Igor Pasternak was born in the Kazakh SSR, one of the republics of the former Soviet Union, and is the eldest child of a Jewish family. His parents, both civil engineers, later moved to Lviv, Ukraine, where he grew up. His younger sister Marina was also an engineer. As a child, Pasternak became interested in airships early. According to The Seattle Times, Pasternak faced anti-Semitism in the USSR before Mikhail Gorbachev began perestroika and was unable to study aeronautical engineering because both of his parents were Jewish. Studied civil engineering at the Lviv Polytechnic National University. As an undergraduate student at the university, Pasternak set up an airship design bureau in 1981, and by 1986 founded Eros LLC, his first company to manufacture balloons and airships for various purposes, including advertising and meteorology, in the USSR and abroad. In 1994, Pasternak emigrated to the United States following his family.
Since 1994, Pasternak's US entrepreneurial and engineering career has been closely associated with Worldwide Eros Corp (also known as Eros), which he re-established in the US. In 1994, Pasternak moved from New York to California and rented a hangar at Castle Air Force Base (located two hours south of San Francisco) to build his first U.S. airship, the Eros 50, a 78-foot airship. The Eros 50 was later sold for publicity during the 1996 Paralympics. Since then, Eros has released and commercialized a number of new airship models, including the Sky Dragon, the Dragon Dream cargo airship (Aeroscraft) and TAS. Worldwide Eros Corp has received various certifications, including from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for some of its airships. The company subsequently moved its construction operations to Montebello, California, where it is now located.
Pasternak is the inventor of the cargo airship with adjustable buoyancy (Aeroscraft). A distinctive feature of this technology is the built-in internal ballast control, which allows vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and hovering with maximum payload without the use of external ballast and unloading of stores during the hover. He also developed a method for compressing helium, which allowed the ship to be made heavier or lighter as needed.
