Several times a year, would-be inventors stride into the Federal Aviation Administration's Long Beach office with some naive plan to build an aircraft.
FAA engineer Maureen Moreland typically whips out an 1,100-page volume of regulations and answers a few questions. That's usually enough to send budding Wright Brothers back to their garage workshops, never to be seen again.
Occasionally, Moreland agrees to set up a meeting with her colleagues at the office, which oversees aircraft production at Boeing Co.'s Long Beach complex. They sit around the table and ask the applicant complicated questions about propulsion, aerodynamics and aircraft structures. All is polite, but the message is clear: Building a new aircraft is not for the meek or the poor.
When immigrant Igor Pasternak walked through the door five years ago, wearing a cheap pinstripe suit and with an interpreter in tow, Moreland was more than a little skeptical of his plan to build a high-tech blimp.
"I didn't believe there was any chance he would make it through the certification process," Moreland said.
But Pasternak, now 36, was not just another guy with another idea. "He was unstoppable," Moreland said.
On Friday, Moreland's office awarded Pasternak's Chatsworth-based Worldwide Aeros Corp. a certificate for the Aeros 40B blimp, only the seventh certificate won by a domestic airship manufacturer.
"This was a dream that I just followed," said Pasternak, who gained entry to the United States as a refugee from anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union.
During his blimp-building odyssey, the Russian-speaking Pasternak learned English, how to raise and spend money (about $7 million) and how tragedy can mar the American dream.
Pasternak's sister Marina, 32, and Levon Samamyam, 35, an employee and friend, died repairing the airship on Jan. 27. They suffocated while patching holes in a ballonet, an inner air balloon inside the helium filled blimp, which had been damaged during flight tests. Investigators believe helium leaked into the balloon, killing the workers in the 15-minute gap between their last contact with people on the outside and the discovery that something was amiss.
The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health is investigating whether workplace safety rules were violated in the accident.
