Founded in 1917 by Robert N. Hartzell as the Hartzell Walnut Propeller Company, the conglomerate known today as Hartzell Aviation comprises Hartzell Propeller, Hartzell Aerospace Welding, and Hartzell Engine Tech.
By dint of innovation, investment in cutting-edge technologies, and partnerships with forward-thinking air-framers and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) start-ups, the conglomerate’s flagship division, Hartzell Propeller, has rebounded from the hardships and uncertainty of the late Twentieth-Century and, in 2021, delivered some 3,500 propellers—amounting to roughly 15,000 blades—to aircraft OEMs and aftermarket consumers alike.
Notwithstanding the multitudes of piston-engined, general aviation airplanes conveyed skyward by the company’s propellers, it is the business turboprop sector in which Hartzell’s star is most rapidly and revolutionarily rising. Currently, Beechcraft’s storied King Air family of twin turboprop business airplanes; Pilatus’s single-engine PC-12 utility aircraft and PC-21 military trainer; as well as Daher’s TBM-series of high-performance, single-engine, business airplanes and Kodiak single-engine-turboprop, backcountry, STOL aircraft all leave their respective factories fitted with Hartzell propellers.
Over its 105-year history, Hartzell—after the fashion of all enduring aerospace concerns—has continuously refined its products to keep pace with the incessant technological advancements by which the aviation industry has been compelled relentlessly futureward. By degrees, the single-piece, two-blade, fixed-pitch propellers early Hartzell craftsmen carved from walnut gave way to multi-component, three-and-four-blade, variable-pitch, reversible units cast from aerospace-grade aluminum. In the Twenty-First-Century, environmental exigencies and the advent of Advanced Air Mobility occasioned Hartzell’s investment in and manufacture of five-and-six-blade, carbon-fiber-composite propeller systems of surpassing strength, durability, and lightness. Such propellers will thrust aloft future generations of aircraft, including myriad manned and unmanned electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles currently under development.
In addition to its partnerships with Beechcraft, Pilatus, and Daher, Hartzell has forged supplier agreements with aftermarket and retrofit providers the likes of Wipaire, an American, third-generation, family-owned, aerospace manufacturing and repair company known for its aircraft floats and conversions of utility aircraft to amphibious configurations; and Blackhawk Aerospace, a Waco, Texas-based company specializing in performance upgrades of Cessna’s Caravan and Conquest, Piper’s Cheyanne, Pilatus’s PC-12, and Beechcraft’s King Air turboprop aircraft.
Wipaire will presently offer Hartzell’s Stump-Puller carbon-fiber propeller on its Caravan float-planes, while Blackhawk—the world’s largest non-OEM buyer of new Pratt and Whitney turboprop engines—currently pairs its PT6-67P PC-12 engine retrofits with Hartzell four-blade aluminum and five-blade carbon-fiber propellers.
Within the AAM sector, Hartzell five-blade composite propellers were chosen by Arlington, Washington-based Eviation to motivate its Alice electric aircraft, which made its maiden flight in September 2022.
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