Veteran Inventor partners with TriMech to help prevent helicopter engine failure

It’s every pilots’ worst nightmare. You’re 30,000 feet high, soaring high above the clouds, with the sun beaming off your face – when the engine starts to stutter. Suddenly, the helicopter stops propelling and you’re forced into a life-threatening nose dive speeding towards the earth at hundreds of feet per second.

Flash-forward to a few years later, where this very pilot (who astonishingly survived the experience by performing a strategic auto-rotation mid-air), and military veteran Kenneth Koch partnered with TriMech to use our product development services.

Together, we brought an invention to life that would prevent this type of helicopter engine failure from happening again.

The KJ Filter

After Kenneth’s helicopter crashed, the investigation process found the small fuel filter was plugged with debris, which stopped fuel from flowing to the engine.

No fuel = no fly.

Helicopters do have a sump area in the tank to catch all the debris but in this case, it was more than the sump could handle. The extra debris overflowed from the sump into the fuel filter causing the blockage. So, the idea was to collect the debris before it got to the tanks and thus, collecting it before it got to the fuel filters.

Rendering of the top portion of the invention.

How TriMech Helped Create the KJ Filter

TriMech collaborative product development services allowed us to see Kenneth’s vision and use his sketches to bring his invention idea to life. The result is a micro-filament filtering system that mounts to the fuel tank and stops debris, as small as microscopic particles, from collecting in the fuel tank. Bottom line: it keeps anything but fuel from going into the engine, decreasing the likelihood of engine failures and engine wear and tear.

“I have to admit, I was not sure how I could afford professional product development services,” says Kenneth Koch. “But we put our heads together and came up with a schedule that worked. We had very open and direct conversations about how we wanted to this look and work. I could not be happier to have a company like MAKO behind me.”