Igor Pasternak is an American aviation entrepreneur,[3][4] inventor and engineer[5] specializing in designing and building airships.

[6] According to The Seattle Times, Pasternak faced antisemitism in the USSR before Mikhail Gorbachev started Perestroika and couldn't study aeronautical engineering because both of his parents were Jewish.

[13] While an undergraduate student at university, Pasternak started an airship-design bureau in 1981,[17] and by 1986 he founded Aeros Ltd.,[14] his first company producing aerostats and blimps for various applications including advertising and meteorology in the USSR and abroad.

[10] In 1994, Pasternak moved from New York to California and leased a hangar from the Castle Air Force Base (located two hours south of San Francisco) to build his first airship in the US - Aeros 50, a seventy-eight-foot long blimp.

[18][14] In 2000, Pasternak's younger sister Marina and his friend Levon Sanamyan died in a tragic accident in a hangar of Aeros while working inside a blimp.