Hartzell—the Ohio-based manufacturer of composite and aluminum propellers for all manner of aircraft—is readying itself for the rise of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and the fielding of myriad air-vehicles that promise to return the propeller to prominence.
The rise of the gas-turbine—read jet—engine in the 1940s heralded the propeller’s relegation to antiquity. Within the military and business aviation sectors, propeller-driven aircraft clung tenaciously to relevance, evolving into the C-130s, A400Ms, and King Airs by which modern-day troops and executives are shuttled about to wreak their respective havocs on locale insufficiently developed or auspicious to merit real jet traffic.
General aviation, however, and its legions of light, sport and utility aircraft, remained the near-exclusive province of the propeller and the principal source of sales and succor for companies like Hartzell—but in the prophetic, if not atonal, words of Bob Dylan, Times, they are a-changin’.
Comes now the second-age of the venerable propeller, a weird and wondrous age, the promise of which is written in the order books of Archer, Joby, Lilium, Vertical, Wisk, and Eve—aeronautical upstarts whose superb timing and genuine cleverness have earned them billions upon billions of dollars in aircraft orders from customers the likes of American and Virgin Atlantic Airlines.
Hartzell has sensed the propwash of change and—owing to the long years and big dollars the company has invested in the continuous betterment of its designs and materials—now stands ready to hitch its fortunes to the rising star that is Advanced Air Mobility.
Among the most pivotal of Hartzell’s years was 1978. The Bee Gees were Stayin’ Alive, Gerry Rafferty was cruising Baker Street, and Hartzell was about the business of building its first composite propeller. No one in the company—neither the troops nor the executives—could have guessed at that time that forty-years on, the aeronautical vanguard would be borne upon composite rotors, and that the propeller would so significantly contribute to the advancement of a world that had wrongfully deemed it passe.
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