While some 70-year-old companies are out there, not many can say one of their founders still comes to work every day. That’s the case with aviation component supplier Essex Industries, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. Founded in 1947 by Harold and Sidney Guller, the latter at the age of 93 still has a hand in the family-owned business. An exhibitor at Heli-Expo for the past two decades, the St. Louis, Missouri-based company specializes in platform controls, a large variety of valves and regulators, liquid oxygen systems and emergency breathing equipment. Essex occupies four facilities in the city, totaling 180,000 sq ft of manufacturing space. Its staff consists of 270 employees, including 35 full-time engineers, with an average tenure of 15 years. The company has moved with the times and now offers state-of-the-art rapid prototyping capability utilizing 3-D printers and quick-casting tooling technology.
According to global account executive Robert Geisz, factoring the company's acquisitions over the years, Essex has manufactured approximately 15,000 different products, and at Heli-Expo, the company (Booth 5722) is displaying a wide variety of components, including its cyclic and collective grips that are standard on the Bell 525 and have been selected for the airframer’s V280 Valor tiltrotor. The company will be giving away a cyclic grip beer tap to one lucky show visitor.
Essex entered the cryogenics market in 1963, and its liquid oxygen converter systems are found on approximately 80 percent of the medical transportation helicopters currently in service, noted Geisz. In 1991, the company acquired DuPont’s portable breathing and rescue products division, and Essex now has thousands of emergency supplemental oxygen units in service on commercial and private aircraft worldwide.
The company, a major supplier to military and commercial OEMs, also manufactures components such as pitot tubes, heater probes, hydraulic pulsation dampeners, fuel ejector pumps and flame arresters.