The Sky Is the Limit — Unless Lawyers Get There First
Archer Aviation is suing Joby Aviation at the ITC. This is how industries die in the crib.
Let's start with some context. Urban air mobility — eVTOL, air taxis, whatever you want to call it — is not a toy market. It's a potential $1 trillion transportation revolution. Cities are choking. Commutes are getting longer. The infrastructure to fix ground-level transit doesn't exist, won't be funded, and takes 30 years anyway. The sky is the only underutilized real estate left in America's metros. And we have — had — two serious US companies, Joby and Archer, racing to get there first.
Now Archer has filed a patent infringement complaint against Joby at the US International Trade Commission. The ITC doesn't award damages. It does something worse: it bans products from the US market entirely. If Archer wins, Joby's aircraft could be excluded from American skies. Delta Air Lines, which has a commercial partnership with Joby, is so alarmed it filed its own warning with the ITC, arguing that excluding Joby would hand Archer a de facto monopoly and gut competition in a market that doesn't yet fully exist.
Read that again. Two US startups, pre-revenue, pre-commercial scale, are lawyering each other into oblivion while China, Germany, and South Korea are writing checks to their own eVTOL companies at a national level. This is what losing looks like in slow motion.
We have seen this movie before. Several times. And it never ends well.
Act I: The Wright Brothers
The Wright Brothers invented powered flight in 1903. By 1909, they were suing everyone. Glenn Curtiss. Foreign aviators. Anybody who put wings on anything. The result? The litigation was so consuming — financially and psychologically — that the Wrights made no meaningful contributions to aviation after 1905. Meanwhile, European competitors, unburdened by the legal warfare, sprinted ahead. When the US entered World War I, American pilots flew French planes. The country that invented flight couldn't build enough planes to fight a war in them.
Act II: Waymo vs. Uber
Fast forward a century. Google's Waymo and Uber — two American juggernauts — turned the autonomous vehicle race into a legal demolition derby. Waymo alleged Uber stole LIDAR trade secrets via a defecting engineer. The case consumed both companies for over a year, sucked executive attention like a black hole, and settled for $245 million in equity. More importantly, it froze the AV industry in a posture of paranoia exactly when bold cross-company collaboration could have accelerated deployment. A decade later, self-driving at scale is still mostly a promise.
The Pattern
Emerging category. Enormous stakes. Two domestic competitors. IP warfare. Market development stalls while foreign players advance. Every. Single. Time.
Here's the irony: the ITC was designed to protect American industries from foreign unfair competition. In this case, it's being used by one American startup to kneecap another. The legal instrument meant to build walls against China is being deployed as a moat between two San Jose companies competing for Manhattan airspace.
Delta's argument is correct but insufficient. Yes, excluding Joby damages competition. But the deeper damage is temporal. The ITC process takes 15-18 months to resolve. That's 15-18 months of uncertainty that freezes investment, chills partnership deals, delays FAA certification timelines, and hands the narrative to Archer's lawyers instead of to engineers building the future.
The Resolution
This almost certainly settles — the ITC's exclusion threat is typically leverage, not endgame. Archer wants a licensing deal or a payout. Joby wants to keep flying. Somebody's investors will eventually do the math and push them into a room.
But "probably settles" isn't "doesn't cost anything." Markets aren't static. Every month of legal cloud is a month of stalled deployment. America's transportation system is broken and the fix is sitting on a launchpad in Marina, California — right next to a pile of legal briefs.
The sky should belong to builders. Not billing partners.
Related Articles
ITC Probe Puts Joby Delta Partnership And US eVTOL Plans At Risk — Yahoo Finance/Simply Wall St report on how Archer Aviation's ITC complaint threatens Joby's US market access and its commercial partnership with Delta Air Lines.
Joby Lifts Off, and Santa Cruz Looks Up — SCW on Joby's piloted Bay Area flight and what a real 2026 commercial launch could mean for the Central Coast.
Joby Says U.S. Air Taxi Operations Could Begin in 2026 Under White House Program — SCW coverage of Joby's selection for the White House eVTOL Integration Pilot Program across 10 states.
Joby Flies Two Aircraft Simultaneously in Testing Milestone — SCW on Joby's dual-aircraft flight over Marina, CA — a key step in maturing its test program ahead of FAA certification.
The Wright Brothers' Patent War — How the Wrights' aggressive IP enforcement divided the early aviation industry and ceded ground to European competitors.
Waymo v. Uber: Surprise Settlement — Harvard Journal of Law & Technology on the landmark autonomous vehicle trade secret case that consumed two AV giants and settled for $245 million.