A small plane landed on the tarmac at Salt Lake City Airport on Wednesday.

Its pilot didn’t, though.

They were 700 miles away, controlling the aircraft from a facility in in Concord, California.

Dozens of people watched from the Utah Department of Transportation’s hangar as Joby Aviation’s J208 aircraft touched down in Utah’s capitol. Although an safety pilot was onboard as a passenger in the aircraft to meet requirements from the Federal Aviation Administration, that pilot never input any controls himself, according to the aviation company.

These planes have already been used in military operations — along with the required onboard safety pilot — but Bonny Simi, Joby’s president of operations, said they will likely move to the “next stage” with the FAA — flying without an onboard pilot — sometime next year. It’s unclear when they could become commercially available in Utah.

“Utah has always been a place where innovation and big ideas can take flight,” UDOT Aeronautics Director Matt Maass said. “This supervised autonomous flight is more than a demonstration; it is helping to generate important data that will be used to inform safety standards, future infrastructure decisions and operating best practices for [advanced air mobility] deployment across Utah.”

Joby Aviation’s air taxis — which are fully electric and can fly one pilot along with four passengers — may have a much shorter runway.

Simi, who is also a three-time Olympian and former pilot who splits her time between California and Utah, said these aircraft will soar over Utah skies sometime between next year and the 2034 Olympics.

But they’ll take off first in New York sometime next year, and the goal is that they’ll become as cheap as a rideshare, she added.

“Initially it might be a little more, but even at launch [it] would be less than helicopters,” Simi said. “Helicopters are very very expensive to operate and such, and our aircraft [are] not that expensive to operate.”

Beyond transporting people, the new technology has other opportunities as well — such as increasing health care access for rural communities and helping with wildland fire response, Sen. Wayne Harper, R-Taylorsville, and Rep. Kay Christofferson, R-Lehi, said during Wednesday’s event.

“This is not meant to be some rich person’s thing,” Simi said. “This is meant to be transportation for everyone.”