PILOTING HIS DREAMS INTO SUCCESS.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff writer

TARZANA - Igor Pasternak calls himself a crazy man. The government disagrees.

Pasternak is a blimp-maker. He's spent more than 40 years chasing a dream that's literally in the clouds, one that's taken him from the Soviet Union to a nondescript office and warehouse off Oxnard Street. His creations serve as floating billboards and drug interceptors, and he dreams of revolutionizing the world with a heavier-than-air, helium-filled craft nearly three football fields long.

As the boy genius of blimps growing up in Ukraine, he dreamed of building crafts that would cruise lightly through the air. His friends and family were not so sure.

"They thought that I was crazy - they still do," said Pasternak, now 42, chief executive officer and owner of Worldwide Aeros Corp. "And maybe I am. This is not a usual business."

But it's a good one, enough to win him the U.S. Small Business Administration's Los Angeles district small-business person of the year title. After relocating from Russia in the 1990s, Pasternak has built the company into a 50-employee outfit that records between $10 million and $12 million in revenue each year, which will earn him the award in a ceremony next month.

"Mr. Pasternak's spirit and entrepreneurial drive is just tremendous," said Alberto G. Alvarado, the SBA's district director. "He's a very sophisticated individual with a tremendous academic background. In many ways, he epitomizes the small-business community in this country."

Pasternak started early, dreaming as a kid about the strange, elegant objects he'd read about in books but had never seen.

At the age of 11, he built his first working prototype out of shipping film, only to watch it float away, never to return. Not long after, he was attending aerospace conferences and mingling with Soviet scientists, conjuring up ways to create massive, heavy-lift airships to ship goods out of Siberia.

He finished his civil engineering training around the time Soviet society began permitting private enterprise, which launched him into the business world. When conditions deteriorated, he took off for the States, eventually ending up near relatives in the San Fernando Valley 10 years ago.

In subsequent years, the company produced 30 blimps, which take nearly a year to build and cost several million dollars apiece. From tethered ships to manned craft with sophisticated camera equipment, its products do everything from advertise the German equivalent of the Academy Awards to keep an eye out for Caribbean drug smugglers.

While that's been a nice steady business, Pasternak now has his eyes on something much, much bigger - the Aeroscraft. Nearly 900 feet long, capable of hefting 500 tons of personnel and equipment, with a cruising range of 12,000 nautical miles, the vehicle would be the literal representation of a notion he cooked up back in the '70s.

With its hard, composite skin, nine engines and helium tanks, it would be an entirely unique craft, not plane, nor blimp. If it became reality, Worldwide Aeros says the craft could transport an entire military unit from base to a war zone, pick up goods from a factory in China and plunk them down directly in a retailer's parking lot, or take well-heeled passengers in slow, cushy style across the Atlantic.

As crazy, to borrow Pasternak's word, as this all sounds, the Department of Defense likes the sound of it. In January, it awarded Worldwide Aeros a multi-million dollar contract to develop a prototype. The company hopes to have the scaled down version, a 213-foot version assembled in its Palmdale facility, within three years.

If the company wins the final contract it could lead to billions in revenue and a completely different new way of doing business. It could also make explaining what the company does to make money a little less difficult.

"When I meet people and they say what do you do, I say, I sell blimps," said Edward Pevzner, the company's business development manager and Pasternak's first cousin. "They say, yeah, but how do make a living off something like that?"

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Blimp-maker Igor Pasternak, chief executive officer and owner of Worldwide Aeros Corp., stands in his Tarzana facility dwarfed by a blimp's ruddervators. Captivated by blimps since he was a child in Ukraine, Pasternak's success has earned him a businessperson of the year award.

(2) Electronics technician Albert Lopez works on the control panel of an Aeros blimp at the company's Tarzana facility Wednesday.

Gus Ruelas/Staff Photographer