Why Boeing is so keen to learn from Wisk’s little airplane

There was absolutely nothing coincidental to a chalet with a little yellow airplane sitting within maybe thirty meters of the Boeing MAX 10 near the static display of this week’s Farnborough Airshow. If there was anything that the maker of that airplane – Wisk – wanted to highlight at this airshow was the close ties with Boeing and vice versa. Because this new Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) vehicle on display is something Boeing hopes to learn a lot from in the near future. Why Boeing is so keen to learn from Wisk’s little airplane.

Wisk CEO Gary Gysin held two identical media briefings at Farnborough this week and was assisted by Brian Yutko, Boeing’s chief engineer and vice president of Sustainability and Future Mobility, whom we had seen before twice in the week talking about Boeing’s own Future of Flight

plans and at General Electric’s hybrid-electric update. “And I sit on the Board of Directors of Wisk”, he added.

The Wisk Cora on display in the chalet in Farnborough – and at the same time Down Under in Queensland-Australia – has actually served most of her role as a test airplane. The 21 feet long/36 feet wide two-seater eVTOL with twelve independent electric fans for lift and one propeller on the back is the fifth iteration of Wisk’s full-electric vehicle since 2011. Back then, Wisk was still called Kitty Hawk before it established a joint-venture with Boeing in 2019 and changed names.