Worldwide Aeros says its Aeroscraft blimp can
do for cargo what the Internet did for information, if U.S. government
will listen.
January 23, 2006 Print Issue
Like many
obsessions, Igor Pasternak’s lifelong fixation started in the pages of a
children’s book. For some kids it is trains; for others, it’s dinosaurs.
For Mr. Pasternak, it was—and 36 years later, still is—blimps.
As a
five-year-old living on the western fringes of what was then the Soviet
Union, Mr. Pasternak saw a picture of an airship in a book for children.
That illustration sparked a passion that survived the upheavals of
adolescence, the anti-Semitism of the Soviet state, and countless
instances of being told he was a fool. Whether the derision was blunt or
oblique, Mr. Pasternak never abandoned his dream of developing an airship
that could ferry hundreds of tons of cargo over mountains, deserts, and
oceans.
Today, as
the president and CEO of Worldwide Aeros in Tarzana, California,
41-year-old Mr. Pasternak says that after two decades of scrapped designs,
he has never been closer to making his vision a reality. But like the
failed heavier-than-air airship builders before him, this is not the first
time Mr. Pasternak believed success was near.
An airship
builder must possess an innate optimism, but even skeptics have some
reason to think that Mr. Pasternak and his 20 employees are on to
something. Armed with $3 million in funding from the U.S. Department of
Defense and purchase order agreements from shippers and investment
companies in China and Germany, Mr. Pasternak is building a so-called
hybrid airship that stays aloft through a combination of gas buoyancy and
traditional aerodynamics.
Taking
shape in the company’s Tarzana hangar is the Aeroscraft, the prototype of
an airship designed to carry 120,000 cubic feet and 200 tons of cargo at
150 knots. Able to take off and land vertically, the idea is for the
Aeroscraft to take 20 truckloads of goods straight from a factory in Japan
to a warehouse in California in a day and a half, bypassing crowded ports
and clogged rail lines. “We have a very efficient information exchange,
but we are missing an efficient system for the distribution of goods,”
says Mr. Pasternak, his accented English still betraying the first 27
years of his life spent in the Ukrainian city of Lvov.
Doing for
the supply chain what the Internet did for communications might be an
overstatement, but an airship like the one Mr. Pasternak has in mind could
change shipping forever. A Boeing
747, the current workhorse of air cargo, can carry around 30 tons.
The
Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
While
logistics experts agree that the global supply chain is bedeviled by
bottlenecks, and the current worldwide infrastructure of ships, trains,
planes, and trucks is not up to the task of moving an ever-growing volume
of freight, Mr. Pasternak’s hybrid airship is not universally regarded as
a plausible solution to the problem. In fact, says Yossi Sheffi, director
of the Center for Transportation and Logistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and author of The Resilient Enterprise, a
vessel such as the Aeroscraft “is not even on the radar screen.” But a
tidal wave of cargo certainly is. The U.S. Department of Transportation
reckons that in the United States alone, the 15 billion tons of freight
moving across the nation’s transportation network today will climb to 22
billion tons in two decades. Figures like that give Mr. Pasternak hope.
Mr.
Pasternak says the Aeroscraft will create a market worth “trillions of
dollars.” But before the entrepreneur starts counting his fortune, he
would be advised to visit a hangar at a small airport in Robinsville, New
Jersey. There he would find the sole remaining Aereon 26, a 35-year-old
heavier-than-air airship that was going to be the Internet of the global
supply chain before there was an Internet. The Aereon 26 was given a
measure of fame in the early 1970s when The New Yorker serialized
the story of its development. The author, John McPhee, published the
series as a book, The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, in 1973. But for
William Miller, the president of Princeton, New Jersey-based Aereon, the
story did not end there.
Today, Mr.
Miller, 79, says he spent the next 20 years fruitlessly trying to convince
the U.S. government to fund further research and construction of
heavier-than-air hybrid airships. He claims that the Aereon 26
demonstrated the air-worthiness of the hybrid concept, but chicken-hearted
bureaucrats didn’t want to take a chance on something as revolutionary as
the “Deltoid Pumpkin Seed.” By the end of the Cold War, he gave up.
Mr. McPhee
was the one who gave the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed its moniker, but it was Mr.
Miller and his fellow engineers at Aereon who gave the craft its singular
shape. Achieving lift through a blend of gas buoyancy and aerodynamics is
not as simple as attaching wings to a blimp, or filling wings with helium.
The interplay between the two forms of lift demands a delicate balance.
Mr. Miller says that long hours with the slide rule convinced him that a
deltoid shape with the gas in the middle was the only way to build a
maneuverable hybrid airship.
Warehouse or Warfare
Even as
Mr. Miller beat the Washington, D.C., pavement looking for someone to back
the Aereon 26, others were working on the same idea. Mr. Pasternak was one
of them. As a young engineer, he wrote letters to Mr. Miller trying to
interest him in his own designs. But Mr. Miller had his own problems and
wasn’t interested in dealing with some kid behind the Iron Curtain. “We
couldn’t make our own work, so how could we draw in someone who is a
foreign national from a country that was an adversary?” he says.
Mr.
Pasternak’s love of blimps started early, but the Soviet educational
system did nothing to nurture it. When the time came for Mr. Pasternak to
enter university, anti-Semitism prevented him from enrolling in an
aeronautical engineering program. Instead, the authorities shunted him
into the more earth-bound civil engineering faculty at Lvov’s Polytechnic
National University. It was the first of many obstacles placed in his way.
Still, by the mid-1980s, with Perestroika blowing a new spirit of
embryonic entrepreneurialism across the Soviet Union and its satellites,
Mr. Pasternak founded his own blimp company in Lvov, at a time when a
privately owned ice cream parlor was considered radical.
Aeros won
contracts with various bureaucracies in Moscow, and even worked on a
prototype to the Aeroscraft that the Soviets wanted to carry goods in and
out of Siberia. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1992, Mr. Pasternak
moved his company to the U.S. Today, while he waits for the Aeroscraft to
turn the global supply chain upside down, Mr. Pasternak makes a decent
living selling blimps and aerostats, an area of aviation now undergoing a
renaissance in military circles. Aeros has revenues of $10 million. In
late 2005, Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of National Security bought a
single-pilot, 40-foot blimp to patrol its borders.
It is an
award from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
that fuels development of the Aeroscraft. As one of the world’s largest
shippers, it is easy to see why the Pentagon would be interested in a
flying machine that can carry 500 tons of cargo at around 500 miles per
hour. While Aeros has until next September to deliver a prototype of what
DARPA dubs the Walrus—as does Aeros’ competitor, Lockheed Martin—it is
also working on the Aeroscraft, a commercial version of the Walrus.
Mr.
Pasternak says that two companies have signed early agreements to be first
customers when the Aeroscraft is ready for production in 2009: F1
Investments in Germany, and the East Asian Shipping Company in China.
While the Aeroscraft doesn’t have many competitors, Mr. Pasternak is not
alone. ATG in the United Kingdom touts its Sky Cat, which, like the
Aeroscraft, is described in the future tense: “The SkyCat 1000 will be the
largest aircraft ever to fly.”
Mr. Miller says that whether or not the Sky
Cat 1000 or the Aeroscraft ever does fly has nothing to do with
aeronautics and everything to do with commitment. The idea is sound. The
machines will fly. But governments and companies have to be as passionate
as the people who build them.
About
Worldwide Aeros Corp:
Worldwide Aeros Corp. is
the world's leading lighter-than-air, FAA-certified aircraft manufacturing
company. The company's operations involve the research, development, and
marketing of a complete family of Aeros-branded air vehicles used in
military and civilian applications. These include
rigid aeroscrafts, commercial
non-rigid airships, and advanced tethered
aerostatic systems.
The Aeros airships serve both government agencies
and private corporations and are available for a wide variety of platform
missions including advertising, touring, surveillance and broadcasting.
Worldwide Aeros Corp. has a presence across three continents and has
affiliates in eight European and Asian countries. The company's
industry-leading expertise is based on more than 20 years of operations
and advanced research in lighter-than-air technologies. Please visit us at
www.aerosml.com for more information and news about Worldwide Aeros
Corp.
Contact:
Edward
Pevzner
Business Development Manager
Tel. 818 344-3999 x 106
Edward@AerosML.com
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