After ups and downs, Boeing and Kitty Hawk reboot flying-car venture as Wisk

The partnership that Boeing and Google co-founder Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk venture forged to develop personal air vehicles has been reorganized and rebranded as a joint venture with a new name: Wisk.

• Kitty Hawk’s first electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle, known as Flyer, was more like a flying raft than a flying car. It’s designed to be flown over fresh water in uncongested areas. As reported by Forbes’ Jeremy Bogaisky, Flyer ran into troublesome snags that led Kitty Hawk to rethink how the project will proceed.

• Another type of eVTOL, dubbed Cora, has been undergoing flight tests in New Zealand. “The Cora team is now the foundation of Wisk,” the joint venture announced on its freshly minted website. Wisk is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with locations in Atlanta as well as New Zealand. Its CEO is Gary Gysin, who previously headed Liquid Robotics, a Boeing subsidiary.

• The Boeing influence can be seen in the composition of Wisk’s board, which includes executives from Boeing NeXt and Boeing HorizonX. It remains to be seen how Wisk will mesh with Boeing’s other efforts on the frontiers of air mobility — including its Aurora Flight Sciences subsidiary, its flying-car partnership with Porsche and its SkyGrid joint venture with SparkCognition. Kitty Hawk, meanwhile, has yet another flying-car project up its sleeve: Heaviside, a high-performance eVTOL.

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