In 2020, Nikita Ermoshkin, then an engineer at SpaceX, decided to get a private pilot’s license so she could take a day trip from her home in Los Angeles to San Francisco to visit friends and her favorite burrito place. The experience led to the age of the light bulb: in the age of self-driving cars and avocado-peeling robots, why is flying still so difficult? “It’s like driving a convertible with two steering wheels,” Ermoshkin told the Observer.
A year later, Ermoshkin quit his job and started a company with two fellow engineers, called Airhart Aeronautics, with the goal of building the equivalent of an automatic transmission for airplanes. Airhart was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 cohort, where it raised an earlier seed round. Named (roughly) after Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, the startup is working on its first prototype, a four-seater called the Airhart Sling, in partnership with Sling Aircraft, a light aircraft manufacturer. If successful, a person with no prior driving experience can learn to use the Airhart Sling in one hour, according to Airhart.
The Airhart Sling is currently listed under the Federal Aviation Administration’s experimental/development category, which means it won’t be allowed to be used for commercial purposes, and you’ll still need a regular private pilot’s license to use it. But in the future, Airhart is looking at airworthiness for new certifications, such as MOSAIC (Modern Special Airworthiness Certificate), to push sales.
In an interview with the Observer this summer, Ermoshkin discussed his vision for Airhart and the untapped personal jet market. The following discussion is edited for length and clarity.
Observer: Before founding Airhart, you worked at SpaceX for three years. Can you tell me about your career there and what made you leave and start your own company?
Nikita Ermoshkin: At SpaceX, I was an avionics systems and integration engineer. I worked primarily on the Falcon 9 rocket fairing restoration program. I left in April 2021 to start Airhart. In the end, what motivated me was that I had just learned how to fly about a year before, and I really loved it. But I also realized how complicated and difficult it is, and there is a disconnect about the current general aviation market that doesn’t sit well with me: we have this better way to travel, but why isn’t anyone doing it? So, we started Airhart to solve that problem and make flying so accessible that flying a plane is actually an extension of driving a car.
I’ve talked to a lot of people who work at rocket companies, and they all seem to have a driver’s license. Is that something in the space community?
I think so. I think there is an overlap between people who are in space and who enjoy flying.
The real reason I wanted to get my driver’s license was to fly to San Francisco to get burritos. [Editor’s note: It’s called Señor Sisig.] I live in Los Angeles. It’s usually a six to seven hour trip. Once, a friend of mine took me to San Francisco on his plane. I loved that I could travel for the day, hang out with my friend in the afternoon, go get lunch at my favorite burrito place, and fly back home in the evening.
Airhart’s biggest selling point is ease of flight. How easy is it to talk about, and how is it different from the current approach?
Piloting a small plane is incredibly complicated because you are doing all the different movements. In addition, you must navigate the airspace and communicate with air traffic control. It’s like driving a manual transmission with two wheels on the steering wheel, and what we’re building is the same as an automatic transmission—wthe hen pushes the stick left and right, turns left and right and does all the coordination for you, if you push the stick backwards, the plane just goes up and down.
Does that require any new technology?
We don’t rely on any new batteries or propulsion technology. We use the existing concept of fixed-wing aircraft, which has been known for over 100 years, and put all our efforts into changing the way people fly rather than trying to invent a new type of flying car. . But we use a lot of modern UI and UX techniques to make it feel like you’re using an iPad rather than a complex computer system.
How did you decide there would be a market for this type of personal plane? And if so, how big?
Basically, we are creating a new market here. Almost everyone in this country—about 300 million people—lives within 15 minutes, or 10 kilometers, of a major airport. We have 19,000 airports in the US, but only about 100 are used for commercial air travel, and the rest are for general and private aviation. So, we have all this infrastructure that is very underutilized.
What do you think about the four-seater design?
The idea is that you can put your whole family on the plane. You go from Los Angeles to Mammoth to go skiing, which nowadays people do every weekend, and it’s a seven-hour drive without cars. During the ski season, people load up their cars on Friday afternoon, drive up, check in at midnight, spend the weekend skiing, drive back and get home by midnight, Sunday night. With our plane, it will be less than two hours journey.
How much training is required to get your driver’s license?
I spent about 80 hours on my first private pilot’s license, which took about six months. And I spent about 50 more hours in three months on the measurement of my instrument. That, right there, is an indication of the fundamental problem here and why making it easier to fly is a big part of this because we want people to be good at flying airplanes with one hour of training instead of 100.
One hour. That sounds ambitious.
For reference, however, we have a simulation system set up with our flight control system fully in the loop there, which we use for both developer development and demos. We would bring in people who had never flown before, let them try to fly, and they would always crash. But when our simulation system is on, it can fly, take off and land within 10 minutes.
What questions do you get the most when pitching to investors?
Honestly, the biggest thing most people think is almost too good to be true. As with any aerospace company, regulation and certification remain a big question mark, and it’s just a matter of working through the certification process with regulators.
The point we always want to drive home is that we have all this technology available and all this infrastructure available to us to move quickly and efficiently and we’re not using it yet. That’s Airhart’s goal: to implement and actually start moving towards the promise of the flying car and everything by building on what we have today rather than promising something impossible.
