In a public post on the Merlin company website Matt George, Founder and CEO, of Merlin Labs has given more details about the company’s plan to commercialize autonomy and its path to certification in New Zealand and the United States.
“In the history of aviation, no traditionally crewed, fixed-wing aircraft has flown autonomously in commercial revenue service,” he said. “Our goal is for Merlin to be the first to do it, and we are working to get there in 2027 from our test facility in Kerikeri, New Zealand. By commercial service, I mean real autonomy on real aircraft, flying real routes, in revenue-generating operations.”
“We picked New Zealand as a key part of our test operations because it gives us a unique environment to build autonomy that holds up in the most challenging conditions. Since 2022 we have operated a flight test and development center in the far north of the country. ….To date we have logged hundreds of autonomous test flights using the Merlin Pilot, the same AI-powered autonomy system we are working to certify with the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand and on a concurrent validation pathway with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. We believe we have passed meaningful markers on the certification path this year and are approaching its final phases. We are designing the system to fly, from takeoff to touchdown, under the same regulatory oversight as any other aircraft in the airspace.”
“As we noted on our most recent earnings call, the Merlin Pilot is designed to become a multi-application, multi-airframe platform. This means that we are pursuing different use cases for the technology simultaneously. In this context, the commercial milestone we are pursuing in New Zealand is an important complement to our defense work. No one has done this, because it is very hard. Building the technology is hard, and getting it certified is even harder. We believe this is what the future of aviation looks like, and we are focused on getting there. We believe that flying real commercial routes with the Merlin Pilot is proof of our thesis: autonomy built from first principles, shaped by certification requirements from day one, and validated in real operational environments can produce a system regulators can certify, operators can deploy, and communities can rely on.”
For more information
Going First: Commercial Autonomous Flight in New Zealand in 2027 | Merlin Labs