EXECUTIVE WATCH Todd Tetzlaff


President and CEO of Enstrom Helicopter Corp. By Rick Weatherford


WHEN TODD TETZLAFF TALKS... PEOPLE LISTEN


“I’m really good at dumbing things down because I’m not that bright,” says the man who is now leading the revival of past-bankrupt Enstrom Helicopter Corporation, based in Menominee, Michigan. In a relaxed interview that spanned over an hour at this year’s recent HAI Expo in Atlanta, one gets the sense that Todd Tetzlaff is completely candid when he confesses his shortcoming. No, not because the aircraft engineering technology graduate from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is “not that bright.” After all, Tetzlaff has held FAA engineering designee privileges with flight analyst and structural authorities for over 20 years and is also a certified private fixed-wing and commercial rotary- wing pilot. He bilingually and fluently speaks the advanced languages of engineers and pilots. He also was the object of a decades long tug-of-war between Enstrom Helicopter and Gulfstream for his abilities, when he bounced back and forth between helicopters and jets until helicopters won. Of course, he humbly doesn’t see himself as an object of pursuit; he was the pursuer and just grateful to be working in aerospace.


There’s something refreshing and real about the now CEO/ president who so loves Enstrom Helicopter that he’d do anything, even leave his comfort-zone cubicle in Georgia to move back North into the C-suite, to help save the helicopter manufacturer that was his first love. He may have been apprehensive — as any thinking person with self- awareness would be — upon being presented the chance to take a big bite from the apple of opportunity (big bites can choke). But Tetzlaff quickly and bravely concluded, “I didn’t want to be sitting somewhere in five years regretting that I’d not tried and had instead passed on a very rare opportunity, asking myself, ‘What might have been?’” Much of his life has been a war to overcome what he calls “debilitating shyness” and win that struggle one battle at a time. How long has he been fighting with dogged determination? The 54-year-old takes us back to his Wisconsin high school...


14 Mar/Apr 2023


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