The flying taxi arrived in March, cost about 41 US dollars, and carried one passenger in a circle.

Reporting fourth-quarter results on 12 March 2026, EHang told investors that its two certificated operators would begin selling EH216-S seats to the public that month, from EHang Future City in Guangzhou and Luogang Central Park in Hefei, at an early-bird fare of 299 yuan. That was almost a year after the Civil Aviation Administration of China issued the world’s first air operator certificates for pilotless passenger aircraft in late March 2025. In that earnings call, EHang attributed the intervening year to ongoing work with the CAAC on ground crew training and certification, alongside continued trial flights at both sites.

In Dubai the sequence is running the other way round.

What 299 yuan buys

The EH216-S is a two-seat machine with sixteen propellers on eight arms and no controls in the cabin. A ground operations centre holds a 5G command link. EHang’s published specification gives it 30 kilometres of range, up to 25 minutes of flight time and a maximum speed of 130 kilometres per hour, at a suggested retail price of 2.39 million yuan, roughly US$330,000.

What the operator certificates authorise at those two sites is narrow: one passenger per flight, hovering and circling inside a designated zone, returning to the pad it left from. There is no point to point routing on sale.

Writing in Forbes when the certificates were issued, Nicole Kobie noted that EHang’s own vice president had put broader air taxi service three to five years out. Sixteen months on, that still describes the situation.

Dubai has a certified building

On 6 July the UAE’s General Civil Aviation Authority and Skyports Infrastructure announced certification of VDX, the vertiport beside Dubai International Airport, which Aviation Week reported as the first purpose-built commercial vertiport certified anywhere. Four storeys, about 3,100 square metres, two takeoff and landing areas, fast charging, and a design capacity of 170,000 passengers a year. Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum reviewed the completed facility in April and directed that the service open to the public before the end of the year.

Joby’s S4 carries a pilot and four passengers at up to 322 kilometres per hour, a different proposition from a sightseeing loop. In November 2025 the company completed the UAE’s first crewed point to point air taxi flight, a 17-minute run from its Margham test site to Al Maktoum International, not to the DXB-adjacent hub that will anchor the network.

The complication is on the flying side. The same trade press that covered the certification reported that Joby has paused the flight validation programme it began in the emirate last year because of the Iran conflict, while maintaining that its regional plans stand, per FlightGlobal’s account. Skyports expects initial test flights into VDX in the autumn.

The certificates are the story

China’s approach has been to certify a limited aircraft for a limited purpose and then widen the envelope one approval at a time. Type certificate in October 2023, production approval in 2024, operator certificates in 2025, tickets in 2026.

The clearest evidence of where that envelope might go is not the ticketed service. In December 2025, per EHang’s fourth-quarter results release, an EH216-series aircraft flew 22 kilometres across the Qiongzhou Strait from Hainan to Guangdong in 18 minutes, running a solid-state battery co-developed with Inx Energy, against a ferry crossing of 60 to 90 minutes. Point to point, over open water, with a real time saving. It was a demonstration, not a sale.

EHang has also put its longer-range VT35, with a design range near 200 kilometres, into CAAC type certification, a plain acknowledgement that the certified aircraft cannot do intercity work.

The American programmes went the other way. Aviation Week’s reporting from October 2025 had Joby and Archer both stepping back from firm US launch dates while holding to their UAE commitments, a consequence of uncertainty about the FAA type certification timeline. Dubai became the first market because its regulator was willing to build a framework around one operator on a political deadline.

What to watch

Joby’s air operator certificate and its first revenue flight, rather than the vertiport, which is done. Whether validation flying resumes in the autumn will indicate how much of the year-end deadline survives.

Whether the CAAC authorises ticketed point to point service, and where. EHang was named in June, alongside Kwoon Chung Smart Mobility and Hong Kong Cyberport, as one of the first batch of projects under Hong Kong’s Regulatory Sandbox X, the round opened for unconventional aircraft. That covers demonstration flights and scenario validation, a step that precedes route approval rather than route approval itself.

And operating figures. EHang says the EH216-S had passed 90,000 flights by May 2026, most of them trial and demonstration work. Flights per aircraft per day, load factor at 299 yuan, cost per seat kilometre: those numbers will show whether a transport service is forming or a certified attraction is being maintained.

The next figure worth waiting for is the first one describing a flight between two different places, sold to someone who wanted to get there.