Archer Aviation will assess how much of Wisk’s aircraft development and autonomous flight technology to adopt once its purchase of the Boeing subsidiary is complete, Archer CEO Adam Goldstein said during a late Monday earnings call.
Under the agreement, announced Monday morning, Archer is to acquire the electric air taxi company along with SkyGrid and Insitu, two other Boeing subsidiaries developing autonomous flight technology. The deal, the full terms of which were not disclosed, is slated to close at the end of the year, Archer said in a news release.
Archer’s near-term goals, Goldstein said, include receiving FAA type certification for its Midnight passenger air taxi. Another is developing the Thunder defense drone with Anduril, and the Halo commercial variant, both of which were announced in July.
All three aircraft programs will benefit from the autonomous technology in the works by Wisk, SkyGrid and Insitu, he noted. For instance, Insitu builds the ScanEagle long-endurance, low-altitude military drone for surveillance and reconnaissance.
“The air taxi will always be core to our mission. And Midnight is well on its way,” Goldstein said. But he added that the company will now “deploy and harden the technology on Halo/Thunder first and fold it into future iterations of the air taxi when the FAA is ready to certify autonomy.”
Midnight was designed for an on-board pilot, in contrast to the largely autonomous Gen 6 design Wisk has been test flying and displaying for the past several years. Goldstein did not mention Gen 6 during the call, and it was not referenced in Archer and Boeing’s statements about the deal.
“Archer had been focused on finding the most efficient path to commercialization, while Wisk focused on autonomy and advanced flight controls, and so there’s really nice overlap, but there’s also complementary aspects that make a lot of sense for these companies coming together. So there’s going to be an exploratory period to figure that out,” Goldstein said during the call.
Wisk was established in 2019 as a joint venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk, which was backed by Google founder Larry Page. Boeing bought out Kitty Hawk in 2023.
Boeing already had a stake in Archer as a result of a 2023 settlement that ended a lawsuit in which Wisk alleged Archer stole trade secrets.
After the acquisition, Boeing is to become Archer’s majority shareholder, capped at 19.75%, and will have options to buy $200 million in Archer stock, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
