Crop Dusting

An old friend of mine, now deceased, used to say, "if the flying doesn't kill you, the chemicals will!"

Of course, that old friend, who dusted quite a bit back in the day, died in bed at 92, so take it for what it's worth. To his credit, he got out of cropdusting pretty early in his career, though.

 

Oh Man! Thanks for that one, Rob. It took me back to 1938-39 when I used to help the crop dusters when they were operating out of Johnny Lowe's strip in Fla. No Stearmans then , Travel Airs and Waco's. I used to row spot for them and saw my good friend ,Tommy, fly under the wires if it was clear on the next field. They sprayed dust and I suppose that it was arsenic and I wonder why I'm not having some mental problems now because I rode back to the field in the hopper a few times... maybe I just THINK that I don't have any problems. Anyway, I was a lucky kid to be accepted by those guys, especially the one who sort of took me under his wing and let me fly with him in his non-duster Travel Air. He was lost in the war and going over the names of all the guys that I have known who were dusters, even those from a few years ago, they are all gone.

 

This video surfaced a memory of hearing the wheels clipping the celery tops sometimes when they dusted early in the morning when it was still. That brief shot of the Stearman strewn all over the field reminded me of my friend, Tommy Livermore , after he hit a stump one day when he didn't walk the field like he usually did. The stump was the same height as the celery tops. The wreckage of his Travel Air was rolled into a ball but all he got was a broken nose. These guys are a different breed.

 

Crop-dusting is the kind of job that will be probably be done by remote-controlled drones or fully-automated robotic drones in the near future.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdSzGxjvwDs]ZERO UAV--Pesticide Spraying UAV - YouTube[/ame]

 

This reminds me of the time I was heading north on I-5 out of Sacramento on a sunny but hazy morning in 1979. Well ahead of me, I thought I saw an airplane suddenly appear off to the right side of the freeway, and then suddenly disappear. This happened a couple of times, and not until I got closer did I realize what I was seeing. He was dusting a field perpendicular to the Interstate in an AgCat, and the field was between two lines of trees. So he was out of sight while dusting, and then pulling up at each end of the field, doing an Immelmann, and then going back down for another pass. After I passed the scene, I kept watching him in my rear-view mirror until he was out of sight.

 

Once driving out to Havasu in the middle of the night, saw these bright lights. Turns out they were dusting at 1 in the morning.

 

It's a beautiful thing, isn't it?

I row-spotted a few times as a teen working the fields & as now, was mesmerized, transfixed & as far as I no, don't think. eye half dain bramage.