A Former SpaceX Engineer Is Building an Airplane Anyone Can Fly in One Hour
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? “It’s kind of like driving a manual car with two steering wheels,” Ermoshkin told Observer.
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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.
