On a Friday afternoon in October 2023, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) handed a small Guangzhou-based company a certificate that rewrote the rules of passenger flight. The EHang EH216-S became the world’s first unmanned electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft to receive a type certificate for carrying human passengers, authorising fully autonomous commercial air taxi operations without a pilot on board. EHang had been flying its autonomous aerial vehicles since 2017, conducting tens of thousands of test flights and refining a concept first unveiled as the EHang 184 at CES in 2016. The two-seat octocopter, directed by a central command centre and supervised by remote monitoring, has since carried passengers in demonstration flights across eighteen countries. The CAAC certification—achieved after more than 1,000 days of rigorous testing and the publication of special conditions for unmanned passenger vehicles—established a regulatory benchmark for the global Urban Air Mobility industry. Whether shuttling tourists over Dubai or connecting Chinese city centres, EHang’s certification proved that the skies of tomorrow need not be crowded with pilots; they can be navigated by algorithms, opening a new chapter in which the public hails an aircraft as easily as a car.