From Prototype to Production: How eVTOL Manufacturing Is Finally Growing Up

Photo courtesty of Joby. Read more on flyingmag.com

For the past decade, eVTOL has lived in a familiar startup purgatory: beautiful concept art, heroic test flights, breathless press releases, and a nagging question hanging in the air like an unresolved chord: can anyone actually build these things at scale?

In 2025, that question finally started getting some adult answers.

The most telling shift in the industry right now isn’t speed records or range improvements. It’s square footage, tooling, workforce planning, and training infrastructure. In other words: manufacturing. And manufacturing is where most moonshot transportation ideas either become boringly successful… or quietly die.

The Factory Is the Product Now

When Joby Aviation acquired a roughly 700,000-square-foot production facility in Dayton, Ohio, the news barely registered outside aviation circles. It should have been headline material.

That move signals a philosophical pivot. Joby isn’t optimising for demonstrations anymore — it’s optimizing for throughput. Their stated goal of producing up to four aircraft per month by 2027 may not sound impressive if you’re thinking like a car company. In aerospace terms, it’s a serious declaration of intent.

More importantly, Joby isn’t just building airframes. The plan includes integrated pilot training and full-motion simulators, developed in partnership with CAE. That matters because certification, training, and operations are inseparable once you leave the prototype phase. You don’t scale aircraft without scaling humans.

This is where eVTOL starts behaving less like Silicon Valley and more like Airbus circa the A320 era: modular production, parallel testing, and ruthless attention to repeatability.

Aerospace Has Been Here Before...and It’s Cautious for a Reason

Traditional aerospace is conservative because it’s paid in blood when it gets things wrong. eVTOL startups have spent years arguing they can move “faster than legacy aviation.” Manufacturing reality has a way of humbling that attitude.

What’s different this time is where the complexity lives.

Classic aircraft manufacturing is dominated by:

• Low volumes

• High part counts

• Extreme certification rigidity

eVTOL manufacturing tries to flip that script by:

• Reducing mechanical complexity via electric propulsion

• Emphasizing modular motor units and battery packs

• Leaning heavily on software-driven redundancy

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: software doesn’t eliminate manufacturing risk — it relocates it. Thermal management, vibration isolation, battery safety, and structural fatigue don’t care how elegant your flight control algorithms are.

Scaling eVTOL production means solving for all of that consistently, not once.

Supply Chains Are the Quiet Make-or-Break Factor

One of the least sexy but most consequential shifts happening right now is supply-chain stabilisation.

Early eVTOL prototypes leaned on:

• Custom-machined parts

• Boutique composites

• Low-volume electronics

Production aircraft demand:

• Multi-source suppliers

• Aerospace-grade quality systems

• Predictable lead times

This is why companies are gravitating toward existing aerospace hubs rather than reinventing the wheel in tech corridors. Ohio, Arizona, and parts of Texas aren’t glamorous, but they know how to build flight-critical hardware without losing sleep over it.

The industry is quietly rediscovering a truth automotive learned decades ago: your CAD model is only as good as your worst supplier.

Why This Matters for Urban Air Mobility

Urban air mobility doesn’t fail because aircraft can’t fly. It fails because:

• They’re too expensive to produce

• They can’t be maintained at scale

• Training pipelines bottleneck growth

Manufacturing scale directly affects unit cost, which affects ticket price, which affects whether eVTOL remains a novelty or becomes infrastructure.

Four aircraft per month turns into dozens. Dozens turn into route redundancy. Route redundancy turns into public trust. This is how aviation has always scaled — quietly, incrementally, and with a lot of very boring spreadsheets.

The Unsexy Phase Is the Important One

The eVTOL industry is entering its least Instagrammable era: factory layouts, workforce certification, tooling calibration, failure-rate analysis. This is good news.

Anyone can make one aircraft fly. Very few can make the hundredth one behave exactly like the first.

If eVTOL is going to survive its hype cycle, manufacturing discipline--not performance specs--will be the deciding factor. The companies investing in square footage and simulators instead of splashy unveilings are telling us something important.

They’re not trying to win the future.

They’re trying to build it repeatedly, safely, and on schedule.

And in aviation, that’s the real flex.