The legal team defending Archer Aviation against allegations of intellectual property theft made by rival eVTOL aircraft developer Wisk says that the plaintiff filed a patent application for its “sixth-generation” design in January 2020 only after it was made aware of Archer’s tilting rotor design. In a new filing with the federal court for the Northern District of California, Archer’s leadership team says that Wisk was made aware of its design by senior engineer Geoff Long following a recruitment meeting on Dec. 9, 2019.
In the filing, made late on June 23 in opposition to Wisk’s earlier motion for a preliminary injunction, Archer’s attorneys also cite testimony from its chief operating officer Tom Muniz that at the time he left Wisk he “was unaware of any development project or efforts by Wisk for a tilting rotor aircraft of any configuration.” They claim that after being told about Archer’s plans by Long, Wisk “quickly filed an application that included the very designs Archer had disclosed to Wisk.”
