The Allplane Podcast #112 - the safest and easiest-to-fly personal airplane, with Nikita Ermoshkin (Airhart)

Nikita Ermoshkin is a man on a mission: to create an aircraft that is so ridiculously easy to fly that the experience can be compared to driving a car.

Nikita, a former SpaceX engineer, is the founder and CEO of AirHart, a startup based in Long Beach, California, that is already testing a new type of cockpit promising to open up personal aviation to the masses.

Apparently, 70% of people who enroll in flying lessons drop out without obtaining their pilot’s license. Nikita’s team at AirHart wants to tackle this issue with a clean-sheet computerized avionics system that simplifies many tasks pilots typically handle, all while adhering to the strictest safety standards.

What’s more, Nikita aims to achieve this while delivering a relatively affordable aircraft, with a price tag in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Quite a tall order, but so far, AirHart, together with its partner Sling Aircraft, is making progress. Nikita told me the AirHart team has already been flight-testing their system.

Should AirHart succeed in this quest, the potential is enormous. Nikita believes the size of the U.S. general aviation market could increase tenfold!

So, if you're as intrigued as I was when I first heard about Nikita’s work at AirHart, don’t miss this episode of the podcast! It’s pure moonshot-level entrepreneurship.