TL;DR
A former Wisk Aero software manager is suing the Boeing subsidiary, alleging she was fired for flagging cuts to FAA-required testing.
A former software manager at Wisk Aero, Boeing’s autonomous air taxi subsidiary, has filed a lawsuit alleging she was fired after raising internal safety concerns about reduced software testing, the Seattle Times first reported. Briahna O’Neill filed the suit in Santa Clara Superior Court, claiming wrongful termination and discrimination. According to the complaint, O’Neill submitted two internal safety reports alleging that company executives pushed engineers to cut FAA-required software testing in order to meet a 2025 test flight deadline.
O’Neill says she was terminated in March 2025, weeks after filing her second internal complaint. Wisk said it cannot comment on ongoing litigation, and Boeing declined to comment on the matter. The allegations have not been proven in court, and the case is in its early stages.
Wisk was founded in 2019 as a joint venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk, the air taxi company backed by Google co-founder Larry Page, and is now a wholly owned Boeing subsidiary. The company is developing a fully autonomous electric air taxi designed to fly without any pilot on board, supervised remotely by a single operator overseeing up to three aircraft at once. That approach sets it apart from competitors like Joby Aviation, which uses a piloted model and is the furthest along in the FAA certification process.
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Wisk’s Generation 6 aircraft completed its first flight in December 2025, and a second prototype flew in May 2026, doubling its test fleet. The company is one of eight selected for the FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, which launched in March 2026 and allows supervised commercial testing across 26 states over a three-year period. Wisk is preparing for operations in Texas as part of that programme.
The lawsuit lands at a difficult moment for Boeing’s broader safety reputation. The company has faced 32 whistleblower complaints filed with OSHA since 2020, according to federal records, and a Senate subcommittee has held hearings on what it described as Boeing’s “broken safety culture.” Corporate retaliation against employees who raise concerns has become a recurring theme across the tech and aerospace industries, with legal actions multiplying in recent years.
Whether O’Neill’s allegations hold up in court remains to be seen, but for Wisk the timing is particularly sensitive. The company is asking the FAA to certify the first fully autonomous passenger aircraft in the United States, a process that depends entirely on regulators’ confidence that its software systems meet the highest safety standards. A lawsuit alleging that those same software testing requirements were deliberately weakened to hit an internal deadline raises exactly the kind of question the FAA will need to answer before any certification is granted.
