COULD FLYING EVER BE EASY AND LOW COST LIKE DRIVING IS?

Pulling up to the airfield, jumping in your aircraft and flying wherever you want to go has long been a freedom restricted to the few. High costs of acquisition, upkeep and learning to fly have kept it exclusive. However, flying a personal aircraft should be significantly cheaper and simpler than it is currently, according to Nikita Ermoshkin.

The former SpaceX engineer is now co-founder of startup Airhart Aeronautics, having launched the company with two colleagues to develop what is essentially an automatic transmission for general aviation aircraft. The company motto centres around ‘opening the skies’ to more people.

To achieve this, Airhart is building a modern aircraft featuring Airhart Assist, a computerised flight control system designed to increase safety and reduce operational complexity.

Ermoshkin hopes the aircraft — also known as the Airhart Sling — can reduce dropout rates among student pilots, make training more accessible to all, and lower the entry price point for those wanting to fly. The Airhart Sling will initially retail at $500,000, with plans to bring the price down to as little as $100,000 with scale.

Admitted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 cohort, where the company raised a pre-seed round, Airhart is loosely named after Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Its first prototype is being developed in partnership with South African light aircraft maker Sling Aircraft, based on the four-seat Sling TSi.

Once completed, anyone — i.e. a person with no prior flying experience — should be able to fly the aircraft with only one hour of training. The Airhart Sling is currently classified under the FAA’s category for experimental/amateur-built aircraft. This means no commercial usage, and operators will still require a private pilot’s licence to fly it. That said, Ermoshkin is hopeful that updates to legislation, such as last year’s Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certificates (MOSAIC), will make it easier to innovate and develop new aircraft.

“So on day one, you’ll still need a pilot’s licence. [Our aircraft is] classified as light sport under MOSAIC, so a sport licence will do. But in terms of the actual complexity of learning, people are able to take off and land on their first try pretty much across the board,” he explains. “When I learnt, the first 20 hours were spent learning how to fly the plane. For us, it feels like about 15 minutes.”

The vision

Discussing his vision for Airhart, Ermoshkin poses the question: “Why don’t more people fly aircraft?”

“The fundamental reason we have identified is safety,” he tells us. “Aircraft are more complicated to fly than cars or small boats. You are 27 times more likely to have an accident in a general aviation aircraft than in a motor vehicle. That is the core problem we are tackling with Airhart Assist.”

Airhart’s co-founder is a “big picture” thinker. Less than 0.2% of the US population holds a pilot’s licence, according to FAA statistics, yet nearly 90% live within a 15-minute drive of a general aviation airport. “We have 19,000 airports in the US, but we only really use about 100 of them for commercial transportation. The rest are relatively underutilised,” says Ermoshkin. “This country lacks a well-structured public transport network. Infrastructure in places like the Midwest and Alaska is set up for general aviation, so it makes sense to leverage that.” Airhart’s technology should prove popular in Alaska, where there are on average six times more pilots per capita than in the rest of the US.

ATC ‘buffer zone’

Outages to air traffic control (ATC) systems have been making headlines of late. Earlier this year, trade association Airlines for America called on the US government to “urgently modernise” the country’s ATC system, where floppy disks remain an everyday tool of the trade.

Although there have been some modern ATC communication techniques deployed in commercial aviation, such as controller–pilot data link communications, general aviation, for a host of reasons — not least a lack of investment — lags behind.

However, efficient, reliable ATC systems will be required if Airhart’s vision plays out and general aviation numbers return anywhere near the heights of the late 20th century.

“In the bigger vision, there needs to be updates made to ATC. It was a system designed decades ago that relies on voice and radio for communication. We are also seeing a decrease in controllers too,” says Ermoshkin. “But the system was designed when there were ten times more general aviation aircraft flying around than there are today. That gives us a buffer zone right now in order to grow, but we do have to begin thinking about how we modernise ATC communication in general aviation.”

Airhart is taking some in-house measures to modernise communication with ATC ahead of time. The firm is developing an automated communication service that will provide speech-to-text transcripts for ATC communications. “The system will be contextually aware. For example, if your tail number pops up, it will appear in a different colour versus general communication to another aircraft. If it has a response like: ‘Switch to this frequency’ or ‘squawk this code’, you just have to tap it, and it will load onto your transponder. That begins simplifying the process.

Eventually, we can start implementing the reverse, where instead of the person talking and reading back the instructions, a text-to-speech synthesiser can do that and reply automatically. From there, we can begin to replace voice with digitised communications.”

Reducing the price tag

Ermoshkin has a long-term plan to see Airhart begin designing its own aircraft from scratch, which he sees as key to the firm getting anywhere near the holy grail of “democratising aviation”. “In order to sell a $100,000 aircraft today, you need to be vertically integrated. We need to design the airframe and avionics together, rather than buying all the parts from different vendors and putting them together,” says Ermoshkin.

Part-inspired by his time at SpaceX, the startup is taking a rapid-iteration approach to developing its avionics system. From flying its first software testbed in November 2022 to flying a second prototype this year and debuting that aircraft at EAA Oshkosh, the firm has made quick progress since its founding just over two years ago. The timeline sees Airhart make its first customer delivery in January 2026, before beginning work on its own airframe in the latter half of 2027.

“There are a lot of lessons that SpaceX taught me. Specifically, as an avionics engineer, I learnt a lot about how you build high-reliability electronics and avionics systems for much lower cost than what is typical in the aviation industry. Those are the lessons I want to bring to Airhart as well,” says Ermoshkin.

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