Airhart completes milestone flight and surprises enthusiasts with a sneak peek of the Airhart Sling
In a major step toward transforming the future of personal flying, Airhart successfully completed a flight of the Airhart Sling aircraft, surprising an audience of aviation enthusiasts with an exclusive sneak peek at Douglas Day 2024 at Santa Monica Airport, US. The event marked a significant milestone for Airhart as the team showcased the transformative technology behind the aircraft and its broader mission to make personal flying substantially easier to learn and safer to fly.
“This is a huge step forward in our mission to engineer an aircraft that’s easier and safer for everyone to fly,” said Nikita Ermoshkin, Founder and CEO of Airhart. Reflecting on the flight, Ermoshkin shared, “It was such a pleasure to personally fly the Airhart Sling from our Engineering and Research Center in Long Beach to the event in Santa Monica. It was a short hop, but the aircraft performed perfectly and was a joy to fly.”
Former SpaceX engineer, Nikita Ermoshkin, is rethinking and reengineering everything about personal aviation. Their aircraft is already in the air, marking a significant milestone toward their transformative technology. Almost 300 million travelers live within 15 minutes of one of the 19,000 general aviation airports in the US alone but it’s been simply too difficult to learn to fly safely …. until now!
The Douglas Day 2024 event commemorated the 100th anniversary of the first around-the-world flight by the Douglas Cruiser, celebrating both aviation’s rich history and its future. Airhart was honored to participate in such a landmark event for the Santa Monica community and the wider aviation world.
“We’re making it happen,” added Ermoshkin. “Our vision of creating an aircraft that’s truly transformative is becoming a reality, and this flight is a testament to that.”
In 2020, Nikita Ermoshkin, then an engineer at SpaceX, decided to get a private pilot license so that he could take day trips from his home in Los Angeles to San Francisco to visit friends and his favorite burrito place. The experience led to a lightbulb moment: in the era of self-driving cars and avocado-peeling robots, why is flying an airplane still so complex?
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 automatic transmission for airplanes. Airhart was admitted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 cohort, where it raised a pre-seed round. Named (approximately) after Amelia Earhart, the first woman aviator to solo fly cross the Atlantic Ocean, the startup is working on its first prototype, a four-seater called Airhart Sling, in partnership with Sling Aircraft, a manufacturer of light aircraft. If successful, a person with no prior piloting experience could learn to operate Airhart Sling in one hour, according to Airhart.
Airhart Sling is currently classified under the Federal Aviation Administration’s experimental/amateur-build category, meaning it won’t be allowed to be used for commercial purposes, and you’ll still need a regular private pilot license to operate it. But in the future, Airhart looks to qualify the aircraft for new certifications, such as the MOSAIC (Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certification), to push for commercialization.
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