Eve Air Mobility expects the first of its six certification prototypes to fly in the second half of 2027, it said with its third-quarter results on 5 November. Those aircraft, built to the final design in an Embraer hangar in São José dos Campos, are the ones whose flights count toward a type certificate.
The aircraft flying now does not count. Eve’s engineering prototype has made 73 flights since December 2025, flown by test pilots from a ground station in a truck, with nobody aboard. It has yet to fly on its wing.
Not yet on the wing
Eve’s design lifts off on eight rotors and cruises on a fixed wing, pushed by a rear propeller. The handover between the two is called transition. At about 80 knots the wing carries the weight, the lift rotors stop and their blades fold away.
So far the prototype has made 14 partial transition flights, reaching 45 knots with its lift rotors still turning. Eve plans five more, then full transition by the end of the year. In August it had planned about 30 partial-transition flights.
Eve says the campaign has now covered 91 percent of the test points planned for the prototype. Noise matched its predictions, and the batteries and motors did better than expected, by the company’s account.
The certification path
Brazil’s aviation authority, ANAC, is Eve’s main regulator. Eve expects the FAA to validate the Brazilian certificate in 2028, and plans to start European certification tests in mid-2028.
Parts for the first conforming prototype have begun to arrive, including fuselage tooling, pylons and wing skins. Eve expects to finish its critical design reviews by the end of 2026.
Money and orders
Eve lost $58.1 million in the quarter, against $46.9 million a year earlier. It held $356.0 million in cash and investments at 30 September. With undrawn credit from Brazil’s development bank BNDES and a grant, it counts $470.4 million of liquidity, enough to last through 2028, it says.
On 4 November FlyBIS, a Brazilian operator, turned a 2022 letter of intent into a binding agreement: two firm orders and rights to ten more aircraft, for routes along the coast of Santa Catarina and in Rio Grande do Sul. Chief executive Johann Bordais called it a move to “concrete fleet commitments”. Most of Eve’s pipeline of about 2,500 aircraft still rests on non-binding letters of intent.
Joby, the furthest-along US rival, expects FAA pilots to start flying its conforming aircraft in the first half of 2027.
