There are more solutions than obstacles. Nicolas Zart.
From certification milestones and emergency response pilots to hybrid propulsion breakthroughs and Robinson’s unmanned pivot, AAM’s spring 2026 is dense with signal — here’s how to read it.
By Nicolas Zart · March 19, 2026
There are more solutions than obstacles. That’s been my running thesis in this space for over two decades, and the past two weeks have given me more reason to believe it than almost any comparable stretch of news I can remember — if you know where to look.
Set aside for a moment the Joby-versus-Archer legal saga, more in depth analysis on Patreon, that continues churning through federal court. The industry that actually matters — the one building hardware, testing systems, earning certifications, deploying aircraft for real missions — is moving at a pace that would have seemed ambitious three years ago. Let’s talk about that.
Here is a snapshot of what’s happening across the AAM ecosystem right now, and what it means, in time for your weekend catch up enjoyment.
Beta Technologies: The Quiet Leader Keeps Executing
If you want to understand what disciplined, pragmatic advancement looks like in this industry, watch Beta Technologies.
The Vermont-based company has announced that its H500A electric engine propulsion certification program is on track for FAA type certification in the first half of 2026. That’s not a projection — it’s a confirmed milestone trajectory. In its Q4 2025 earnings release, CEO Kyle Clark summarized a year that included crossing 100,000 nautical miles flown across the Alia CTOL and VTOL test fleet, with the CX300 carrying the bulk of that distance given the simple physics reality that conventional takeoff aircraft cover ground faster than a vehicle doing a lot of slow, vertical-phase flying.
The certification path Beta has chosen is to first certify the Hartzell propeller, then the H500A electric engine — in progress. Finally, it will certify the Alia CX300 eCTOL aircraft — targeting late 2026 or early 2027. Then certify the Alia A250 VTOL, roughly 12 months after that. Because about 80% of components are shared between the eCTOL and eVTOL variants — the wing, fuselage, avionics, pusher motor — the regulatory pathway to the VTOL should be materially simpler than starting from scratch.
Clark has puts it plainly: the strategy is designed not just to win the certification race, but to take a more pragmatic path aligned with what the FAA actually expects and can process.
Beta closed 2025 with a civil aircraft backlog of 891 aircraft worth approximately $3.5 billion, including 289 firm orders. It was selected to supply electric motors to Eve Air Mobility under a 10-year arrangement worth up to $1 billion. It’s in seven of eight eIPP launch programs. And it’s deploying Alia eCTOL and eVTOL aircraft for cargo, medical logistics, organ delivery, offshore operations, and passenger missions across at least 10 states.
Beta’s strategy isn’t just to win the certification race — it’s to take the most pragmatic path aligned with what the FAA actually expects.
This is not a company chasing headlines. It’s a company building an industry. The contrast with the litigation-dominant portion of the sector is hard to miss.
Vertical Aerospace and the Valo: A European Contender Makes Its American Case
We met most of the team at Verticon 2026 in Atlanta and found that Stuart Simpson doesn’t talk like most eVTOL executives. He talks like a CFO who looked at an industry full of people saying what investors wanted to hear, decided that wasn’t sustainable, and bet his career on a different approach.
In a February 2026 interview with Aviation Week, the Vertical Aerospace CEO laid out his case for why operators will prefer Valo — the company’s redesigned aircraft unveiled in December 2025 in London. The reaction to the unveiling, Simpson said, was immediate and striking: the company was inundated with inbound calls from customers and operators who described the aircraft as redefining the sector.
What’s being sold is flexibility. Valo can be configured for four premium business-class seats at launch or six economy seats, giving operators real choices about their economics and passenger experience from day one. That optionality matters in an industry where the operating economics of air taxis remain genuinely uncertain.
Vertical has also been building out its hybrid powertrain program, which Simpson says began about 18 months into his tenure after he found room within the cash envelope to kick it off. The hybrid system already has a bench-validated powertrain with 1,000-mile range, 1,200-kilogram mass, and 3,000-pound payload capability. The low heat and noise signatures have potential implications that extend well beyond commercial urban air mobility — defense markets are paying attention.
The company completed its third and final full-scale prototype in December 2025, doubling flight test capacity and setting up for piloted transition flight in 2026. It has approximately 1,500 pre-orders across American Airlines, Bristow, GOL, and Japan Airlines. It is reporting its full-year 2025 results on March 24th.
And through all of it, Vertical is also one of Archer’s litigation targets — a company now defending itself in federal patent proceedings while simultaneously pushing its certification program forward. Simpson’s team has called Archer’s legal action an attempt to distract from Archer’s own competitive challenges. Two separate companies, in two separate cases, appear to have independently arrived at the same read of Archer’s motivations.
Wisk Rolls Out Its Second Gen 6 Prototype — And the Autonomy Case Gets Stronger
On March 17, Boeing’s Wisk Aero rolled out the second flight-test example of its sixth-generation autonomous eVTOL, registered as N607WA. First flight is expected within weeks.
We say the 6th generation fly at Oshkosh 2023 and to date, Wisk is has designed, built, and flown six generations of eVTOL aircraft, accumulating over 1,750 test flights across those generations. The Gen 6 completed its first untethered hover in December 2025 at Wisk’s facility in Hollister, California — and now a second aircraft is ready to join the program, which targets its first full transition flight later in 2026.
The transition flight — from hover to forward flight — is the defining capability milestone for an eVTOL program. It’s where the aircraft proves it can do what an air taxi actually needs to do. Once that box is checked, the testing trajectory shifts fundamentally.
What makes Wisk strategically distinct from every other major player is its autonomous-first philosophy, something it has been steadfast from the get go. Designed to carry four passengers and managed by a ground-based Multi-Vehicle Supervisor, Wisk’s argument is that autonomy is not just a feature, it’s the only path to the scalability and affordability that urban air mobility ultimately requires. You cannot staff every air taxi with a type-rated pilot and still make the economics work at meaningful scale.
Wisk has been selected for the eIPP program and may fly helicopters first to collect real-world operational data before transitioning to the Gen 6 for live airspace demonstrations. The program is targeting commercial launch cities including Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles. The timeline to commercial certification extends to later in the decade, but Wisk’s technical foundation — Boeing backing, six generations of aircraft, an active certification project with the FAA — is more mature than most.
Wisk’s bet: you cannot staff every air taxi with a type-rated pilot and make the economics work at scale. Autonomy isn’t a feature — it’s the only viable path.
The Middle Mile Gets Serious: Hybrid eVTOLs and the Logistics Opportunity
The air taxi narrative tends to dominate AAM coverage, but the fascinating fight is within the commercially immediate opportunity cargo space. This is the notorious inefficiency of the middle mile between large freight hubs and final-mile van delivery where improvements can be made.
The growing hybrid eVTOL foray targeting this gap has ramped up its activities. Whereas pure-electric range limitations constrain passenger air taxi economics, this becomes less relevant when you’re designing for 300-pound payloads over 300-mile routes over 60-mile urban hops. Hybrid propulsion removes the dependency on high-power charging infrastructure at every stop and dramatically expands operational flexibility in remote or disrupted environments.
MightyFly is among the companies making this case most explicitly. The San Francisco-based company closed a $10 million funding round in February 2026, bringing total funding to $15 million. Its autonomous hybrid eVTOL platform is designed for 100 to 500-pound payloads over 600 to 1,000 miles, with multiple stops within a single route. The company has completed over 400 autonomous flights across three full-scale aircraft and holds a Special Airworthiness Certificate. It has generated over $1 million in revenue and holds letters of intent and contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in total if fulfilled.
Elroy Air‘s Chaparral — the only purpose-built heavy-payload cargo drone selected for the eIPP — is another data point here. Its hybrid-electric architecture allows it to deliver 300 pounds over 300 miles, operating primarily in the Gulf Coast for the Louisiana-led eIPP project alongside Bristow Group. The cargo-first approach also carries a regulatory advantage: freight operations face fewer hurdles than passenger flights, meaning these companies can generate revenue and build operational credibility before the certification process for passenger operations is complete.
The through-line across these programs is that hybrid propulsion is evolving from an aviation curiosity to a genuine commercial architecture — particularly for missions where range and payload matter more than the zero-emission story that drives urban passenger air taxi marketing.
Pivotal in Hyde County: The First Real eVTOL Public Safety Deployment
On March 6th, Pivotal announced something the industry has been working toward since its earliest days: the first deployment of eVTOL technology for active public safety operations.
The Ways We Move speaks to Pivotal
The company, Pivotal — maker of the Helix ultralight eVTOL, FAA Part 103-compliant and the most mature technology in the light eVTOL and civilian powered-lift categories — announced a proof-of-concept project with Hyde County Emergency Services in North Carolina and Code Blue Resources. Flight-trained paramedics, serving as volunteer pilots, will deploy Pivotal aircraft to provide rapid medical care directly at high-acuity emergency scenes.
Hyde County is Outer Coastal Plain terrain — rural, dispersed, subject to the full range of geographic and infrastructure challenges that make ground EMS response slow. The county handles approximately 1,000 emergency calls per year. For EMS in that context, an aircraft that can take off vertically from virtually any surface, requires no runway, needs no traditional pilot license (though operators complete Pivotal’s rigorous in-house certification program), and can deliver a paramedic faster than any road vehicle is not a technology demonstration — it’s a genuine operational tool.
The program will also extend beyond EMS response into law enforcement support, fire response, and emergency management operations. Incident damage assessment following natural disasters or mass casualty events is an obvious application, and one where the overhead perspective an eVTOL provides has immediate, practical value.
Pivotal CEO Ken Karklin called this a definitive milestone for advanced air mobility — the first time eVTOL technology is being deployed to support active public safety operations. He’s right. And the significance extends beyond Hyde County: this is the template for how light eVTOL technology enters the public sector, builds a track record, and demonstrates the value proposition that eventually unlocks broader institutional adoption.
For the first time, eVTOL technology is being deployed to support active public safety operations. This is the template for institutional adoption.
Robinson Goes Unmanned: Legacy Aviation’s Most Significant Autonomy Pivot
On March 10th at Verticon in Atlanta, Robinson Helicopter Company announced the establishment of Robinson Unmanned — a new business unit dedicated to remotely piloted and autonomous aircraft spanning from small Group 1 drones to large helicopter-based UAS platforms.
This is a more significant announcement than it may appear. Robinson is the world’s leading manufacturer of civilian rotorcraft — over five decades of vertically integrated manufacturing, with the R22, R44, and R66 as the backbone of helicopter flight training and utility operations worldwide. When Robinson decides that the future of vertical flight requires a full-spectrum autonomous capability, that’s not a startup making a bet. That’s a market leader reading its customer base and responding.
The structure of Robinson Unmanned brings together Ascent AeroSystems (the coaxial drone subsidiary Robinson acquired in 2024) with new autonomous variants of the R44 and R66 helicopters, powered by strategic agreements with Rotor Technologies and Sikorsky. The flagship product revealed at Verticon was the R66 Turbinetruck — an autonomous cargo helicopter that integrates Sikorsky’s proven MATRIX autonomy suite into the R66 airframe. MATRIX has been validated across 21 aircraft types with over 1,000 hours of operational data, from small drones to strategic airlift platforms.
The Turbinetruck is designed for defense logistics and operations in contested environments: internal and external cargo, rapid loading through a nose-mounted clamshell door, and autonomous mission execution via the MATRIX tablet interface. Robinson is targeting first flight in early 2027. Useful load is 1,500 pounds.
The R44 Airtruck (heavy-lift cargo using Rotor Technologies’ RPX autonomy) and R44 Sprayhawk (precision agricultural application) round out the larger platform portfolio. Small UAS from Ascent — the Helius nano, the Spirit surveillance drone, and the Spartan extended-endurance platform — provide Group 1 and 2 coverage.
CEO David Smith described this as Robinson entering the ‘Era of Both’ — the seamless integration of human intuition and machine precision. It’s a clean framing of a real shift: the most reliable and high-volume rotorcraft airframes in the world, now being offered as open-architecture autonomous platforms that any autonomy developer can build on. Robinson is positioning itself as the airframe equivalent of a developer toolkit for large autonomous vertical lift.
Collins Aerospace and the SWITCH Project: Hybrid Propulsion for the Next Narrowbody
On March 16th, Collins Aerospace announced the beginning of initial testing of the electric motor drive systems for the EU Clean Aviation SWITCH project at its advanced electric power systems lab in Rockford, Illinois — a facility the company calls ‘The Grid.’
What’s being tested: two 1MW-class motor-generators, their controllers, and the power distribution systems that will ultimately be integrated into a hybrid-electric Pratt & Whitney PW1100G geared turbofan engine. The motors were designed and built at Collins’ Solihull, UK facility. Power distribution components came from Nordlingen, Germany. GKN Aerospace built the high-voltage electrical wiring in Papendrecht, Netherlands. This is a genuinely pan-European industrial consortium, funded by EU Clean Aviation and led by MTU Aero Engines.
The project’s goal — a 20% fuel burn reduction by hybridizing the PW1100G — matters because the PW1100G powers the Airbus A320neo family, which is among the most numerous narrowbody platforms in commercial aviation. Demonstrating hybrid-electric technology on that engine family is not a research exercise; it’s a direct pathway to emissions reductions at the scale of the global commercial fleet.
The technical achievement being validated at The Grid is not trivial. Collins’ 1MW motor delivers four times the power of the company’s most advanced electric motor generators currently in flight, at twice the voltage, with half the heat loss and half the weight. By the end of 2026, the SWITCH project aims to have taken the full hybrid propulsion system to Technology Readiness Level 5 through full-scale ground testing — with a potential follow-on phase to flight demonstration if EU funding is secured.
For the AAM sector specifically, the significance of Collins’ work is indirect but real: every advance in electric motor technology at this power level and weight profile expands the design space for the next generation of hybrid eVTOL and regional electric aircraft. The megawatt-class motor is not just a component for an airliner program. It’s infrastructure for an electrified aviation future.
Eight Projects Cleared to Fly, and a City Called Atlanta Starts Paying Attention
On March 9th, the U.S. Department of Transportation and FAA announced the eight projects selected for the inaugural eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) — a nationwide initiative that will put electric aircraft into real commercial airspace, including Class B and C airports with active air traffic control, before those aircraft have received full FAA type certification. Operational flights are targeted for summer 2026.
The selected aircraft span the full range of what this industry has built: Archer’s Midnight for urban passenger hops, Joby’s S4 for longer-range air taxi missions, Beta‘s Alia in both eCTOL and eVTOL variants for cargo and medical logistics, Wisk’s Gen 6 for autonomous demonstration, Electra‘s EL9 for short-field regional operations, Elroy Air’s Chaparral for autonomous heavy cargo, and Reliable Robotics’ autonomy platform for commercial freight.
The program covers 26 states. Beta is in seven of eight projects. The geographic breadth — from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf Coast to the Rocky Mountain medical logistics corridors — reflects a deliberate decision to test across the full range of environments and use cases the industry will eventually need to serve.
At Verticon in Atlanta — held at the Georgia World Congress Center from March 10 to 12 — executives from Eve Air Mobility and Vertical Aerospace laid out the case for why cities like Atlanta represent exactly the markets this technology is designed for. Eve’s Chief Commercial Officer Megha Bhatia, whom we reconnected with a Verticon 2026, said the company’s aircraft could begin operating in U.S. cities as early as late 2027, pending certification. Vertical’s team described the Valo’s noise profile — roughly the volume of a loud conversation during takeoff and landing, dropping to dishwasher-level sound in cruise — as critical to community acceptance and municipal adoption.
The framing from both companies: air taxis will start as premium transportation, analogous to executive car services, and scale toward ride-hailing economics as production grows and battery technology improves. That’s the same trajectory every disruptive transportation technology has followed, and the data from the eIPP will determine how quickly the cost curve moves.
Atlanta matters as a test case precisely because it’s not New York or Los Angeles. It’s a fast-growing, geographically sprawling city with severe traffic congestion, a world-class airport, and no meaningful urban rail network to speak of. If urban air mobility can make the case in Atlanta, it can make it anywhere in the American Sun Belt — and the Sun Belt is where the population growth is happening.
The Through-Line
There are more solutions than obstacles. That framing isn’t optimism for its own sake — it’s what the evidence actually supports, if you’re willing to look past the litigation headlines.
In the past two weeks alone: Beta continues its methodical march to certification with a propulsion system on track for type approval in the first half of 2026. Vertical Aerospace is on a U.S. tour with a redesigned aircraft that customers are calling industry-defining. Wisk’s second Gen 6 prototype is ready for its first flight. Robinson has pivoted its 50-year legacy rotorcraft business toward autonomous vertical lift. Pivotal has deployed its aircraft for the first active public safety operations in eVTOL history. Collins Aerospace is validating megawatt-class hybrid propulsion for commercial aviation. Eight eIPP projects are cleared for operations that will put electric aircraft into real airspace before the summer is over.
And in Atlanta, two companies stood in front of a room at Verticon and made the case to a city that ground transportation has failed — that there is another way.
The industry wins when aircraft fly safely over cities and people pay for the service. The signals from the past two weeks suggest that is coming closer, not further, despite the noise from courtrooms.
There are more solutions than obstacles.
Nicolas Zart covers Advanced Air Mobility for The Ways We Move. For the Patreon Tier 3 deep dive on the Joby vs. Archer litigation, see this week’s extended members-only audio.
© 2026 Nicolas Zart Studio · All rights reserved · electricairmobility.com