Piloting His Dreams into Success
Brent Hopkins, Staff writer
TARZANA - Igor Pasternak calls himself a crazy man. The government
disagrees.
Pasternak
is a blimp-maker. He's spent more than 40 years chasing a dream that's
literally in the clouds, one that's taken him from the Soviet Union to a
nondescript office and warehouse off Oxnard Street. His creations serve as
floating billboards and drug interceptors, and he dreams of
revolutionizing the world with a heavier-than-air, helium-filled craft
nearly three football fields long.
As
the boy genius of blimps growing up in Ukraine, he dreamed of building
crafts that would cruise lightly through the air. His friends and family
were not so sure.
"They thought that I was crazy - they still do," said Pasternak, now 42,
chief executive officer and owner of Worldwide Aeros Corp. "And maybe I
am. This is not a usual business."
But
it's a good one, enough to win him the U.S. Small Business
Administration's Los Angeles district small-business person of the year
title. After relocating from Russia in the 1990s, Pasternak has built the
company into a 50-employee outfit that records between $10 million and $12
million in revenue each year, which will earn him the award in a ceremony
next month.
"Mr. Pasternak's spirit and entrepreneurial drive is just tremendous,"
said Alberto G. Alvarado, the SBA's district director. "He's a very
sophisticated individual with a tremendous academic background. In many
ways, he epitomizes the small-business community in this country."
Pasternak started early, dreaming as a kid about the strange, elegant
objects he'd read about in books but had never seen.
At
the age of 11, he built his first working prototype out of shipping film,
only to watch it float away, never to return. Not long after, he was
attending aerospace conferences and mingling with Soviet scientists,
conjuring up ways to create massive, heavy-lift airships to ship goods out
of Siberia.
He
finished his civil engineering training around the time Soviet society
began permitting private enterprise, which launched him into the business
world. When conditions deteriorated, he took off for the States,
eventually ending up near relatives in the San Fernando Valley 10 years
ago.
In
subsequent years, the company produced 30 blimps, which take nearly a year
to build and cost several million dollars apiece. From tethered ships to
manned craft with sophisticated camera equipment, its products do
everything from advertise the German equivalent of the Academy Awards to
keep an eye out for Caribbean drug smugglers.
While that's been a nice steady business, Pasternak now has his eyes on
something much, much bigger - the Aeroscraft. Nearly 900 feet long,
capable of hefting 500 tons of personnel and equipment, with a cruising
range of 12,000 nautical miles, the vehicle would be the literal
representation of a notion he cooked up back in the '70s.
With its hard, composite skin, nine engines and helium tanks, it would be
an entirely unique craft, not plane, nor blimp. If it became reality,
Worldwide Aeros says the craft could transport an entire military unit
from base to a war zone, pick up goods from a factory in China and plunk
them down directly in a retailer's parking lot, or take well-heeled
passengers in slow, cushy style across the Atlantic.
As
crazy, to borrow Pasternak's word, as this all sounds, the Department of
Defense likes the sound of it. In January, it awarded Worldwide Aeros a
multi-million dollar contract to develop a prototype. The company hopes to
have the scaled down version, a 213-foot version assembled in its Palmdale
facility, within three years.
If
the company wins the final contract it could lead to billions in revenue
and a completely different new way of doing business. It could also make
explaining what the company does to make money a little less difficult.
"When I meet people and they say what do you do, I say, I sell blimps,"
said Edward Pevzner, the company's business development manager and
Pasternak's first cousin. "They say, yeah, but how do make a living off
something like that?"
brent.hopkins@dailynews.com
