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Uber To Add Blade Air Taxi Bookings Through Its App
Joby Aviation will integrate Blade’s air mobility service into the Uber app from 2026, linking airports and cities with quiet, zero-emission electric aircraft.
Electric air taxi firm Joby Aviation and Uber will begin integrating Blade’s urban air mobility services into the Uber app as early as 2026, following Joby’s acquisition of Blade’s passenger business this summer.
Blade carried more than 50,000 passengers in 2024 across New York and Southern Europe, linking high-demand routes such as Newark, JFK, Manhattan and the Hamptons. Once folded into Uber, Blade flights will be bookable alongside ground rides, giving users faster, seamless connections in congested cities.
Joby and Uber have been partners in advanced air mobility since 2019, with Joby acquiring Uber’s Elevate division in 2021. That deal gave Joby tools for market modelling and multimodal integration. The Blade acquisition extends that partnership by adding a ready-made network of landing sites and passenger lounges.
Joby’s electric aircraft, designed to carry four passengers and a pilot at speeds up to 200 mph, promises an acoustic footprint far quieter than helicopters and aims to launch in cities including Dubai, New York, Los Angeles, the UK and Japan.
JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby pitched the integration as both a practical step and a long-term signal: “We’re excited to introduce Uber customers to the magic of seamless urban air travel. Integrating Blade into the Uber app is the natural next step in our global partnership with Uber and will lay the foundation for the introduction of our quiet, zero-emissions aircraft in the years ahead. Together with Uber’s global platform and Blade’s proven network, we’re setting the stage for a new era of air travel worldwide”.
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Andrew Macdonald, president and COO of Uber, added: “By harnessing the scale of the Uber platform and partnering with Joby, the industry leader in advanced air mobility, we’re excited to bring our customers the next generation of travel”.
For Uber, adding air mobility is less about novelty than keeping users inside its platform for every leg of a journey.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget
The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
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