Wisk announces first-of-its-kind partnership with NASA to create new framework for autonomous passenger flight

Wisk is team­ing up with NASA to focus on the safe inte­gra­tion of autonomous air­craft sys­tems into Urban Air Mobil­i­ty appli­ca­tions at a nation­al lev­el, which will also include con­duct­ing flight demos.

The part­ner­ship is the first of its kind and part of NASA’s Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty Nation­al Cam­paign strat­e­gy to devel­op key guid­ance for Urban Air Mobil­i­ty oper­a­tions, while address­ing key chal­lenges. These include cer­ti­fi­ca­tion and stan­dards devel­op­ment, in an effort to accel­er­ate U.S. lead­er­ship in emerg­ing auto­mat­ed avi­a­tion tech­nol­o­gy.  

Specif­i­cal­ly, it will ini­tial­ly address crit­i­cal Nation­al Cam­paign safe­ty sce­nar­ios with a focus on autonomous flight and con­tin­gency man­age­ment, includ­ing col­li­sion avoid­ance and flight path man­age­ment.

Com­ment­ing on the news, Gary Gysin, CEO of Wisk, said: “Our part­ner­ship with NASA will bring togeth­er our mar­ket-lead­ing exper­tise in auton­o­my with the unmatched tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties of NASA. The frame­works and rec­om­men­da­tions devel­oped through this col­lab­o­ra­tion will not only advance autonomous pas­sen­ger flight but also increase the over­all safe­ty of avi­a­tion.”

Through the part­ner­ship, NASA and Wisk intend to exe­cute on opti­mized oppor­tu­ni­ties to eval­u­ate archi­tec­tures, per­form sim­u­la­tion stud­ies, and devel­op an over­all val­i­da­tion frame­work that can be lever­aged for autonomous flight assess­ments.

This will be done in close coop­er­a­tion with indus­try stan­dards organ­i­sa­tions, and may include guid­ance on air­space struc­ture, flight pro­ce­dures, min­i­mum per­for­mance require­ments for par­tic­i­pat­ing air­craft, and stan­dards that will influ­ence the evo­lu­tion of autonomous sys­tems.

Robert Pearce, Asso­ciate Admin­is­tra­tor for NASA’s Aero­nau­tics Research Mis­sion Direc­torate, added: “Wisk brings a tremen­dous amount of expe­ri­ence in eVTOL vehi­cle devel­op­ment, automa­tion tech­nolo­gies, and flight test, and com­bines it with a safe­ty-first mind­set towards advanc­ing autonomous flight. NASA believes our part­ner­ship with Wisk will help accel­er­ate the real­i­sa­tion of excit­ing new Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty mis­sions.”

Wisk has been devel­op­ing and test­ing its all-elec­tric, self-fly­ing air­craft, Cora, since 2010. It has com­plet­ed more than 1,400 test flights as part of its effort to cre­ate flight-based solu­tions which address the grow­ing urban mobil­i­ty cri­sis in a way that is effec­tive, acces­si­ble, and sus­tain­able.

For more infor­ma­tion on Wisk, vis­it ​wisk.aero.​