Joby Aviation, a company developing electric air taxis for commercial passenger service, has announced the acquisition of the autonomy division of Xwing Inc., an industry pioneer in autonomous aviation technology.
Founded in 2016, Xwing has been flying autonomous aircraft since 2020, utilising the Superpilot software it developed in-house. Superpilot enables safe, uncrewed operations, supervised from the ground, and is the world’s first fully autonomous gate-to-gate flight technology. With 250 fully autonomous flights and more than 500 auto-landings completed to date, Xwing became the first company to receive an official project designation for the certification of a large unmanned aerial system (UAS) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 2023 and the first to receive an Air Force Military Flight Release in 2024.
The acquisition propels Joby to the forefront of aviation autonomy and complements the company’s 2021 acquisition of Inras GmbH, a company developing lightweight, high-performance radar sensor technology. Xwing’s comprehensive approach, and expertise in perception technology, system integration, and certification, is expected to benefit both near-term piloted operations for Joby as well as fully autonomous operations in the future. The company also anticipates that the technology will play an important role in accelerating the execution of existing contract deliverables with the U.S. Department of Defense and expanding the potential for future contracts.
