Jul 022011
Past few weeks have been “Cropdusting Season” around here. I believe I’ve only seen a single cropduster, but I’ve seen that single cropduster rather commonly; the pilot is certainly being kept busy. Most of the time the patterns are flown kinda tight… the tighter the turns, the faster the turns, and the sooner the job is done. But a few of the locations, such as farms butted up against Thatcher Mountain, require even harsher maneuvering.
It looks like a hoot.
2 Responses to “Now That Looks Like Fun”
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He’s using a fairly old type of agricultural aircraft.
It’s a Piper PA-25 Pawnee; the aircraft first flew in 1957 with production ceasing in 1982.
Nowadays, your ag plane isn’t stylish unless it has a turboprop engine.
Ah, if only the PZL-Mielec M-15 Belphegor had made it into production – there just aren’t enough turbojet powered biplanes in the world: http://jetphotos.net/showphotos.php?aircraft=PZL-Mielec%20M-15%20Belphegor
Designed to spray huge collective farms, the Belphegor would have hardly had to maneuver at all over the vast Soviet seas of cropland that were the Ukraine.
Nice try, Poland.
The big problem with cropdusters (the pilots get really pissed if you call them that, as they are “Ag Aircraft”) is the type of new pilots they attract – which are basically barn-stormers out to have a wild time no matter who gets killed, including themselves… I could tell you so many horror stories about what I saw their pilots do in the twelve years I served out at Jamestown airport, including endangering airliners with 20 passengers aboard.
The survivors, who get around 5-10 years under their belt without getting grounded by the FAA or dying or crippled in a crash, get to be top-notch pilots, real professionals who do the job with precision.
Almost all crashes were due to pilot error or screwing around, not a mechanical failure of the aircraft.
I never did get to do what I wanted to…talking our oldest cropduster pilot into letting me repaint his big Ag-Cat biplane as a SBC Curtiss Helldiver dive bomber off of the Lexington.
God, it would have been _majestic_. 😀