Immigrant Has Right Stuff to Get His Dream Off the Ground
Several times a year, would-be inventors stride into the Federal Aviation Administration’s Long Beach office with some naive plan to build an aircraft.
FAA engineer Maureen Moreland typically whips out an 1,100-page volume of regulations and answers a few questions. That’s usually enough to send budding Wright Brothers back to their garage workshops, never to be seen again.
Occasionally, Moreland agrees to set up a meeting with her colleagues at the office, which oversees aircraft production at Boeing Co.’s Long Beach complex. They sit around the table and ask the applicant complicated questions about propulsion, aerodynamics and aircraft structures. All is polite, but the message is clear: Building a new aircraft is not for the meek or the poor.
When immigrant Igor Pasternak walked through the door five years ago, wearing a cheap pinstripe suit and with an interpreter in tow, Moreland was more than a little skeptical of his plan to build a high-tech blimp.
“I didn’t believe there was any chance he would make it through the certification process,” Moreland said.
But Pasternak, now 36, was not just another guy with another idea. “He was unstoppable,” Moreland said.
On Friday, Moreland’s office awarded Pasternak’s Chatsworth-based Worldwide Aeros Corp. a certificate for the Aeros 40B blimp, only the seventh certificate won by a domestic airship manufacturer.
“This was a dream that I just followed,” said Pasternak, who gained entry to the United States as a refugee from anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union.
During his blimp-building odyssey, the Russian-speaking Pasternak learned English, how to raise and spend money (about $7 million) and how tragedy can mar the American dream.
Pasternak’s sister Marina, 32, and Levon Samamyam, 35, an employee and friend, died repairing the airship on Jan. 27. They suffocated while patching holes in a ballonet, an inner air balloon inside the helium filled blimp, which had been damaged during flight tests. Investigators believe helium leaked into the balloon, killing the workers in the 15-minute gap between their last contact with people on the outside and the discovery that something was amiss.
The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health is investigating whether workplace safety rules were violated in the accident.
The accident took place in the same San Bernardino International Airport hangar where Worldwide Aeros accepted its certificate Friday and delivered the first commercial 40B to Airship USA, a Las Vegas company that will market the blimp as an advertising medium. Airship USA hopes to have an advertiser contracted in time to fly it over Southern California beaches during the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
The 40B comes on line at a time when there are 62 blimps registered to fly in the United States, according to the FAA, but only about a dozen are actually flying. They include the three familiar Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. blimps and airships bearing advertising pitches for such companies as Monster.com, Fuji and Met Life, which is adorned with a giant figure of Snoopy.
That leaves plenty of room for a new entrant, said George Spyrou, president of Airship Management Services, a Greenwich, Conn. company that operates two blimps.
“Advertisers want to be seen at major events,” Spyrou said. “In fact, something isn’t a major event these days unless there is an airship flying overhead.”
Pasternak says his firm has orders for six of its $2.2-million blimps. He figures that there’s a worldwide market for about 100 of the 40Bs, primarily for advertising purposes. Worldwide Aeros’ current production rate is four or five a year.
The market is small because the cost of using a blimp as an advertising vehicle is so high that few companies can maintain a full-time advertising presence in the air. Airship USA is targeting short-term users such as event promoters by asking $18,000 to $30,000 a day, with discounts for longer periods. Airship Management Services seeks upward of $250,000 a month for the use of its blimps.
While perhaps the most recognizable blimps worldwide are flown by Goodyear, Pasternak’s biggest rival is American Blimp Corp. of Hillsboro, Ore., which has sold 21 airships since receiving its FAA certificate in 1990.
With a length of 143 feet, the five-seat 40B is about three-quarters the size of Goodyear’s blimps, but slightly larger than most of the other airships flying in the U.S.
Pasternak said he has made improvements over prior airships, both in technology and manufacturing.
“There’s no doubt, the [40B] is technically advanced over what’s out there,” Moreland said.
Instead of a decades-old steering system that relies on two massive vertical wheels positioned like armrests at the pilot’s seat, the 40B has a joystick similar to those used with video games.
One of the more difficult aspects of the project was the development of the blimp’s envelope, or skin, because it must not only be airtight to hold the helium in, but also be able to resist heat, sunlight and smog.
It is made from a transparent multilayer fabric of woven nylon that is impregnated with polyurethane films, including two helium protection barriers and coatings to prevent ultraviolet damage. During testing, the FAA discovered that patches to the envelope withstood a load nine times what the FAA requires, Moreland said.
The envelope has 2,000 separate pieces of fabric joined by a heat-sealing rather than a sewing process. It takes an eight-member crew four months to assemble.
“We designed the machine, we designed the process. All this technology is unique,” Pasternak said.
Worldwide Aeros builds the blimp in a 23,000-square-foot Chatsworth factory. Final assembly takes place in San Bernardino.
The company has about 20 employees, including a design team of half a dozen engineers who are immigrants from Russia.
Though Moreland talks about the obstacles facing developers of new aircraft in the U.S., Pasternak said he saw this nation’s aviation tradition as an advantage.
“The United States is an aviation-oriented country,” Pasternak said. “This is where I could continue my work.”
Born in what is now Kazakhstan, Pasternak grew up in L’viv, a Ukrainian city of 700,000 near the border with Poland.
After graduating from L’viv Polytechnical University, where he earned a degree in civil engineering, Pasternak worked for the Antanov Design Group, a Communist-style incubator linked to the builder of a giant Soviet transport aircraft. The company was researching development of a mammoth airship cargo lifter that could be used in the Siberian oil fields.
As Pasternak learned to speak English, FAA personnel realized that he knew far more about aerodynamics than they realized. And they were impressed with how his project proceeded without the expense of high-priced engineers and technical consultants.
Evidence of the company’s tight budget abounds. Before flight testing began, workers took the massive envelope on a U-Haul truck to San Bernardino. Company promotional materials have a photo of the blimp and its crew waiting for a businessman. In fact, one of the pilots in the photo is an office assistant. The businessman is also a company employee, and the BMW in the background is Pasternak’s car.
“What Igor has done is a small miracle when you consider how much companies have to spend to get FAA certification,” said Bernd Hermann, president of World Trade Finance, a Hollywood small-business lender and Worldwide Aeros’ banker.
With orders in hand and Airship USA looking to purchase three to five more ships over the next several years, Pasternak is already talking to the FAA about his next project, a 28-seat passenger airship that will use a vacuum system to push off and land. He plans to call it the Aeros ML--the initials of his sister Marina and Levon Samamyam.
This time, the FAA is paying attention.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Modern Airships
Chatsworth company Worldwide Aeros, founded by Igor Pasternak, has been awarded an FAA certificate to build a new blimp, the 40B. Here is a look at the 40B and how it compares with the better-known Goodyear Eagle blimp that is often seen in Southern California’s skies:
*--*
Aeros 40B Goodyear Eagle Length 143 feet 192 feet Width 34.8 feet 55 feet Height 43.8 feet 59.5 feet Envelope volume* 88,570 cubic ft. 202,700 cubic ft. Maximum speed 74.5 mph 50 mph Cruising range 24 hours 24 hours Passenger capacity 5 6
*--*
*
* Volume of gas that the main balloon can hold.
Sources: Company Web sites, Goodyear Corp.
Researched by NONA YATES/Los Angeles Times
