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Boeing has assumed full ownership of eVTOL aircraft developer Wisk Aero, which has been run as a joint venture with Kitty Hawk, an advanced mobility start-up formed by Google co-founder Larry Page and Google executive Sebastian Thrun. Speaking at a media briefing in South Carolina on May 31, Wisk CEO Brian Yutko announced the change of ownership while not providing any details about financial terms for the transaction between Boeing and its former partners.
Kitty Hawk, which had been working on the Heaviside autonomous eVTOL vehicle, <a href="https://www.futureflight.aero/news-article/2022-09-22/kittyhawk-signals-its-imminent-exit-evtol-aircraft-innovation">closed down</a>&nbsp;in September 2022. At the time, Wisk said that the move did not impact its ownership and that Kitty Hawk’s backers would remain investors in its plans to bring a four-seat, passenger-carrying autonomous eVTOL vehicle to market later in this decade.
As a wholly owned subsidiary of the Boeing group, Wisk&nbsp;will continue to operate as an independent company with oversight by the Boeing board. A spokesman told&nbsp;FutureFlight that Boeing will continue to provide additional support through access to talent and expertise.&nbsp;
Boeing is now focusing most of its efforts to break into the <a href="https://www.futureflight.aero/news-article/2022-09-21/boeing-and-wisk-issue-concept-operations-urban-air-mobility">advanced air mobility sector</a> on Wisk, having made a<a href="https://www.futureflight.aero/news-article/2022-01-24/boeing-bets-big-evtols-450-million-funding-wisk-aero"> $450 million investment </a>in the company in early 2022. Its rival, Airbus, is developing its own four-passenger eVTOL aircraft called the CityAirbus NextGen.
In October 2022, Wisk unveiled what it describes as its <a href="https://www.futureflight.aero/news-article/2022-10-03/wisk-aero-unveils-four-seat-autonomous-evtol-air-taxi">sixth-generation eVTOL design</a> at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. The all-electric aircraft&nbsp;features 12 wing-mounted propellers, six of which tilt. Yutko told reporters that the projected range will be up to around 100 miles, which is slightly more than the 90 miles announced last year, with a cruise speed of 120 knots at altitudes between 2,500 and 4,000 feet.
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With earlier technology demonstrators, including the fifth-generation Cora vehicle, Wisk has made more than 1,600 test flights in California and New Zealand, where it has conducted some early development work. Yutko said the company now employs 700 people and collaborates closely with engineering teams from Boeing and its Aurora Flight Sciences subsidiary.
In early May, <a href="https://www.futureflight.aero/news-article/2023-05-09/wisk-and-japan-airlines-partner-bring-autonomous-air-taxi-flights-japan">Japan Airlines (JAL) signed a memorandum of understanding </a>with Wisk to jointly work to&nbsp;introduce air taxi flights to Japan. The carrier, which is the first to publicly partner with Wisk, has not committed to buying any of its eVTOL vehicles but is providing support in areas such as operations and maintenance. JAL has previously committed to adding Vertical Aerospace’s VX-4 four-passenger, piloted eVTOL vehicle to its fleet.
<h3 class="subheading">Autonomy or Bust Is Wisk's Path To Unlocking Advanced Air Mobility's Potential&nbsp;</h3>
Initially, Wisk intends to be the sole operator for its eVTOL aircraft as the company seeks to prove the <a href="https://www.futureflight.aero/news-article/2022-04-11/wisk-and-skyports-issue-concept-operations-autonomous-evtol-aircraft">viability of autonomous operations </a>for commercial passenger services. It has not yet set a timeline for type certification—in part, because the regulatory path to this is not yet fully defined—but Yutko indicated that the company expects to secure the required Part 135 operators certificate fairly soon.
According to Wisk, autonomy is critical to scaling up advanced air mobility services to unlock the cost structures that it and other pioneers believe could transform air transport. “There’s a misnomer in the industry that this is about removing the pilot,” he told reporters. “It’s not about that. That’s not actually where the value of autonomy comes from. It comes from ‘unconstraining’ the aircraft from what it has to carry.”
Giving the example of cargo operations, Yutko said that many aircraft are chronically underutilized. “They’ll fly out in the morning to a remote location and there they have to wait for an airworthy pilot and the cargo to be in the same place at the same time to bring it back to the hub,” he maintained. “If you were to unconstrain that system, you could move that aircraft around more to increase utilization, increase the flexibility of the network. So that’s what we see as the actual value in terms of scalability and improved economics of autonomy.”

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Commercial airliners and business jets may come in a variety of different sizes and models, but at a superficial level, they all tend to look essentially the same—so much that the average layperson can’t even tell them all apart. Even the newest models on the market still bear significant similarities to the earliest commercial airliners that were designed nearly a century ago. But that could soon change as aircraft designers turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to generate new designs.&nbsp;
Researchers are already using generative AI models to explore new ways to optimize aircraft design, Boeing’s chief technology officer Todd Citron said during a panel discussion at the Sustainable Aerospace Together Forum, which Boeing hosted near Seattle last week. With machine-learning algorithms, AI can assimilate just about everything there is to know about aerodynamics and engineering and quickly spew out a highly optimized design of its own—one that looks nothing like the airplanes humans have built in the past.&nbsp;
When humans design a structure, they tend to repeat existing patterns, Citron explained. For example, the truss structures that are common in bridges are the result of humans repeating a pattern that has been proven to work. The same has been true for most airplane designs over the past century. However, when AI is tasked with generating a design from scratch, it doesn’t necessarily follow the same patterns as human engineers. “Because [AI] can put more complexity into its electronic brain than a human can, it can optimize over a broader space,” Citron explained.&nbsp;
“If you look at the machine learning-optimized structures, they just look inherently different. They almost look like an alien spaceship, because they don't have that regular structure that makes it simpler for one human to do a design,” he said. “So, the look of the designs will change as we pull that in, and that's what we're doing today.” While Boeing isn’t necessarily going to replace its fleet with new “alien spaceships,” engineers can use the unique AI-generated designs to glean new insights and think outside the box when designing aircraft and their various components.&nbsp;
When asked how he imagined new airplanes will look in the year 2040, Citron said there will likely be some changes to the shape of the airframes and the engines. “You might notice that the wings are very thin, based on work [Boeing is] doing together with NASA to drive greater aerodynamic efficiency, which means fewer emissions,” Citron said. “The engines may look different, and you may see a large open-rotor fan that drives much higher efficiency and lower emissions. So, I think there's a number of technologies you're going to see in that timeframe.”
Kirsten Rose, executive director of future industries at CSIRO, Australia’s government science agency, agreed that airplanes will likely look very different by 2040. During the panel discussion, she said that new technologies—especially generative AI—could change design parameters “in ways that we're only now imagining.” The aerospace industry today is “only now understanding the capability for optimization, which will drive efficiency, for design parameters and things like that,” she said. “So, I think we'll start to see that play through absolutely in the design and the enhancements of existing and new aircraft.”
AI isn’t the only emerging technology that is shaping the way new aircraft are designed. Boeing and other manufacturers are now also leveraging <a href="https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2022-09-26/boeing-marks-opening-its-washington-additive-facility">additive manufacturing</a>, or 3-D printing technology, to create aircraft parts and tools more efficently. Between AI and new advancements in additive manufacturing, “you'll get even more interesting structures,” NASA chief technologist A.C. Charania said during the sustainability forum.&nbsp;
Citron added that additive manufacturing is much more sustainable than traditional or “subtractive” manufacturing, in which parts are made by carving out large blocks of raw materials—a process that creates a lot of waste. With subtractive manufacturing, “you're putting all this energy into removing material. By additive, it's adding material progressively. The energy savings is 50 percent&nbsp;or more, so inherent sustainability comes out of that.”
While new airplanes will be more efficient both to manufacture and to fly, perhaps the most important difference between the airplanes flying today and those we’ll see in 2040 won’t be a physical change that passengers will be able to see. Hopefully by that time, more flights will be running on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), or at least a blend of SAF and jet-A, the panelists agreed. Today SAF supplies are extremely limited, and it’s only available at a handful of airports worldwide. As the industry works to scale SAF production and build a supply chain, the conventional airplanes flying today as well as other new designs will be able to use the alternative fuel to cut back on carbon emissions.

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