Bridgewater, Virginia-headquartered Dynamic Aviation, the owner of the world's largest private King Air fleet, has entered into a 55-aircraft partnership with Merlin Labs, a developer of autonomous flight technology for fixed-wing aircraft. Merlin recently raised $25 million in funding from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and First Round Capital.

Dynamic Aviation performs intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; airborne data acquisition; and public health and safety missions for government and commercial customers worldwide.

“We are honoured to partner with Merlin by leveraging this leading-edge technology in an operational platform,” says Dynamic CEO Michael Stoltzfus. “We look forward to serving alongside Merlin to create extraordinary value for customers around the world.”

Merlin co-founder and CEO Matthew George adds: “We're proud to partner with Dynamic to begin the process of moving autonomy from the lab and to the market. This deal represents a major commercial milestone as well as Merlin's commitment to support larger and more complex aircraft.”

With offices in Boston, Los Angeles, Denver and Auckland, New Zealand, as well as a dedicated flight facility at the Mojave Air & Space Port in California, Merlin is building a certifiable autonomy system for complex fixed-wing aircraft. The company has demonstrated hundreds of autonomous missions on multiple aircraft types, including complex twin turboprop aircraft. Its autonomy platform is aircraft-agnostic, focuses on onboard autonomy rather than remote piloting and is being integrated into a wide variety of public- and private-sector aircraft.

The company is announcing the first public implementation of its technology with a partnership with Dynamic to automate 55 high-performance King Air platforms that will support a wide range of public- and private-sector missions. The first aircraft from the partnership is currently in flight trials in Mojave.