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. These five Cora versions have done some 1.600 flights until now, Gysin said, the particular aircraft in Farnborough some 400 flights. He added: “Without accidents. I am very proud of that track record.” This fall, Wisk will unveil the sixth version of Cora, which is jointly developed with Boeing and with some 100 Boeing engineers that are on the joint development team. In total, Wisk’s workforce counts some 500. “Generation six will be four seats and will fly further and faster.” The fifth version of the Wisk Cora is an autonomous two-seater. Version six will have four seats. (Richard Schuurman) “The thing that we really like about Wisk is that they are legitimately on their fifth generation of these platforms”, said Boeing’s Yutko. “So when we started looking for who is really differentiated in this space, Wisk had done the first electric VTOL aircraft of this type. Wisk had done their first piloted transition of an aircraft of this type and Wisk routinely transitions these airplanes in a non-piloted way from vertical flight to forward flight, which to us is a differentiator. It is fairly easy to make an aircraft that will hover, it’s very easy to make something that takes off like a conventional airplane, but it is actually quite difficult to be able to routinely do vertical take-off and forward-flight transition.” When it lifts off, the Cora goes to 40 feet before moving into horizontal flight mode, a process that will take 25 seconds. In January, Boeing confirmed its $450 million investment in Wisk. “From our perspective from Boeing, there are two interesting things here. One is the incredible business opportunity that these aircraft represent from being able to fly from close to where people live and all sorts of interesting use-cases we can think of. Second, the technology that is going to be pioneered in developing an ultimately certifying the first passenger-carrying, autonomously flying aircraft is something that is also very interesting to us.” Boeing is looking at autonomous technology for some time Boeing has been looking for some years at autonomous technology, but it will take quite a few years before that is mastered and certified. Back at the 2017 Paris Airshow, Vice President of Product Development, Mike Sinnett, said that getting regulatory approval of flying autonomously will actually be the most difficult thing to get. Brian Yutko admits that nothing will be easy, as does Gysin. Yet, Wisk has always intended to go for an autonomously flying eVTOL concept. Gysin explained that, for now, autonomous flight means that people are still involved. “There are pilots in the loop, but they are on the ground and not in the aircraft. We are doing that from a number of different perspectives. One is from a safety perspective. People don’t know, but 93 percent of commercial aviation is automated already. There is very little that the pilot actually has to do, but regulations are designed around having a pilot in the cockpit, looking out of the windshield, and kind of finding targets. Which is incredibly inefficient and technology can do that job much better.” Once the Wisk is up at forty feet, the propeller takes over for horizontal flight. (Richard Schuurman) “All the technology for doing this exists today. We are flying defense missions every day with large aircraft that are fully autonomous. There is drone technology. We have been doing this since 2011 and did the first transition of flight back in 2014. We acknowledge that we may not be the first eVTOL in the market to fly, but we are driving to self-flying and autonomy.” No business case without self-flying On the operating costs, Gary Gysin said: “We don’t have the pilot training costs, we don’t have labor costs of having someone in the cabin. If the operating costs are lower, then our ability to charge our users less is greater and we have a higher ability to reach a mass market. We don’t want this to be a premium helicopter-like priced transport mode, we want his to be something like an Uber X-ish that even a university student can afford.” Gysin added: “It is hard to have a business case and make money in this business without self-flying. It is too expensive.” “Safety is one, operating costs are two”, said Gysin, who acknowledges that Wisk will have to prove the safety of the concept to the regulators. “We have to show that this technology is actually safer than a piloted mode of transportation.” And not just to the regulators, but also to the public. “There is an emotional belief that without a pilot, it can’t be safe. Educating the logical side of it and the data side of it and showing that this is actually a safer way to go.” Wisk has created a dedicated software tool that will help it develop all aspects of eVTOL operations, including how to engage with local communities. (Richard Schuurman) Engaging with communities Wisk has done a study into public acceptance and many other social aspects of AAMs, which it released earlier in July. Called SCOPE, which stands for “Simulation, Coordination, Optimization, Planning, and Engagement”, it’s actually a software architecture that helps it amongst others to “support partner engagement with cities, local governments, and local communities, provide guidance on the development of AAM infrastructure, inform route and network planning recommendations.” The SCOPE tool can also help Wisk with internal strategic business decisions, engineering strategy, and Concept of Operations (ConOps) development. “Using the SCOPE platform, Wisk can simulate millions of real-world trips and model travel behavior in metropolitan areas across the world, while measuring the impact of AAM integration into the transportation network”, the study says. All UAM start-ups acknowledge that getting public acceptance for this new transport mode has to be won, in one region more than in the other. People might perceive eVTOLs and noise, but that’s not correct, says Gysin: “This is much different than a helicopter. If you will ever hear electric aircraft flying, it is incredibly quiet. It will be like the ambient noise of a highway that is a mile away. You will not have to pause your discussions and let us take off. The burden is on us to work with communities to show how safe they are and really learn and understand and integrate with the communities, instead of saying: ‘Hey, we are going to start flying from rooftops tomorrow.” Long Beach set to become the launch city Once Wisk will enter service, it plans to roll out in twenty cities in the US, Australia, and New Zealand in the first five years. Gysin made a slip of the tongue when he said that Wisk had announced to launch in Long Beach, but the spokesperson added that Wisk hasn’t actually officially shared where it will be launching. A few elements from customer feedback will be incorporated in the sixth version of Cora. “Every passenger will have a screen and will be able to see the route that we are flying, and how much time is left in the flight. And we also heard from customer research that passengers want to be able to talk to the operator on the ground if they want to. So people will be wearing headsets and can ask questions, so there is always that direct line of communication with the people on the ground.” Don’t take the people on the ground by mistake as those who kind-off remotely control the Cora, says Gysin. “Think of the ground control crew more like air traffic control. They are all watching consoles, they will only intervene if there is something going wrong or an emergency and they have to take the flight route. There is no stick, they aren’t actively piloting, they are watching the telemetry, but they can control.” Brian Yutko added: “The question is for the pilot on the ground: what level of authority will they have if and when they do step in in a contingency scenario. That level of authority won’t be a sticking rudder. So they are not going to fly this airplane like it is in a video game, but they will be able to choose from automated contingency scenarios. That’s ultimately key to making the system safety case work because it isn’t just about what we put on the airplane, it is how you assemble the full ecosystem of all the different sensing and participants within that ecosystem to ultimately close the system safety case.”
