Joby Aviation, the One Hundred Seventeen Million Dollar Trade Secrets Verdict, and What the eVTOL IP Wars Mean for the Aircraft of Tomorrow

A federal jury has awarded Aerosonic Corporation nearly $117 million in damages against Joby Aviation in a trade secrets lawsuit. Joby - one of the most advanced eVTOL developers in the world and a strong contender for FAA type certification - is seeking to have that verdict overturned. The case sits at the intersection of precision aerospace instrumentation, next-generation aircraft development, and the increasingly contentious question of who owns the intellectual property underpinning the electric air taxi industry.

What the Verdict Found

Aerosonic Corporation, based in Clearwater, Florida, is a precision aerospace instrumentation company with decades of experience supplying altimeters, airspeed indicators, and barometric pressure sensors for military and high-performance aerospace applications. A federal jury found that Joby violated Aerosonic’s trade secrets and returned a damages award of nearly $117 million.

Joby is now asking the federal court to overturn that verdict entirely. Post-trial motions of this kind are standard in federal civil litigation, particularly when a nine-figure damages award is at stake.

Who Is Joby Aviation?

Joby Aviation was founded in 2009 by JoeBen Bevirt in Santa Cruz, California. The company has raised more than $2 billion in total investment. Toyota is a significant backer, and Delta Air Lines has a commercial partnership with Joby worth up to $2 billion contingent on milestones. The United States Air Force has partnered with Joby under its Agility Prime program, which the Air Force created specifically to accelerate eVTOL development for potential military applications.

Joby’s aircraft is a tilt-rotor, six-rotor design capable of carrying five occupants - including the pilot - at cruise speeds of around 200 miles per hour. It takes off and lands vertically, transitions to forward flight for cruise, and is designed with a noise signature low enough for urban operations. The company has logged thousands of test flight hours in California and is widely considered one of the two or three companies closest to receiving FAA type certification for a crewed commercial eVTOL aircraft.

That certification is everything. Without it, you have a very expensive prototype. With it, you have a product.

Who Is Aerosonic Corporation?

Where Joby is a venture-backed startup building something entirely new, Aerosonic is embedded in the legacy aerospace supply chain. The company supplies precision instrumentation - altimeters, airspeed indicators, barometric sensors - for aircraft at the high end of the performance envelope. They hold military contracts and have served defense programs for decades.

The overlap between what Aerosonic develops and what a next-generation eVTOL aircraft requires is not coincidental. An aircraft like Joby’s still needs to know precisely where it is in the sky. It needs barometric altitude data of sufficient quality to fly low-altitude urban routes - potentially in degraded visibility, in close proximity to buildings and other aircraft, with no margin for error. Precision pressure sensing at that performance level is not a solved problem. If Aerosonic holds proprietary solutions in that space, and if those solutions found their way into Joby’s development program without proper licensing, that is exactly the kind of harm trade secrets law was built to address.

What Are Joby’s Legal Options After the Verdict?

A jury verdict in a federal civil case is not automatically the final word. After a verdict, the losing party can file a motion for judgment as a matter of law. The legal standard is essentially this: would no reasonable jury, looking at the evidence presented at trial, have reached this verdict? If the judge agrees, the verdict can be set aside. The losing party can also move for a new trial if the proceedings were flawed in a way that prejudiced the outcome.

Filing post-trial motions is standard procedure in civil litigation at this scale. Every competent defense attorney in a case ending with a nine-figure verdict asks the court to take another look. Sometimes the court agrees. Often it does not.

If the court denies Joby’s motion, the next step is an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals - a process measured in years. Nearly $117 million could sit in legal limbo for a long time before anyone writes a check.

Joby vs. Archer: The Company’s Prior IP Litigation

This is not Joby’s first significant intellectual property dispute. In 2021, Joby sued Archer Aviation - its most direct domestic competitor - alleging that engineers who left Joby to work at Archer took confidential information with them. Joby’s complaint cited thousands of files: design specifications, proprietary test data, information that Joby argued gave Archer an unearned shortcut in the development process.

That case settled. Part of the settlement had Archer issuing equity to Joby. The specific terms were not fully disclosed. Both companies continued moving forward.

In the Archer case, Joby was the plaintiff. In the Aerosonic case, Joby is the defendant. The company is now fighting intellectual property battles from both sides of the table at roughly the same point in its development timeline.

The Broader eVTOL IP War

The eVTOL sector has generated a remarkable volume of IP litigation in a short period. Beyond Joby-Archer, Wisk Aero sued Archer in a separate case alleging that a former employee carried proprietary information to Archer. That case also settled, with Archer paying a substantial sum.

The pattern reflects something real about the industry. A relatively small number of exceptionally skilled engineers have built the core knowledge base in this field. They have moved between companies, sometimes carrying expertise that is genuinely novel and genuinely valuable. The line between what belongs to a previous employer and what belongs to an individual’s professional knowledge is one that courts have wrestled with for a very long time.

What the Defend Trade Secrets Act Means for Aviation

The Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), the federal statute governing cases like this one, was passed in 2016. Before that, trade secrets litigation was governed primarily by state law, which created inconsistency across jurisdictions. The federal framework brought some uniformity.

But the hardest questions remain genuinely contested: What qualifies as a trade secret? What constitutes misappropriation? How do you calculate damages when the information at issue is one component in a highly complex technology product? Juries hear technical arguments and competing expert witness testimony on damages, and they arrive at verdicts that sometimes surprise everyone in the courtroom - including the lawyers.

Nearly $117 million surprised Joby.

Why a $117 Million Verdict Matters Beyond the Courtroom

Joby went public through a SPAC merger in 2021. Their financial position is disclosed in public SEC filings. A judgment of this size, if it stands, would be material - not necessarily existential for a company that has raised more than $2 billion, but consequential enough that it cannot be absorbed as a routine legal expense.

More broadly, this case is about who owns the technology inside the aircraft of the next twenty years. The precision sensing systems, software-driven flight control architectures, and high-integrity barometric instrumentation being argued over in these courtrooms are the same technologies migrating into general aviation avionics. The capability in modern glass cockpits - synthetic vision, precision approaches available to a Cessna 172 today that would have been unimaginable thirty years ago - came from somewhere. The intellectual property ecosystem around aviation technology shapes what gets built, who builds it, and what it costs when it reaches the panel of a trainer aircraft at a flight school.

A nearly $117 million verdict in a trade secrets dispute is a data point in the long negotiation over who owns what in this industry. Those negotiations have consequences for Joby’s certification timeline, for investor confidence, for commercial partners like Delta who have made significant bets on Joby reaching the market, and for the pace at which advanced aviation technology filters down to the broader aviation community.

Where the Case Stands Now - October 2026

Joby’s motion to overturn the verdict is pending in federal court as of October 2026. There is no published timeline for the court’s decision. If denied, the Ninth Circuit is the next stop, and that process is measured in years. If granted - or if a new trial is ordered - the litigation resets while the aircraft development program continues in parallel.

Joby has not indicated publicly that this litigation is affecting its FAA certification program. Test flights are continuing. The FAA powered-lift certification framework, finalized in late 2023, remains the regulatory pathway Joby is traveling, and the agency continues to advance that process.

Nearly $117 million has a way of complicating things, even when operations continue as normal. This one is worth watching.

Key Takeaways

• A federal jury awarded Aerosonic Corporation nearly $117 million against Joby Aviation for trade secret misappropriation; Joby is pursuing post-trial motions to overturn the verdict.
• Joby - backed by Toyota and Delta Air Lines, with more than $2 billion raised - is one of the top global eVTOL certification contenders, making the verdict financially and strategically significant.
• The case involves precision aerospace sensing technology - specifically the kind of high-integrity barometric instrumentation a low-altitude urban air taxi requires to operate safely.
• Joby has now been on both sides of major IP litigation: it sued Archer Aviation in 2021 (settled with equity), and now faces a nine-figure judgment as the defendant.
• The eVTOL IP wars - Joby-Archer, Wisk-Archer, Aerosonic-Joby - reflect a pattern of talent and specialized knowledge moving through a small industry where the legal ownership of that knowledge is actively contested.
• Joby’s FAA certification program continues uninterrupted, but the pending judgment is a material factor in the company’s financial position and a signal of the intellectual property pressures reshaping the future of aviation technology.