But recently I read a National Transportation Safety Board report about a fatal accident involving a 42-year-old Cessna 182 parked on a ramp in Cleveland, Tennessee. What happened is important, I think, because so many of us fly elderly GA airplanes with key-style ignition switches that may be faulty and not know it.

While his wife stood near the right cabin door, the husband performed a preflight check before their return flight home. She heard him just slightly move the propeller, and then the engine unexpectedly fired. The husband was fatally struck by the propeller.

One of the first things drilled into me (probably you, too) when learning to fly was “always treat any propeller as if it is ‘hot.’” If you’ve ever hand-propped an airplane you thought was securely tied down or with somebody unqualified at the controls, you won’t forget if it unexpectedly roared to life, scaring the hell out of you (and the person inside).

The reason a quick mag check at idle before shutdown is taught—or should be—is to ensure the mags are grounded and the switch works properly. This man who was killed had properly shut down his 182 with the mixture control and then turned the ignition key to “off.” But the switch—and the key itself—were old and worn. Investigators found the key could be removed (pulled out) of the switch in any position: “right,” “left,” “both,” or even “start.” That’s dangerous—and, in this case, fatal.

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So, next time you fly and shut down near the hangar, throttle way back to idle and briefly turn the switch to “off” and then back to “both.” And try removing it (gently) from the other positions. The accident airplane was only 30 hours out of annual. Sure, the mechanic should have checked that it was grounded, but…

Another good practice is repeating the “before-takeoff” run-up and mag check on the ramp before shutting down. It could save you from an unpleasant discovery on your next flight. Just be sure you’re not blasting something or somebody behind you.

Which brings me to a story about my friends at what was once the Hartzell Propeller Company in Piqua, Ohio. Cessna airplanes use McCauley props, so Hartzell once borrowed my Cessna 180 for tests when it applied for a supplemental type certificate to install its props on Cessnas.

In a promotion, Sporty’s Pilot Shop sent a pretty girl flying in, I think, a 172 to airports in the vicinity, including Piqua, with the gift of a large attractive clock for the hangar. The clock face had big ads for Sporty’s, Cessna airplanes, and McCauley props. Obviously, somebody hadn’t done their homework, because Hartzell would hardly hang a clock with a McCauley prop advertisement on its repair station hangar wall. The company thanked her, but declined and sent her on her way. The experience went even further south when, tailed into the open hangar, she fired up the 172 with a roar and blew everything all over the place.

Memories of Hartzell for me are simply joyful. Most involve a wonderful man, Jim Brown, who bought the company in the late 1960s from TRW. Things were in kind of a mess after multiple owners, but Brown rapidly put them right. From then on, Hartzell proudly lived up to its motto, “Built on Honor.”

Jim was a special person. After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an engineer, he joined the Navy, graduated from Officer Candidate School, and trained in SNJs at Pensacola, Florida. When he’d earned his wings, Jim spent his career in the 1950s flying Panthers and Demons (the Navy’s first jets) from a straight-deck carrier, “the Bonny Dick,” (officially the USS Bonhomme Richard) in the Pacific. Meanwhile, Mrs. Brown was presenting him with several of their eventual five babies.

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I met him in the early 1970s, when I flew an airworthiness inspector to Piqua to check a Top Gun school Jim and a friend who were planning to launch with a couple of T-34s. Blessedly, that enterprise never got off the ground, but it gave me a chance to talk to “Mr. B” about doing FAA safety seminars at the airport repair station and the impressively remodeled plant near town. He was enthusiastic, helpful, and, eventually, we did a bunch.

He had been an executive at Standard Oil and Austin Powder in Cleveland but jumped when he learned the historic Hartzell company in the cornfields at Piqua could be bought from TRW. It was an arrangement made in heaven. Jim was a fine pilot who loved airplanes and was an astute businessman who ensured quality and took care of his employees. Shortly thereafter, anybody who worked there came to love him.

He had a Beech A36 Bonanza and a SOCATA TBM for company trips and an AT-6, magically “converted” to an SNJ. A couple of wonderful and talented guys—Larry Zetterlind and Mark Runge—maintained and flew the airplanes while Jim often flew himself visiting suppliers and customers. He even sent employees who needed care to the Cleveland Clinic at the company’s expense in those airplanes.

Unchained from the FAA (praise the Lord), I frequently flew my 180 to Piqua and flew the SNJ (checked out by T-6 guru Bill Leff). It was heaven. Jim and I bought a Piper Cub, Mark kept my 180 flying, and I joined Hartzell’s flying club. Mr. B taught two mantras: “Go for it,” and “Break one rule every day,” which I’ve taken to heart.

It’s difficult to describe how much Jim loved the company and its people. He’d walk through the plant, greeting each employee by name and asking about their kids. He bought a property next to the airport and named it “The Ostrich Farm” (the previous tenant had raised ostriches). It hosted employee picnics, company parties, and was command central for the biennial Friends of Harztell Airshow, with performers including Bill Bruns, Darrell Montgomery, Mike Goulian, Harold Johnson, Bruce Bohannon, Sean D. Tucker, Matt Chapman, Dale “Snort” Snodgrass, and Leff.

Jim Brown died in 2017. His sons Jim and Joe made lots of money, acquired related aviation businesses, and sold Hartzell to a venture capital firm in 2023.

I miss Jim very much, but I’m glad he’s not here. I’m afraid the sale would have broken his heart.

This column first appeared in the March 2024/Issue 946 of FLYING’s print edition.

The post The Man Who Saved the Iconic Hartzell Propeller Company appeared first on FLYING Magazine.

“Wing warping,” as this approach was called, was satisfactory for very slow airplanes, but faster ones required more rigidity, and by around 1908 or 1909 the idea had arisen of replacing part of the trailing edge of a wing with a hinged, controllable flap. Actually, a prescient Englishman, Matthew Boulton, had patented the idea in 1868, when airplanes were still a thought experiment. His invention had been forgotten, however, by the time real airplanes came into being. Despite the early invention of the aileron, wing warping continued to be used, even on some fighters, as late as 1916.

That a hinged trailing-edge flap would have the same effect as warping the entire wing is obvious to us, because we have seen it in action. But it cannot have been quite so obvious then. The evolution of airplanes in the United States suffered from the Wrights’ unfortunate attempt to establish a monopoly on flight by patenting the very concept of lateral control. Litigation over that ambitious claim held back aeronautical development in America for years while it raced ahead in Europe.

The function of an aileron, or any hinged trailing-edge surface, is commonly explained in ground school by simple analogy to, say, a door opened on a windy day. The wind hits the deflected surface of the aileron and pushes on it. If the aileron is deflected downward, the wind pushes it upward, and if it’s deflected upward, the wind pushes it downward.

This explanation, while intuitively appealing, fails to capture what is really happening. The majority of the lift generated by an unstalled airfoil is always concentrated near the front, and moving a trailing-edge flap up or down changes the flow conditions at the leading edge. An aileron deflected downward impedes air passing below the airfoil, and as a result, the dividing line between air passing below the airfoil and that passing above it moves aft. More air now passes over the top, the velocity of air rounding the leading edge increases, and the pressure there is correspondingly reduced. In other words, the lift change that results from deflecting the aileron is not confined to the aileron itself. It affects the entire area ahead of the aileron as well.

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The effect of the aileron, like that of wing warping, amounts to a change in angle of attack. This understanding helps clarify what is happening in a steady-state roll. Why does an airplane with deflected ailerons settle at a steady-roll rate rather than roll faster and faster? It’s because the rotation reduces the angle of attack of the up-going wing and increases that of the down-going one. The change, which is opposed to the change caused by aileron deflection, is not uniform. It is greatest at the tip, where the rotational velocity of the wing, relative to the forward velocity of the airplane, is greatest. When the change of angle of attack due to rotation, integrated across the entire wing, is equal in magnitude to that resulting from deflection of the ailerons, the airplane is in equilibrium about its roll axis and rate of roll stops increasing.

Rate of roll is one of the “wow” numbers associated with a high-performance airplane. When we read that a T-38 or an A-4 rolls 720 degrees per second, we are amazed and wonder how the pilot knows which way is up. Arguably, roll acceleration—how quickly you get from zero to, say, 90 degrees of bank—might be more important in air combat maneuvering.

Roll rate is not a single number, however, as it increases with speed. Preferring a criterion that is independent of speed, engineers often refer to “peebee-over-toovee”—a (more or less) constant value represented by the ratio “pb/2V,” where “p” is the rate of roll in radians per second (a radian is 57.3 degrees), “b” is the wingspan, and “V” is the true airspeed (in the same units as the wingspan). Thus, for example, an airplane with a roll rate of 70 degrees per second (deg/sec), a wingspan of 35 feet, and a forward speed of 300 feet per second has a pb/2V of 0.071 radian.

In physical terms, that means that if the airplane flew past you while rolling, the path of its wingtip, in profile, would be at an angle of 0.071 x 57.3, or about 4 degrees to the flight path. That is called the “helix angle,” because the rotating wingtips form a double helix, like DNA.

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The rolling helix angle is theoretically a constant for any given airplane, determined by wing planform, aileron design, and various other subtler factors. In principle it allows you to predict an airplane’s roll rate at any speed. Things don’t quite work out that way, however, because at high speed deflecting the ailerons makes the whole wing twist, counteracting the ailerons themselves, and cables stretch, preventing the ailerons from deflecting completely. Still, helix angle remains a convenient criterion, at the very least for setting a minimum acceptable standard for rolling performance.

A 1941 National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics report set that minimum value at 0.07 for transports and bombers and 0.09 for fighters. According to some published figures with which pilots who flew the airplanes are bound to disagree, the Spitfire Mk.V and FW-190 were fast-rolling airplanes, and the P-40 was not far behind. The FW-190 rolled 151 deg/sec at 226 knots, the Spitfire 150 at 176, and the P-40 134 at 315. The P-47 rolled a mere 71 deg/sec at 250 knots, the P-51B 98 at 260, the P-38 78 at 260. The corresponding pb/2V values are 0.118, 0.163, 0.082, 0.060, 0.072, and 0.084 respectively. The T-38 scores around 0.26.

Neither helix angle nor rolling acceleration fully expresses the quality of lateral control experienced by the pilot. That has more to do with effort, linearity of response, and presence or absence of “hysteresis,” or slop. Pilots used to single out the ailerons of Bellancas for praise, but pb/2V had nothing to do with it. It was really all about the ailerons’ smooth, frictionless, instantaneous response, low forces, and lack of free play.

The fact that pb/2V is theoretically constant for a given airplane has a couple of corollaries. One is that a larger span results in a lower roll rate. Another is that roll rate in degrees per second, taken alone, is misleading.

The Sopwith Camel, one of the deadliest fighters of World War I, rolled at a mere 40 degrees a second. But if you judged it by its pb/2V of 0.083, it was equal to the P-40 and superior to the P-47 and P-51.

This column first appeared in the March 2024/Issue 946 of FLYING’s print edition.

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