: people from out of town want to go to a Reds game, but everyone has worked all day at their business and doesn’t have time to drive down to the stadium to sit in traffic for an hour and a half during rush hour.  If they could take a Joby air taxi to the stadium, they would do it without hesitation.  Mark and I were discussing that old building in West Chester that would make a great skyport for the southern Ohio region.  Because establishing those would be the very next problem that Joby Aviation would have to overcome, they had the technical parts worked out.  Now they had the political support.  Now, all they needed were vertiports to create a network of use that these flying cars could be a part of, so that commercial travel could begin.  But that was new information.  Mark has been down this kind of road before, with many thousands of similar enterprises that just needed a friendly place to set up shop, which is why West Chester became one of the best places in the world to live.  Mark Welch embodies the perfect politician, and if we want to protect what is so good about West Chester, Ohio, re-electing Mark Welch to his trustee position is crucial and a wise decision.  There is a lot of fun coming on the horizon for those bold enough to put their arm around innovation.  And when it comes to government leadership, Mark Welch excels at doing just that.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

I Endorse Michael Ryan for Butler County Commissioner: A wonderful future if only we have the courage to embrace it

I thought it was going to be a secret for a while, but it was announced at the Nancy Nix fundraiser on February 21st, 2025, that Michael Ryan, the Hamilton City Council member and Vice Mayor, was planning to run for one of the commissioner openings that were coming up in November of 2026.  I have felt for a long time that if only T.C. Rogers, one of the current commissioners in Butler County, had another friendly vote, lots of good things could happen for a community that has over 400,000 people and has the potential for some of the best economic output anywhere in the United States, or even the world for that matter.  If another commissioner could help with the critical free market philosophy, lots of upward mobility for a lot of people would be created.  Upon hearing this news, I first thought that Michael would be a perfect replacement for the current commissioner, Cindy Carpenter.  I haven’t been a fan of hers since she started, but her career path fell off the road last year when she was caught campaigning for a Democrat in Middletown, Ohio.   There is a lot of talk about Cindy winning eight straight elections even though she has a lot of detractors in the Republican Party.  I would argue that the reason she holds up so well to Democrat challengers is because she is essentially a Democrat who puts an “R” next to her name to win elections in a very conservative county.  I think this campaigning in Middletown for Democrats thing will hurt her now in ways she’s not used to, so I think she’s very vulnerable.   We’re in a new day of politics, and putting up with these RINOs has been something that Central Committees have not been willing to do, especially when they have an opportunity to get a MAGA type of officeholder.  And that is precisely what Michael V. Ryan is.

My wife has been very busy with family business lately.  To run a family well takes a massive commitment sometimes, and my wife is the kind of person who will drop everything at the drop of a hat to help my two daughters with life as it’s happening.  This leaves me going to some of these vital community functions by myself a lot.  And at Nancy’s fundraiser, I talked too much to too many people to find a seat in the vast crowd.  Nancy Nix always does a great job with these events, which are always well-attended.  On this particular evening, it was being held at the Elks Club in Liberty Township, which is a favorite venue of mine.  It holds a lot of people, and she always brings in big-time comedy acts to entertain people during a nice dinner provided by the Spinning Fork restaurant that facilitates the club.  The comedians were Jeff Jena, Dave Dugan, and Lou Santini, so they were not second-rate acts, so seating had some priority.  If my wife had been with me, we would have found a seat and held it near people we usually associate with.  But Jeff Jena was acting as the master of ceremonies, and he was getting impatient. People were still talking as it was time to serve dinner and start the show.  So I needed to stop shindigging and get to a seat.  I had been talking to Michael Ryan about several county and city topics, and he saw my dilemma and said that I could sit with him and his wife, along with others from city councils in not just Hamilton but also nearby Middletown. 

Michael and I have had a lot of discussions over the years about the potential of Butler County, and as a younger guy, he has reminded me of a lot of up-and-coming political people who are formulating the MAGA movement that is emerging behind Trump’s leadership in the Executive Branch, which includes J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Bernie Moreno.  These are different kinds of brilliant people who could be successful in any field they want to be in.  However, a personality type is emerging that is quite noticeable, and Michael Ryan, who I call “young” at 41 years old, has a lot of good stuff to give.  Once I heard that he was planning to run for that Butler County Commissioner seat that Cindy Carpenter occupied, I got excited and decided to get behind his campaign and help however I could.  As he and I were talking about his upcoming campaign, shortly after Nancy Nix gave him a full endorsement in front of the crowd that caused a little controversy, in a good way, he kept reminding me of a different version of Vivek Ramaswamy. I met Vivek years ago through Nancy Nix and a few other places at VIP events, such as a time with Mike Pompeo and again as he prepared to announce his race for Governor of Ohio.  Leading up to Nancy’s fundraiser, I was coordinating that big announcement with Vivek at CTL Aerospace, and I noted how different this new generation of politicians was as opposed to the past before Trump changed politics forever.  Michael Ryan fits this new, young, ambitious type of politician who runs toward capitalism, not away from it as Cindy Carpenter has all these years. 

So I appreciated Michael and his very nice wife Amanda letting me share in their date night as a third wheel.  We talked about many incredible opportunities for Butler County if only someone like him could fill that critical seat.  We spent a lot of time discussing the vertical taxi market, which I have been talking about with everyone with a mind to listen.  A lot of people haven’t yet put all the dots together, but Joby Aviation is right up the road of the aviation corridor of I-75 that Vivek Ramaswamy is planning to talk a lot about as his run for governor, and they are building eVTOL aircraft that are ready to go right now.  I told everyone months ago how it was going to go down. They are only waiting for regulation approval and can start shipping these air taxi vehicles worldwide.  China and Abu Dhabi are the first to market as they have much fewer regulatory environments to slow them down.  However, under the Trump administration, I’m just saying that those barriers to the United States will be removed.  And someone like Michael Ryan is just the kind of person with the vision to put their arms around it and bring top tech innovation to Butler County as a leader of this emerging new technology.  He understands the value of that kind of innovation, but that’s not the only reason I like Michael.  He’s just a good person who wants to do good things, and I enjoyed spending time with him and his wife, along with the table of fellow council members and community managers.  Michael and Amanda are the kind of people you want to see providing leadership and opportunity to people hungry for it, and Butler County is a prime place to have the most vibrant economy in a state that is going to be Trump’s example of turning a rust belt into a tech giant.  From my experience with the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign for governor, I know his plans for the state.  And to cascade off that, Butler County can be the leader of the state to have the best opportunities that many people can’t yet possibly imagine.  And with a commissioner like Michael Ryan, even the wildest dreams of the most optimistic people can’t even be imagined because such greatness has never yet been seen among the human race. But that opportunity is coming at us very soon, with Vivek Ramaswamy as Ohio Governor and Michael Ryan as Butler County Commissioner. 

Oh, and regarding Joby Aviation and why Abu Dhabi is the current leader in the eVTOL market. Joby’s S4 aircraft, which hauls a pilot and four passengers at 200 mph with a 100-mile range, could slash the two-hour car slog from Abu Dhabi to Dubai to a breezy 30 minutes—no emissions, and much less noise than a chopper. They’re tying this into Abu Dhabi’s Smart and Autonomous Vehicles Industry (SAVI) cluster, a big local initiative to lead in next-gen transport. Joby’s already got exclusive rights to operate in Dubai starting as early as 2025, and this Abu Dhabi move opens the door for zippy inter-emirate trips. They’ve been showing off the aircraft at events like DRIFTx in Yas Marina, flexing their tech to seal the deal.  This is not science fiction.  The only thing stopping us in the United States is having the kind of politicians who can take away the barriers to market saturation currently held up to the speed of slow government left to us by Joe Biden and Obama’s years of bureaucratic infrastructure. The eVTOL is the future of transportation, much more important than building any new highway or railroad.  And Butler County, Ohio can lead America if only it has the right politicians who can make it happen.  The money and investment are just waiting for the pin-headed politicians like Cindy Carpenter to get out of the way.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Air Taxis in West Chester, Ohio: The future is now, and its very exciting

The future is now

It’s going to happen at this point anyway.  My bringing it up now is more of a formality of connecting the dots and explaining to anybody who will listen how the future economy under President Trump will look.  I have conversations about making Ohio the number one state for business-friendly conditions all the time.  I attend many seminars on economic development and Chamber of Commerce incentives for depressed areas looking to rebound.  And when I say the only thing holding back this technology is the FAA, politics has changed.  Deregulation under Trump will get stuffy bureaucrats out of the way, and a second wave of aviation and aerospace development will be unleashed.  The other day, I talked a lot about Hyperloop and how and why a terminal should be built in Monroe, Ohio. But today, I’m talking about an old idea that is about to be unleashed and create an all-new transportation mode: skycars, or more technically speaking, VTOL air taxis.  I can say from personal experience that Joby Aviation, up the road from West Chester and Liberty Township, is at the front of the market.  They have air taxis ready to go, built, tested, flushed out, and prepared for delivery to market in 2025/2026; essentially, all that is standing in the way is the FAA approval process.  Joby Aviation is making a piloted version, but they will quickly become fully automatic and will work by calling one on your phone and having them pick you up and perform just like an Uber.  The future is here, now.  All that needed to happen was that politics would have to get behind it.  We don’t already have these air taxis in use because the Biden administration was a slow and Marxist micromanager that stalled all these efforts.  If Trump had stayed in the White House in 2020, these Joby air taxis would have been out for a few years by now.  So once we get a Trump administration back in the White House and install a pro-business mindset back into America, Joby and a few other companies are going to move quickly, and technical innovation on this front will happen at a blistering pace. 

Knowing all that, I would propose that we get all the minds together in West Chester and Liberty Township and become the first areas in the world to develop official Sky Ports.  Abu Dhabi and China are already deep in development.  And Europe is already all over it.  But they don’t have Joby Aviation right down the road and a stable environment to perform the early day development of the technology, which could make Ohio the first to fly again.  Here’s how and why it would work.  For instance, there is a nice little piece of property across from Ikea in West Chester that is just big enough for a sky port, a mini runway kind of helipad where these air taxis would land and take off like a helicopter, but much quieter and with much more stable flight.  This always happens to me; people come and see me from out of town.  They stay at the many hotels and have to get back and forth between CVG and West Chester, and their biggest problem is the traffic down I-75, which gets back to the airport to catch their flight when doing business in West Chester.  This air taxi system would take all that worry away and improve life for many people. 

For instance, when business guests were ready to leave their hotel, they would walk or catch a little transport from their hotel to Sky Port by Ikea. Theoretically, a sky taxi would be waiting for them.  In this case, a piloted version of the Joby VTOL vehicle would be waiting for them just like an Uber, dialed up by their phone with the ticket, and everything would be paid.  The guests would arrive and get into the craft like a car.  The sky taxi would fly them down to the airport at CVG and land at the front of the terminal, likely on top of the parking garage there, and fly over all the traffic, making the trip in about 15 minutes, which usually takes over 50 minutes.  Another problem I have is bringing people from West Chester who are in town without a car to sporting events.  I typically pick them up and drive to the Great American Ballpark to attend a game for the evening.  Getting downtown with all the rush hour traffic is a pain in the neck.  It would be much better to get into an air taxi and fly straight to the stadium, land in a nice, safe place along the river, and get to the game in about 10 minutes instead of an hour during those peak hours of 5 to 6 PM.  When the game was over, the passengers would just let the air taxi service know you were about to leave, and they would come and pick you up just like an Uber driver now.  Only it would be a VTOL instead of a car.  The same air taxi service could be set up to get to Kings Island from all over Cincinnati.  It could also be set up to serve politicians from their districts directly to the Ohio Statehouse.  There are a vast number of immediate applications that would benefit immediately from the low price of freshly poured concrete. 

After the FAA permit process, the next barrier would be to win over the public.  So, the sooner people see these vehicles working and overcome their fear of flying, the more the concept will expand rapidly.  At first, it would be similar to a helicopter ride experience that you see in very safe tourist areas.  Only this air taxi concept is even safer and much quieter.  It would be at a small volume, maybe a few flights every hour throughout the peak hours of a business day.  But enough people are interested now to make that happen with the Joby Aviation vehicles right out of the box.  However, the flight frequency would quickly increase to a flight every couple of minutes, and even several flights from several pads at the Skyport would come and go all the time.  It will also greatly enhance the business climate wherever sports reside.  So, I think Ohio has a unique opportunity to be the first.  West Chester, precisely because of its hotels and business traffic, could be the first in the world to demonstrate this technology and benefit economically from the visionary approach.  I’m just connecting the dots here for the many people I know in this business who need to know about each other.  And to explain that this isn’t some far off Jetson’s fantasy concept.  I’ve been involved in these Skycars for over three decades now, so when I say that they are here, I can say it with confidence.  Air taxis are here; they will happen and will be the hottest ticket in town for the next half of a decade.  People will find them very convenient, safe, and pleasant.  And they will become nearly as common as a personal car in a very short time.  The VTOL market needed a president like Trump in the White House.  The rest was waiting for the permit approval, which is about to happen as you read this.  If not sooner. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707