Firefighter Nathan Helten was tired of having wet gloves when heading out to a fire. He knew there had to be a solution, but he couldn’t find any — so he invented one. After more than a year in the preliminary stages, Helten took his startup to market. With the advice of fellow Sedgwick County firefighters and the Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer at Wichita State University, the Handy Hook became a reality. “I knew there had to be a better way,” said Helten, who has worked as a firefighter for more than a decade. “I’ve always had that mentality.” Helten was in the middle of building a house in Garden Plain when the idea came to him. The Handy Hook not only keeps firefighter’s gloves dry between events, it helps them get ready for fires more quickly, Helten said. By allowing gloves to hang outside of the uniform instead of squashing wet gloves into pants pockets, they dry faster. In addition, Helten said, the clip minimizes glove-up time, helping to get the uniform on quicker with the hook. “I thought of an idea of being able to take your glove off by sticking something narrow down into a glove and pulling it off. So Christmas break, four years ago, I built this wicked little chunk of metal that I bolted to the side of my pants — I literally bolted it,” Helten said. From that U-shaped contraption, he continued to adapt the model, changing it more than 150 times. Finally, Helten realized he had discovered the ideal mechanism. That’s when he realized he needed help. A little more than a year ago, Helton visited the Tech Transfer and Commercialization department at Wichita State University and asked for advise on his new product.
Source: Wichita Business Journal

After more than a decade in the works, the Augusta Municipal Airport is getting ready to repave its runway. Because of disrepair and large bumps on the pavement, the runway will be fully shut down from Jan. 8 until mid-February, and then again in late March through October. As the airport has one runway, airplanes will not be able to take off or land during construction, which is an approximately $11-million effort. “The runway is in poor condition,” said Ray Self, Augusta Municipal Airport manager. “It has pretty decent-sized cracks. It’s pretty rough when you land on it.” Along with being narrower and shorter than many runways, the Augusta Airport, a taxpayer-funded public location, has a large hump in the middle of the runway, creating a line-of-sight problem. “So if you’re on one end of the runway, you cannot see the other end of the runway, which is pretty important if there’s an aircraft on the other end,” Self said. Because the airport is shifting the runway south by about 500 feet, the area will need extra work. The airport will close for preliminary dirt work on Jan. 8 and reopen at 8 a.m. Feb. 19. The final closure for repair work will begin at the end of March or early April and last through the first or second week of October, Self said. The Federal Aviation Administration is funding most of the $11-million project, but the other 10%, around $1 million, will require local funding. Because the runway is both shorter and slimmer than current standards, it will increase both its length and width, moving from 4,200 feet to 4,500 feet and widening from 60 feet to 75 feet, meeting current FAA standards. The increase in size will not only help smaller aircraft, but it will allow larger planes to utilize the Wichita-area airport.
Source: Wichita Business Journal