So You Want to be a Crop Duster?

The aerial application business is very short of young spray pilots today. It seems as though no one wants to take an interest in the aviation field as we young boys did by hanging on the airport fence watching the old J.3 cubs, Aeronica Champs, Stearmans, Travelairs, Air Coups, and many others too numerous to mention.

With all the FAA regulations now, it takes a determined young individual to go through the courses to acquire the necessary licenses in order to be qualified to begin to actually start spraying in a spray aircraft. They must also know a little bit about the farming business, the chemical businesses, in order to know what chemical to put on what type crops and the proper timing to apply these chemicals to get the most good out of them.

Also the requirements of the insurance company has made it very tough for an operator to hire a young, inexperienced pilot. Most insurance companies require them to have 1000 hours of actual crop spraying experience plus I believe around 500 hours in type of aircraft that you want to start him or her in. Therefore, most operators will put them in an older spray airplane that has been around many years that they have paid for and the operator themselves take the chance of losing that aircraft in case of an accident. With the price of new aircraft that are so popular now days at $800,000 dollars up to $1.3 million dollars it's no wonder an operator would not want to start a brand-new pilot out in one of these aircraft nor would the insurance companies be happy with it either.

Even if the young pilot had quite a bit of time in other aircraft flying among the cell towers and the high lines and all the wires and obstacles and the farmers silos that are around the fields and through the fields that have to be sprayed, it takes quite a bit of experience to know when to start the pull-up in order to clear these obstacles and still get a good job of spraying done on the cornfield.

In the area that I'm in, they are considering putting these big wind generators in the farmers fields and right now they have little skinny poles up 199 ft. high with no orange balls, no paint, and no light on top. You can barely see the guywires that hold them in position and when the sun is in your eyes and you're going toward them, you sure had better be over 200 ft. high or you're going to meet one head on. I'm still having a hard time understanding why a farmer would want to give up the use of an aircraft to save his crop from some kind of infestations years down the road just for the money that he receives for this monster that's in his field blocking any aerial spray operators from helping him out.

Sincerely,
Harold Blackledge
Just my two cents