ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., July 2026 — When the cargo is a medical isotope, the clock is the enemy. A PET tracer made with fluorine-18 begins decaying the moment it leaves the cyclotron, and within hours much of its usefulness is gone. That unforgiving chemistry forces hospitals and research programs into premium logistics — and the bill is steep. A single tracer delivery can approach $10,000, and because the isotope fades so fast, one shipment may stretch to at most three patient scans before it’s spent. Add the MRI time, technicians, and research staff layered on top, and the cost per patient climbs quickly.
Erik Erhardt, PhD, has spent his career on the science that sits downstream of that supply chain — and he decided to do something about the bottleneck itself. A research statistician specializing in brain imaging, Erhardt has co-developed analysis methods now used widely across the field of human brain mapping, and his work spans the study of Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, and Parkinson’s disease. He is also a pilot of more than twenty-five years. He first earned his wings in 1999, stepped away for graduate school, and returned to flying in earnest several years ago — going on to earn seven FAA ratings in the pursuit of being the safest pilot he can be. He put that experience to work building AeroAcumen LLC, an FAA Part 135 air carrier authorized to transport Class 7 radioactive materials, and now flies the cargo himself.
AeroAcumen operates out of Albuquerque’s Double Eagle II Airport (KAEG) with a right-sized single-engine aircraft and a single accountable pilot on every flight. The model is deliberately small: one airplane, one pilot, exclusive single-custody handling from pickup to delivery, day or night. For time-sensitive isotope shipments, that means no missed freight connections and a chain of custody that never changes hands — at a cost structure built for small, urgent payloads rather than a jet charter’s overhead.
Erhardt’s motivation is personal. In 2014, after a family member died of dementia at 62, he turned the focus of his research to the diseases behind it, with his first studies in the field following in 2015; around the same period, a close friend’s mother developed Parkinson’s disease. His work since has centered on those diseases — developing diagnostic markers from blood and cerebrospinal fluid to distinguish Alzheimer’s from vascular dementia, and methods aimed at clearing the harmful proteins (tau, amyloid-beta, alpha-synuclein) implicated in neurodegeneration.
“The half-life isn’t negotiable. The cost of getting it there is — so I built an air carrier to fly it myself. If I can make each delivery cheaper, every research dollar scans more patients — and that’s how we can develop and validate a simple blood test instead of a scarce, expensive scan.” — Erik Erhardt, PhD, owner and pilot-in-command of AeroAcumen
That throughput is the whole point. PET remains the diagnostic gold standard for Alzheimer’s and related diseases because it images the actual molecular pathology in the living brain — the protein deposits and metabolic changes that blood tests and clinical exams can only infer. That same precision is why PET is the benchmark that cheaper tests must be validated against: a blood biomarker is only trustworthy once it’s been shown to agree with PET in the same patients. But PET is scarce and costly, and can’t scale to population screening. The path to an affordable blood test runs directly through larger, better-calibrated PET studies — which means scanning more patients per dollar. By lowering the cost of every isotope delivery, AeroAcumen aims to widen exactly that bottleneck.
Erhardt is quick to share credit for getting the operation off the ground. Standing up a new Part 135 air carrier is a demanding process, and he points to the FAA Flight Standards District Offices in Lubbock, Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, as central to it. “The managers and inspectors at both offices were incredibly supportive and efficient throughout certification — rigorous where it mattered and genuinely invested in helping a new operator get certificated the right way,” Erhardt said. “They were an integral part of this company’s success.”
About AeroAcumen LLC
AeroAcumen LLC is an FAA-certificated Part 135 on-demand air carrier based at Albuquerque Double Eagle II Airport (KAEG), operating a Piper PA-28R-200 Arrow II authorized for VFR day and night flight. The company is certificated to carry Class 7 radioactive materials and other hazardous and time-critical cargo, with single-pilot, single-custody handling and right-sized economics for small, urgent payloads. Founder Erik Erhardt holds IATA DGR and U.S. DOT hazardous-materials certifications and seven FAA pilot ratings — commercial single- and multi-engine land and sea, instrument, glider, and flight instructor. Learn more at AeroAcumen.com.
Media contact
Erik Erhardt, PhD — Owner & Pilot-in-Command, AeroAcumen LLC
(505) 480-4462 · Erik@AeroAcumen.com · AeroAcumen.com
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AeroAcumen LLC · News Release · July 2026 · Rev 00