Any agricultural pilot worth his salt is intimately familiar with the manually adjustable DUMP handle commonly used to open and close the AG gate door during fertilizer and seeding operations.
The DUMP handle manual adjustment has been in use for years and ships standard on Air Tractor aircraft that have a Transland 5” AG gate installed.
The forces required to manually operate the dry gate are fairly high and a long day of fertilizer or seed work can be pretty hard on the pilot’s left arm.
Various AG pilots asked Trotter Controls for a very simple to operate, all-electric system that functions identically to the manual dry gate adjustment mechanism.
The term “IRON ARM” was born since a product that literally replaces the pilot’s left arm for dry gate work was needed. The team at Trotter Controls started on the project and Lary Graf of Angelina Flying, Inc. out of Vidalia, LA offered to help define the system features as well as perform initial testing of the system.
Lary’s experience in the industry helped the Trotter Controls team to develop a reliable, no-frills solution. The IRON ARM all-electric actuator replaces one of the vertical linkages used in the manual DUMP handle mechanism. This arrangement keeps the electric actuator inside the fuselage and functions exactly like the original manual gate adjustment mechanism. The IRON ARM actuator works with any manual 5” gate and is
installed with only two bolts.
The design allows for the existing manual DUMP handle and the existing manual gate adjuster to be used if the IRON ACTUATOR is turned off or is INOP.
The IRON ARM was recently installed on one of Angelina’s AT802 aircraft fitted with a Transland 5” manual gate. The system worked as expected with plenty of speed and force for reliable operation.
Lary Graf said that “The system is super easy to install and operate. The best part about it is that if the IRON ARM were to fail, I can still get my work done using the manual DUMP handle and manual gate adjuster instead of going back to the hangar to work on the gate system”.
The product is a great example of how experienced pilots can guide industry to create products that are tailored to fit the unique challenges that AG operations bring to aviation.
