Friends say Leonard Greene wasn’t just brilliant.
Leonard Greene
Friends say Leonard Greene wasn’t just brilliant. He thought on a different level.
With more than 150 patents to his credit, Greene, who died peacefully on November 30 in Mamaroneck, N.Y., at the age of 88, will be best remembered for the simple, metal stall-warning tab he invented in 1946. Working at Grumman during World War II as a young aerodynamicist and engineering test pilot, he was deeply troubled by an airplane crash he witnessed, the cause of which was an aerodynamic stall. His stall-warning indicator was the first of more than 60 aviation-related devices he designed, patented and sold. Today, stall-warning indicators are mandatory on all airplanes, and hundreds of thousands have been manufactured.
To market his inventions, Greene established Safe Flight Instrument in White Plains, N.Y., after the war. Sixty years later the company, now headed by Leonard’s son Randy, continues as a leading supplier of air safety devices for aircraft. Among the firm’s product portfolio are stick shakers, autothrottle systems, angle-of-attack indicators, power-line detectors, wind-shear warning devices and other lifesaving equipment. Greene tackled the dangers of wind shear after the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 66 at JFK International Airport in 1975. Within a year his first wind-shear warning system was being flight tested. A year after that it became the first such device to obtain FAA certification.
