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After seven years at the helm of Hartzell Engine Technologies (and 22 more with Hartzell Propeller), at the end of 2017 I handed the baton to Keith Bagley to lead HET. Officially I’ve retired, but as you can see, I’m still working to promote HET.
The analogy of a relay race is a good one. Successful companies survive changes in leadership without missing a step. They are able to do this because successful companies have support from their owners and strong teams in place getting the business of the company done day in and day out. While this is the first leadership change in HET’s short history, I’m sure it will be successful because HET’s parent, Tailwind Technologies, has been extremely supportive of HET’s mission and the team at HET is very capable. Keith has the baton now and will continue to keep HET leading the long race ahead of it.
Aside from the change in the name leading HET, we’ve made several other name changes as well – those of our brands. After integrating Sky-Tec into HET, we gave considerable thought about the Sky-Tec brand and our own. While the Hartzell brand is universally recognized for propellers, our end users didn’t always make the same association of the Hartzell brand to turbochargers, alternators, starters, cabin heaters and fuel pumps. Since the Sky-Tec brand is well recognized for aircraft starters, we decided to embrace it and will be using it for HET’s entire starter line. Taking this a step further, we will do the same with our alternator product line using the Plane-Power brand. We also decided to resurrect the Janitrol Aero brand, since it is used synonymously to refer to aircraft cabin heaters.
Our dilemma then became what to do about turbocharger systems, since the Garrett and Rajay brand names were not acquired with those lines. With the help of the creative team of our marketing agency, Jajo (www.Jajo.agency) we hit on AeroForce as a great moniker for the line, since turbos utilize aerodynamics to force air into the engine. Finally, since our fuel pump line was home grown it also didn’t have a natural brand name. Again, after much discussion with Jajo we came up with Fuelcraft, as an embodiment of the precision and craftsmanship that goes into our fuel pumps.
Hartzell Engine Technologies will still be used as the corporate name and the umbrella over the five product brands. All new web sites were recently launched, so please bookmark these:
Finally on the brand name front, late last year we acquired another recognizable aviation brand, South Wind cabin heaters. HET did this to better support the fleet affected by the AD issued on these heaters last year. We recently announced an FAA approved AMOC (Alternate Method of Compliance) terminating action for this AD. You can read more about it in this issue of Vectors.
As this is my last Vectors column, I want to thank you, our customers and interested readers, for supporting HET during my tenure. It was a great run and now Keith has to carry the baton on the next column…
Sincerely,
Mike Disbrow
Hartzell Engine Technologies
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