SportairUSA

Here at Ashgash we've discovered it's not a new brand I've seen the Helix name before but I don't know much about it Bill so Dan Johnson talking to Bill Canino I want you to educate me a little bit about Helix and then about what t Well Dan I discovered Helix at Fugitopin about three years ago and as you and I have been over there several times and talked to them. Generally they've been in business for about 20 years and they've been making a tremendous amount of the propellers that go on drones and now rotable ve Their biggest orders are from car companies and they're needing bigger props and so I've told them when they got into the airplane business and really wanted to show props I'd T Congratulations. They've sent their mechanics and their president to our place they've trained all of our mechanics and we are now certified to do sales and service for these propellers. Alright so what makes t It's a propeller that is totally independent of the aircraft. It's generating 45 volts of power from magnets attached to the airframe and the propeller spinning generates that voltage and the propeller has airspeed indicator if you look very close you'll see a little hole right there. Sure enough. So the propeller knows your airspeed and it knows your engine RPM so if you have no airspeed and As you level off and reduce the power it sees the RPM going down and it will adjust the propeller to fit. And it senses the speed going out. It senses the speed stabilizing at per speed and it knows both of those therefore there's no pilot interaction from t We've got it under an experimental R&D program right now for 100 hours to confirm that it works fine with the Rotex but this is where we think the direction of propellers will go particularly even for 200 horsepower solid crank T But we really want t Well t One lever in his hand says go Yes. But the mechanism is smart enough to go yes I see you've asked for full power but you're just starting to roll so that suggests climb pitch. Am I correct in saying that? That's correct. Okay. It will set the propeller for that. No duty to the pilot. No the pilot just doesn't even know- He just got There's not even a gauge in the cockpit however he can by Bluetooth pick up Okay. We'really trying to take the workload down and yet make safety apparent to even the FAA because we don't see an advantage of a ground adjustable propeller where a pilot who is not a trained mechanic may take each blade apart and torque the nuts to Hopefully that works out well but you can imagine it not. No so we really t Well we're encouraged that FAA is being accommodating of that kind of system because really I considered a safety system. It's not about making that's exactly what we're planning and without the pilot interface the pilot is not burdened with any decisions so the propeller is totally independent if you lost all the generating capacity of the engine and it was still running the propeller would still be performing normally. Now you're saying that t No it's in proofing for the Rotax and the Lycoming will be about another six months away. Again it'sportair. ero or helix. de. ero and then look for the Helix brand. We'll have a Helix website up soon but t Sure they were. Good well congratulations on that we'll look for more about Helix in the future meanw com. Thanks for talking to Bill Canino and myself here at EAA Air Venture Oshkosh.