Sling Pilot Academy Unveils Long Beach Airport Expansion, Quieter Airplane
March 5, 2025 – Sling Pilot Academy has officially expanded into Long Beach, bringing with it the “Whisper Sling” — a new pilot-training aircraft the company has designed with community concerns about general aviation noise in mind.
Company officials, alongside other aviation industry and city representatives, gathered at Sling’s new Long Beach Airport campus on Wednesday, March 5, to celebrate the expansion to unveil the Whisper Sling.
Sling, founded in 2011, has four other flight training schools across Southern California, with facilities at Torrance Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, Santa Monica Airport, Gillespie Field in San Diego — and now, Long Beach Airport. The company has been named the fastest-growing flight school in the nation by Inc. 5000 two years running.
The new Long Beach academy has been up and running for about a month, Sling’s co-CEO, Matt Liknaitzky, said Wednesday. Sling has about 50 students in training at the airport currently, Liknaitzky said, though the campus can train hundreds of students at a time.
Introducing the Whisper Sling – A Quieter Training Aircraft
“We feel very grateful to be a part of everything that’s happening here in the city of Long Beach — the coolest city in the area,” Liknaitzky said. “We see ourselves as the next generation in flight training; we use modern, fuel-efficient airplanes that are much quieter than traditional flight training airplanes, and our core pillars of everything we do are safety, efficiency and community.”
Speaking of community, the company also officially unveiled its new Whisper Sling aircraft at the Wednesday celebration. The aircraft, as the name suggests, was specifically designed by Sling to reduce noise in the hopes of being better neighbors to the communities that live around the airports where its flight schools operate.
“We attacked noise at its source, which is the engine exhaust,” Liknaitzky said, “so we’ve gone through about 20 iterations of our exhaust to muffle the sound that comes out of the engine to the maximum extent we can.”
The Whisper Sling also features a custom-made, quieter propeller, and acoustic sound-deadening material inside the plane’s engine compartment to reduce noise.
“We spent literally 18 months on it and it cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this,” Liknaitzky said. “We’re doing it because we’ve heard the neighbors around the airports. We realized, even though we do already have the quietest airplanes, we have to do better — because we intend to stay flying in the city (and) we want to be the best neighbor we can.”
Commitment to Being a Good Neighbor
Sling, among other general aviation aircraft operators at both Long Beach and other airports across the region, have faced mounting public pressure from adjacent communities over noise pollution. Sling’s Torrance flight school, for example, was put in jeopardy after the town declined to renew the company’s business license for 2024. The City Council did so — citing a 1977 local ordinance that, while it had never been enforced, limited the number of flight schools that could operate at its municipal airport — because of residential complaints about noise.
The controversy played out for months — and eventually led to a lawsuit. Sling and the city, however, settled the issue out of court in April after some legal back-and-forth. The settlement resulted in Sling’s lawsuit and a Federal Aviation Administration complaint being dismissed.
“We don’t have any outstanding issues with the city,” Liknaitzky said about Torrance. “It’s our biggest location, and we don’t have any plans to leave.”
In Long Beach, meanwhile, residents have long had concerns about noise pollution at that city’s airport, specifically relating to general aviation aircraft operations — including flight schools.
Residential concerns about noise pollution at Long Beach Airport came to a head in September after about 100 residents asked the City Council to address the issue.
After that protest at the Civic Center, the city manager’s office released two reports detailing general aviation operations at the airport and what actions Long Beach could take to fix the issue.
The reports found that general aviation — including smaller aircraft operations for any non-commercial purpose, such as flight-school training — has increased at the airport, with a notable uptick in summer 2023, as the result of a nationwide pilot shortage.
Long Beach’s Fly Friendly Program
In response, the city recently announced a new Fly Friendly Program at Long Beach Airport, which is aimed at helping reduce noise pollution caused by general aviation operations by tracking flight metrics and providing incentives for pilots who abide by its rules.
The FFP built upon pre-existing noise regulations under Long Beach’s local noise ordinance, which has been in place since 1995. Though it’s among the strictest of its kind in the nation, it doesn’t apply to airspace — which is under the FAA’s authority.
Long Beach, though, has received FAA approval to increase fines for noise ordinance violations, a change that would require City Council approval to take effect.
Sling, meanwhile, said it’s committed to being a good neighbor and has already signed onto the Fly Friendly Program.
“We are very impressed with the Long Beach Fly Friendly Program and we are signed on to it,” Liknaitzky said, “and (we are) going to try our best to be number one in Long Beach’s (FFP).”
General Aviation’s Economic Impact
That commitment to the community, Liknaitzky said, is largely inspired by lessons learned dealing with critics of Sling operations at Torrance Airport.
“When we first started encountering people who didn’t like flight training in the beginning, we just defended ourselves,” he said. “We got quite big — we were a target, so it forced us to have a lot of these conversations. We decided we were leaving an opportunity on the table to make our airplanes even quieter and less annoying.”
The Whisper Sling, the company said, is 10 decibels quieter than the regular Sling training craft — and even quieter than legacy general aviation aircraft.
“The quality of the sound is smoother, more muted and more appealing to the human ear, which, of course, is a very subjective thing,” Liknaitzky said. “But we’re very happy that we’re very close to (the sound level) of the few electric airplanes that are out there.”
The Whisper Sling also runs on unleaded fuel. It also burns fewer than four gallons of gas per hour, avoiding 100 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions with each hour of flight, the company said.
General aviation is also a massive contributor to both the U.S. and local economies. The industry contributed $339 billion to the U.S. economy and supported 1.3 million jobs nationwide in 2023, according to analysis by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“General aviation is a big part of our economy,” Liknaitzky said. “But for us, the most important thing is that we provide a pathway for people to get into amazing, lucrative, well-paying careers as airline pilots.”
Several aviation industry officials — including JetZero, the Long Beach Airport Association, the FAA, the National Business Aviation Association, SkyWest, and others — attended Wednesday’s event to welcome Sling to “Space Beach.”
“Just in this area, we’re literally building the future of space; space stations are being built in Long Beach,” Mayor Rex Richardson said. “We’re grateful for your commitment to build a vibrant community, and we’re eagerly anticipating the positive impact that you’ll have on training the next generation of aviators.”
This article originally appeared in the Press-Telegram. Read the full article on their website.