Wisk, Boeing Sued over eVTOL Software Safety Claims

A former Wisk Aero software engineering manager is suing California-based eVTOL developer Wisk and parent company Boeing in Santa Clara County Superior Court, alleging that she was fired for reporting that the company’s autonomous air taxi software failed basic aviation safety testing requirements.

Wisk is developing a pilotless, four-passenger eVTOL aircraft it intends to certify and bring into commercial service by 2030. Briahna O’Neill, the plaintiff, led software integration for the aircraft’s vehicle management system (VMS), the software that controls its flight and navigation.

Her complaint, filed June 29, alleges that the VMS software contained known defects and lacked basic verification steps—including unit testing and root-cause analysis—required under DO-178C, the FAA-recognized standard for aviation software. She says Wisk leadership pressed her team to cut testing further to preserve a first-flight deadline for the company’s sixth-generation aircraft. That deadline was May 2025. Wisk’s Gen 6 aircraft did not fly until December, seven months later.

O’Neill was fired on March 31, 2025, 12 days after formally reporting her concerns through Wisk’s internal safety-reporting system and 10 days after raising them directly with the company’s head of safety, according to the filing. A Wisk spokesperson declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

In a statement to The Seattle Times, O’Neill said, “I spent years at Wisk believing in the company’s mission and in the future of this technology…When I raised safety concerns to the company, I did so because I believed it was the right thing to do, not just for myself but for every passenger who would one day fly with this technology.”

“Wisk’s response was not one of accountability,” she added. “It was retaliation.”

The Software Dispute

The safety complaint centers on the DO-178C standard, which requires thorough verification processes such as unit testing and root-cause analysis of defects before software can fly.

O’Neill’s team began integrating Wisk’s ground control software with the VMS in 2024 and found the VMS software contained “spaghetti code”—a term software engineers use to describe code that is disorganized to the point of being difficult to test or fix, according to the complaint. The team responsible for it, led by senior director of avionics and onboard autonomy Steve Alwin, had allegedly not performed any unit testing. By January 2025, the VMS carried roughly 1,200 known defects, compared with 12 to 15 in the ground control software O’Neill’s team had built, the complaint states.

Assigned in December 2024 to lead integration testing ahead of Gen 6’s planned May 2025 first flight, O’Neill proposed a testing timeline that chief technology officer Jim Tighe allegedly declined to authorize. The dispute escalated in March 2025, when Alwin told her Wisk didn’t have “the luxury of waiting another two weeks.” 

Head of aircraft development Guillaume Beauchamp allegedly proposed hiring 100 new engineers and running extra shifts through the weekend to accelerate the schedule—an offer O’Neill characterized to a colleague as compressing months of remaining work into a single evening. Alwin ultimately decided the team would test less to hold the May deadline.

On March 19, O’Neill filed a formal safety report, stating that the testing cuts violated DO-178C. She was fired 12 days later, on March 31; her manager cited an “environment that hinders collaboration” and “program delays.” 

The complaint frames the firing as retaliation under California Labor Code sections 1102.5, the state’s whistleblower protection statute, and 6310, which bars retaliation against employees who report unsafe working conditions.

Certification under Pressure

This software testing dispute has come to light at a critical time for Wisk. The Boeing subsidiary is one of eight projects recently selected for the U.S. eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP), which allows participants to conduct limited commercial operations ahead of full type certification.

Dan Dalton, then Wisk’s vice president of commercialization and airline development, told AIN in April that the company is “actively looking at what those commercial opportunities could look like” under the program, and he did not rule out passenger flights on the Gen 6 aircraft within the program’s three-year window.

Beauchamp, the same executive the complaint says pushed to compress the testing schedule, described the current Gen 6 prototypes to AIN in March as “company conforming” rather than built to the additional oversight and documentation required for FAA-conforming aircraft. 

Wisk CEO Sebastien Vigneron has said publicly that the eIPP is meant to ensure “the regulatory environment is as ready as our aircraft” by the time Wisk launches commercial service.

Undisclosed Incidents

O’Neill’s complaint describes two flight-testing incidents that Wisk hasn’t addressed publicly. In April 2022, according to the filing, a fifth-generation prototype called Cora nearly collided with a hangar structure during testing; days later, the same aircraft veered off the runway after landing. 

Wisk’s internal safety team investigated both incidents and attributed them to schedule pressure and inadequate coordination, warning in its report that the company had developed a “normalization of deviance,” the complaint states.

Separately, the complaint alleges that the City of Fremont ordered a Wisk facility to cease operations in 2025 over code violations including fire hazards, seismic risks, and inadequate electrical safety.

A Wisk spokesperson declined to comment to AIN on the Fremont shutdown, the near-collision, or any other allegations made in the complaint, citing the pending litigation.

O’Neill’s complaint also includes claims of gender discrimination and retaliation tied to her pregnancy and maternity leave, which she took in 2023. She alleges that Wisk delayed her promotion for months after a less-qualified male colleague was advanced ahead of her, and cites the case of a male director who cursed at then-CEO Gary Gysin in 2022 and was encouraged to seek anger management support rather than disciplined, which she contrasts with her own termination after raising workplace concerns.

A Familiar Pattern at Boeing

Wisk’s alleged safety-versus-schedule culture seems to mirror problems at Boeing, which took full control of Wisk in May 2023 after buying out Kitty Hawk, the firm’s only other shareholder.

The 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people, were ultimately traced to MCAS, a flight control software system that relied on a single sensor input and could push the aircraft into an unrecoverable dive. A subsequent FAA investigation found that Boeing engineers had faced pressure from managers to limit safety analysis and testing to meet production schedules and hold down costs.

Boeing’s safety troubles resurfaced in January 2024, when a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9 in flight, prompting another FAA-ordered overhaul of the company’s safety and quality processes. The Max 7, Max 10, and 777X certification programs remain delayed.

O’Neill alleged that Boeing exercises “significant control” over Wisk as a joint employer, and that roughly a quarter of Wisk’s workforce as of July 2025 consisted of Boeing employees “on loan.” The complaint names several Boeing personnel as having decision-making authority over Wisk’s staffing and technical direction.

Wisk has not said whether the software issues described in the complaint have since been resolved. The company’s Gen 6 flight-test program isn’t waiting for an answer. A third prototype is expected to join the fleet before certification, Beauchamp told AIN in March. Wisk maintains that it is on track to enter commercial service by 2030, under a regulatory framework that could allow some of that flying to happen before full type certification is complete.

A case management conference in O’Neill’s lawsuit is scheduled for December 2 in Santa Clara County Superior Court.