Federal Jury Awards Aerosonic $116.9M After Finding Joby Aviation Breached NDA, Willfully Misappropriated Trade Secrets

A federal jury has found Joby Aviation liable for breaching a mutual nondisclosure agreement and willfully misappropriating trade secrets belonging to air-data-probe maker Aerosonic, awarding the plaintiff approximately $116.9 million in damages. The verdict was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

The award breaks down as $68.6 million for Joby's breach of the NDA, $29.9 million for misappropriation of trade secrets, and $18.3 million in exemplary damages after jurors found the misappropriation to be willful and malicious. The jury also rejected all of Joby's counterclaims, including its allegation that the probes it purchased from Aerosonic were defective.

Aerosonic and Joby signed a mutual NDA in 2021, and Aerosonic sold air data probes to Joby in 2022. The probes were intended to measure pitot pressure, static pressure, angle of attack, and angle of sideslip for Joby's flight-test and future mass-production aircraft. Aerosonic alleged that Joby had no prior experience designing its own air data probes before the purchase but began doing so afterward, using proprietary engineering drawings, test procedures and reports, 3D models, wind tunnel data, and other documents shared under the NDA.

Joby said in a statement that it independently developed its own air data system and called the verdict "unsupported by the evidence and inconsistent with the law." The company said it intends to vigorously pursue an appeal, and it retains the option to seek to have the verdict set aside or modified before doing so.

Joby is pursuing a separate trade secret case against rival Archer Aviation, alleging that a former Joby employee downloaded sensitive files before joining Archer and used them to help Archer compete for business. In September, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed some of Joby's claims in that case but allowed two to proceed, including one related to Archer's November 2025 lease of Hawthorne Airport. The same judge rejected Archer's countersuit alleging Joby ran a scheme to obscure ties to China and mislabel imports.

Archer's separate patent infringement case against Joby at the U.S. International Trade Commission remains active and is pending investigation by an administrative law judge. Archer also has an active patent infringement case against U.K. air taxi developer Vertical Aerospace, accusing it of copying the design of Archer's Midnight air taxi for its Valo aircraft. Vertical Aerospace has dismissed the complaint as an attempt to distract from Archer's competitive challenges.

Archer's legal history in the eVTOL space dates to 2021, when Wisk Aero sued it for alleged trade secret theft. The two companies settled in 2023 on undisclosed terms and agreed to make Wisk the sole provider of autonomy technology for future Midnight variants. Archer subsequently acquired Wisk, SkyGrid, and Insitu from Boeing in August in a deal that gave Boeing a significant equity stake in Archer.

This verdict lands alongside a cluster of overlapping suits among Joby, Archer, Vertical Aerospace and Wisk Aero, showing how thickly litigated the eVTOL sector has become as companies race toward type certification while sharing suppliers, employees and components. A jury willing to find willful misappropriation and award exemplary damages signals that courts are treating supplier data shared under NDA as enforceable intellectual property, not just a procurement formality.

In this segment, component suppliers like Aerosonic depend on NDAs to protect engineering drawings, test data and wind tunnel results precisely because manufacturers often build competing in-house systems after an initial purchase. That dynamic creates recurring exposure for any OEM that buys a specialized part before deciding to vertically integrate its own version.

Joby has said it will pursue an appeal and may first seek to have the verdict set aside or modified, so the $116.9 million figure is not yet final. Whether the Archer-Joby trade secret claims tied to the Hawthorne Airport lease survive, and how the ITC patent investigation against Joby proceeds, will show whether this verdict is an isolated supplier dispute or part of a wider pattern of IP friction across the sector.