Crop Dusting share your picture and stories.

[Complete Turf Care]

When I was working on a rice farm, I would put on a raincoat so that I could 'flag' an irregular shaped field for the aerial applicator to spray. I would crouch down to the ground when the airplane passed over me, then take x steps and wave the flag for the next pass.
Most of the time when I did this, they were applying propanil, which is a herbicide for grassy weeds.
That was 40-50 years ago. About 30-40 years ago, they started using GPS and no longer needed flagmen.

 

[K5lwq]

This past February our local cropduster was testing some new equipment:
View attachment 882016

View attachment 882017

Beautiful pictures!! Thanks for sharing these!

 

[K5lwq]

A couple of years before my dad passed I took him to Olney TX to tour the Air Tractor plant. They were just shutting down production for the day. The manager took dad and I into the plant and explained how the planes moved through the building for different stages of assembly. Then he told us to have fun and at the end of the line there is a finished plane that he told us to feel free to climb into the cockpit. We had a blast. They did not have any we could test fly but said they would schedule something if we wanted to come back. We never did that but sure thought about it.

The story of Snow moving the operations to Olney was very interesting. There is a picture of him pulling his plane on the main gear behind a 57 Chevy truck. Cool picture. The link below shares some of the story but much more on the walls of their offices.

Our Heritage

Our Heritage Build a better airplane. Keep improving it. By most accounts, it’s fair to say that Air Tractor founder Leland Snow did more to advance the ag aviation industry...

airtractor.com

 

[flyerdan]

Between the human flaggers in the fields and gps, there was the automatic flagman system that came out in the early 70's, I believe. A heavy cardboard trapezoidal base with two streamers of toilet paper-like material in a chute on top of one wing within the propwash to pressurize it so there would be one over the solenoid so it could be popped upwards out of the frame and away.
When the plane came in, you'd hook up the hopper hose, start the pump, grab a box of flags and fill the dispenser, clean the bugs off the windscreen, unhook the hose and it's taking off again. Start mixing the next load and do it all again in a few minutes.

 

[Complete Turf Care]

I remember the toilet paper flags. They didn’t seem to be very effective.

 

[bdhsfz6]

Every time I think of crop dusting, I'm reminded of the iconic scene from Hitchcock's North by Northwest:

 

[bindian]

Only ag plane I ever worked on was a Piper Pawnee Brave with a P&W PT6 behind the prop.

 

[Sigarms]

Off topic, but I learned about crop dusting in the south.

It's when you pass gas (AKA flatulence) and walk by some people.

Never forget when a co worker started laughing when I started gagging by a smell.

In his heavy NC dialect, he just looked at me and informed me I've just been crop dusted. Got to admit, thought it was a funny phrase. Never heard of the phrase for that use up north.

 

[MossRoad]

Last year my wife and I were pulling into a Menards store, and she said "there's a helicopter parked at that hotel." I was like.... what? So we went back and looked. Yep. A spraying helicopter sitting in a weed patch vacant lot next to the hotel. There were also two tanker trucks with landing pads on top in the parking lot. Apparently they were a spraying outfit from Alabama or close to that with contracts to spray power line right of ways.

 

[Long Roof]

This is from 2019 in Macon County IL. I happened to be on the front porch with my camera and got an entertaining show.