Airhart Aeronautics Makes Flying More Accessible

Nikita Ermoshkin got his pilot’s license in 2020 and promptly did what most new pilots dream about: he started flying up and down California for fun. Los Angeles to San Francisco in under two hours. No traffic, no rest stops, no misery on the 5 freeway. Just air.

That freedom stuck with him. So did the question of why more people weren’t doing it.

“Throughout the process of learning, I started to really see how inaccessible aviation was to the average person,” Ermoshkin said. “But at the same time, I saw what benefits you get from being able to fly a plane.”

The numbers back up his frustration. According to 2024 data from the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, roughly 300 million Americans live within 10 miles of a local airport. Staggering reach, almost entirely wasted. The Federal Aviation Administration found that fewer than 0.3% of Americans held active airman certificates last year. Cost keeps most people out. Fear keeps the rest away, even though statistically, you’re safer in a small plane than behind the wheel of a car.

Ermoshkin, a Cornell graduate in electrical and computer engineering and a former avionics engineer at Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded Airhart Aeronautics Inc. in 2022 to fix that gap. Not with bigger airports or cheaper fuel, but with smarter avionics. The core pitch: make flying feel less like operating a nuclear reactor and more like driving a car.

The company describes its system as an “electronization of the cockpit.” Dual touch displays show flight measurements in real time. A push-pull bar controls speed. A joystick handles direction. The whole setup offloads the automatable tasks onto the machine and leaves the human pilot focused on what computers still can’t do well, things like risk management and situational awareness. Think of it as a responsible co-pilot built into something that looks like a video game interface. That’s not an insult. That’s the design intent.

Airhart’s prototype was developed with South Africa-based Sling Aircraft. Four seats, including the pilot. It burns 7.4 gallons of fuel per hour, which is meaningfully lower than comparable aircraft. Textron Aviation Inc.’s Cessna 172, a standard benchmark in the four-seat market, burns around 9.9 gallons per hour at 75% power, according to a Leopard Aviation report. That gap matters when you’re trying to bring operating costs down far enough to attract people who’ve never seriously considered owning or flying a plane.

The prototype made its first public appearance in 2024 at Santa Monica Municipal Airport. Since then, Airhart has flown it across the country. Last October, the company raised $4.56 million in venture capital. Not a massive round by Silicon Valley standards, but enough to keep the program moving.

Last month, Airhart opened its first design and innovation center in Long Beach, welcoming the initial wave of visitors for what the company bills as an upcoming series of hangar tours. Market rollout for the prototype is planned for later this year.

Long Beach makes sense as a base. The city has long positioned itself as an aviation and aerospace hub, with the airport, established manufacturing infrastructure, and a workforce that knows the difference between a VFR flight plan and a marketing deck. For a company trying to bridge the gap between serious aviation engineering and consumer accessibility, that environment matters.

The broader challenge Ermoshkin faces isn’t really technical. Avionics have been getting smarter for decades, and automation in the cockpit isn’t new. The harder problem is cultural. Most Americans don’t think of flying as something they do. It’s something that happens to them, in a seat they paid too much for, on an airline they don’t especially trust. Reframing general aviation as a realistic personal option, not a rich person’s hobby, requires changing that assumption at a pretty deep level.

“I want to make airplanes easier to fly, and I want it to be a thing that people have much more of a public desire to do,” Ermoshkin said. “And ultimately make flying like driving a car.”

Whether the Long Beach hangar tours and a well-funded prototype can actually move that needle is a real question. The LA Business Journal has been tracking Airhart’s progress as the company builds toward its commercial launch. The engineering looks credible. The market timing, with fuel efficiency and automation both catching public attention in 2026, isn’t bad either.

Still, general aviation has seen promising startups before. Execution is everything.