Taking Flight.

Author/s: Deborah Belgum
Issue: May 8, 2000

WITH PRELIMINARY FAA APPROVAL, WORLDWIDE AEROS IS READY TO LAUNCH A LINE OF BLIMPS AND BECOME ONE OF THE FEW FIRMS IN THIS COUNTRY THAT MANUFACTURES GIANT AIRSHIPS

NOT too many kids say they want to grow up to be a blimp builder. But ever since Igor Pasternak was a teenager in Lvov, Ukraine, he had an obsession with those lighter-than-air machines that float gracefully through the sky.

"It is definitely some mental problem," Pasternak joked in his accented English.

The blimp obsession stuck with him through the years, and now it is finally paying off. The Federal Aviation Administration has given preliminary approval to his four-passenger Aeros 40B, a 143-foot-long blimp, for passenger service in the United States. That will make Worldwide Aeros Corp. one of the few companies in the U.S. that builds passenger blimps.

"It has been a long time working on this," said the 35-year-old engineer, who founded his U.S. company in 1992.

Time is only one element; the road to this point has been arduous and tinged with personal tragedy.

When Pasternak came to the United States in the early 1990s, he came with his father, Anatoly, a civil engineer, and his sister, Marina, also an engineer. Both were an integral part of his company.

But in late January, Marina, 32, and engineer Levon Samamyam, 35, were killed while working on the Aeros 40B at San Bernardino International Airport, where the FAA tests are being conducted. The pair was smothered to death while patching punctures inside the blimp.

The accident has cast a pall over the soon-to-be celebrated success in getting the blimp approved by the FAA. But Pasternak and his workers, many of them from the former Soviet Union, are determined to go forward with the memory of the two engineers in their hearts.

Coming to America

The roots of Pasternak's company go back to 1986 when the young engineer started a venture called Aeros Co. in the former Soviet Union.

The company was quite successful, selling tethered blimps and balloons to companies in Russia and Europe that used them for advertising, air monitoring, photography and surveillance. The company expanded, establishing six branches in Bulgaria, Poland, Germany, Canada and the Czech Republic.

One of Pasternak's biggest clients was the former Soviet government, which used the tethered blimps, or aerostats, to measure air quality around Chernobyl following the nuclear power disaster, among other things.

When the Soviet Union began to collapse in the early 1990s and it became harder to do business, Pasternak and his family moved to the United States to keep their enterprise going. They were in New York for a few months when they were encouraged by the administration of former California Gov. Pete Wilson to move their business to the decommissioned Castle Air Force Base in Atwater.

With $500,000 of their own money and a $400,000 Small Business Association loan, Igor and his family launched the blimp and aerostat manufacturing business with the same zeal they practiced in the former Soviet Union.