Wisk Completes First Flight of Generation 6 Autonomous eVTOL

Business

Wisk Completes First Flight of Generation 6 Autonomous eVTOL

2025-12-17 04:26 Last Updated At：16:11

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec 16, 2025--

Wisk Aero, an autonomous aviation company, today announced the successful completion of the first flight of its Generation 6 aircraft. The flight is a pivotal step forward in Wisk’s journey to deliver the first certified, autonomous passenger-carrying eVTOL to market in the U.S. Wisk is the only company to have designed, built, and flown six generations of eVTOL aircraft.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251216656442/en/

The aircraft performed its initial vertical takeoff, hover, and stabilized flight maneuvers at Wisk’s flight test facility in Hollister, CA. This success validates the aircraft’s core flight systems and is a critical first step in an extensive testing campaign. This Generation 6 aircraft is the subject of Wisk’s type certification application and ongoing certification project.

Leveraging learnings from Wisk’s previous five generations of aircraft and more than 1,750 test flights, Gen 6 is the first-ever candidate for an FAA-certified commercial autonomous passenger aircraft in the U.S., with launch markets including Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami. This first hover flight is a pivotal moment in Wisk’s journey to bring safe, autonomous flight to market.

“This first flight is the moment our team has been working toward, and it is a powerful demonstration of the work, expertise, and commitment that have gone into the Gen 6 program,” said Wisk CEO Sebastien Vigneron. “Seeing Gen 6 take flight is an exciting moment for Wisk and the future of aviation. It reaffirms our belief in autonomy, and we are even more energized to continue the journey to bring safe, everyday flight to everyone.”

“We are excited to see Wisk achieve this milestone, and I’m so proud of the team that made it possible,” said Brian Yutko, VP of Product Development at Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Chairman of the Board at Wisk. “The team at Wisk has built advanced technologies across flight controls, sensing, navigation, mission management, electric power, systems integration, and many others for a product that is designed to meet a rigorous safety case for a focused concept of operations. The engineering methods and technologies are all a valuable source of insight for Boeing as we work together and thoughtfully apply them to the future of flight.”

Wisk aircraft are all-electric and autonomous, with dedicated human oversight from a ground-based Multi-Vehicle Supervisor—a pioneering model Wisk believes is key to achieving high levels of safety, scalability, and affordability. Wisk has an active certification program with the FAA and is designing its aircraft to meet or exceed today’s rigorous commercial aviation safety standards.

With the successful first hover flight completed, Wisk is now executing a rigorous flight test program focused on safely validating the Gen 6 design, simulation models, and system performance. The initial phase of testing will focus on building out the hover regime, concentrating on takeoffs, landings, and low-speed stability before expanding to higher speeds and altitudes, including complex maneuvers such as longitudinal transition, lateral translation, and pedal turns. Each test provides crucial data to verify our control laws, structural loads, and aircraft dynamics, allowing for refinement as needed.

In parallel, Wisk continues to mature its autonomy technologies, including detect-and-avoid and navigation systems, and is collaborating closely with the FAA, NASA, SkyGrid, and others to build a more efficient airspace. With the achievement of Gen 6 first flight, Wisk is advancing on its mission to deliver a new mode of transportation that will not only strengthen the U.S.’s leadership in aviation but also make aviation safer around the world.

About Wisk

Wisk, a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing, is an autonomous aviation company dedicated to creating a future for air travel that elevates people, communities, and aviation. Learn more about Wisk at wisk.aero.

A look at the UK's Royal Navy, which has faced jibe after jibe from Trump and Hegseth

LONDON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been damning of the U.K.'s naval capabilities. Their jibes may have stung in a country with a long and proud maritime history, but they do carry some substance.

The U.K. has been at the forefront of Trump’s ire since the onset of the Iran war on Feb. 28, when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to grant the U.S. military access to British bases.

Though that decision has been partly reversed with the decision to permit the U.S. to use the bases, including that of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, for so-called defensive purposes, Trump is adamant he was let down. He has repeatedly lashed out at Starmer and branded the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers as “toys.”

“You don’t even have a navy,” he told Britain's Daily Telegraph in comments published Wednesday. "You’re too old and had aircraft carriers that didn’t work.”

Hegseth, meanwhile, said sarcastically that the “big, bad Royal Navy” should get involved in making the Strait of Hormuz safe for commercial shipping.

For numerous reasons, the Royal Navy is not as big and bad as it used it to be when Britannia ruled the waves. But it's not as feeble as Trump and Hegseth imply and is largely similar with the French navy, which it is often compared with.

“On the negative side, there is a grain of truth, with the Royal Navy being smaller than it has been in hundreds of years,” said professor Kevin Rowlands, editor of the Royal United Services Institute Journal. “On the positive side, the Royal Navy would say that it’s entering its first period of growth since World War II, with more ships set to be built than in decades.”

It’s not that long ago that Britain could muster a task force of 127 ships, including two aircraft carriers, to sail to the south Atlantic after Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. That 1982 campaign, which then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan was lukewarm about, marked the final hurrah of Britain’s naval pedigree.

Nothing on that scale, or even remotely, could be accomplished now. Since World War II, Britain’s combat-ready fleet has declined substantially, much of it linked to changing military and technological advances and the end of empire. But not all.

The number of vessels in the Royal Navy fleet, including aircraft carriers, destroyers frigates and submarines has fallen from 166 in 1975 to 66 in 2025, according to The Associated Press' analysis of figures from the Ministry of Defense and the House of Commons Library.

Though the Royal Navy has two aircraft carriers at its command, there was a seven-year period in the 2010s when it had none. And the number of destroyers has halved to six while the frigate fleet has been slashed from 60 to just 11.

The Royal Navy faced criticism for the time it took to send the HMS Dragon destroyer to the Middle East after the war with Iran broke out. Though naval officials worked night and day to get it shipshape for a different mission than the one it was readying for, to many it symbolized the extent to which Britain’s military has been gutted since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

For much of the Cold War, Britain was spending between 4% and 8% of its annual national income on its military. After the Cold War, that proportion steadily dropped to a low of 1.9% of GDP in 2018, fuel to Trump's fire.

Like other countries, Britain, largely under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, sought to use the so-called “peace dividend” following the collapse of the Soviet Union to divert money earmarked for defense to other priorities, such as health and education.

And the austerity measures imposed by the Conservative-led government in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-9 prevented any pickup in defense spending despite the clear signs of a resurgent Russia, especially after its annexation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine.

In the wake of Russia's full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and with another Middle East war underway, there's a growing understanding across the political divide that the cuts have gone too far.

Following the Ukraine invasion, the Conservatives started to turn the military spending tide around. Since the Labour Party returned to power in 2024, Starmer is seeking to ramp up British defense spending, partly at the cost of cutting the country's long-vaunted aid spending.

Starmer has promised to raise U.K. defense spending to 2.5% of gross domestic product by 2027, and the updated goal is now for it to rise to 3.5% of GDP by 2035, as part of a NATO agreement pushed by Trump. That, in plain terms, will mean tens of billions pounds more being spent — a lot more kit for the armed forces.

The pressure is on for the government to speed that schedule up. But with the public finances further imperilled by the economic consequences of the Iran war, it's not clear where any additional money will come.

The jibes will likely keep coming even though the critiques are unfair and far from the truth, said RUSI's Rowlands, who was a captain in the Royal Navy.

“We are dealing with an administration that doesn’t do nuance," he said.

This story has been corrected to show there were 166 vessels in 1975, not 466.