BARNSTORMER!

Delta crop dusters a different, essential breed of aviator

By Dwain Hebda

Photography by Rebecca Fellers

Tommy Anderson buzzes through the Delta morning sky, his yellow plane crisp and sharp against the wild blue yonder. Lining up an approach, he swoops across a field as spray flutters behind him, dispensed by nozzles lining his wings. In what feels like an instant, he’s covered the length of the field, and with a pilot’s touch honed over four decades, smoothly moves the stick to gain altitude, safely out of reach of trees and the omnipresent electrical wires below.

There’s no telling exactly how many times he’s done this aerial dance since his first flight in 1981, but a few minutes’ observation — and the knowledge that he’s never crashed a plane — tells you you’re looking at a master at work.

Ask him about his profession and Anderson answers with the unique perspective of an ag aviator, a different breed of pilot who lives life somewhere between aw shucks and oh sh**.

“Well, for me, it’s all about managing your risk,” he said. “I think the trick is you have to be aggressive enough, obviously, to get the job done but cautious enough to live to do it another day.”

You’re not likely to see more accomplished flying than that of Anderson or the 3,400 other agricultural top guns the National Agricultural Aviation Association estimates exist in the U.S. today. Few aerial jobs outside of precision military outfits like the Blue Angels or Thunderbirds demand such unrelenting concentration and skill, as there’s little outside of an active war zone that’s a more dangerous work environment for pilots.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, crop duster deaths only account for about 4 percent of total aviationrelated fatalities, but the laws of scale and proportion make that misleading. Ag pilots generally fly solo, which means crashes don’t incur passenger deaths associated with a commercial airliner. Take the collateral passenger damage out of the picture and the numbers are stunning — despite employing a mere fraction of pilots, ag aviation typically accounts for 10 percent of all pilot deaths annually. Aerocorner.com puts it another way, noting that in 2017, 0.02 percent of ag pilots had a fatal accident, compared to 0.003 percent of general aviation pilots. Moreover, these statistics haven’t changed much over time.

Commercial aviation accident rates have taken a nosedive over the past few decades with 80 percent improvement between 2007 and 2017 alone. Last year, the International Civil Aviation Organization reported a 10 percent decrease in accidents and 66 percent decrease in fatalities compared to 2020, even though total scheduled flights were up 11 percent worldwide. Meanwhile, crop dusters average about five wrecks a month in North America alone.

As a matter of fact, of the 21 aviation incidents in Arkansas investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board last year, five involved crop dusters, including one mid-air collision between two planes near Portland. In all, the crashes resulted in three fatalities.

The inherent dangers of the profession are self-evident and numerous, from power lines and tree windbreaks to mechanical failure. Yet Anderson remains philosophical — you can’t very well devote 40-plus years to a career that puts your butt 15 feet off the ground at 150 miles per hour without a certain acceptance of hazard.

“It’s completely different than it was when I started in 1981,” he said. “In the ’90s, most people started operating turbine airplanes, and about that time they developed GPS guiding systems, so we no longer had to have human flaggers in the field. That technology has improved over the years and made our job so much easier, and the airplanes are all air-conditioned and heated.

“No doubt, I’ve had friends who’ve lost their life doing this. But I always felt when my dad and I quit farming and he started driving an over-the-road truck, and I still believe this, his job is just as dangerous if not more than mine.”

Agricultural aviation traces its roots back more than 100 years. In 1921, John Macready took off from Dayton, Ohio, in a Curtiss JN-6 “Jenny” bound for nearby Troy. The Army test pilot and former World War I fighter ace was running a sortie of another magnitude, to repel a horde of catalpa sphinx moths threatening a grove of catalpa trees. After six passes, as noted by Flying magazine, the enemy was vanquished, and a daring new industry was born.

Over the subsequent decades, the industry grew rapidly both in number of companies and aviation technology, as aircraft manufacturers began producing models specifically for the job. One company, Huff-Daland, leaned hard into the new industry, designing a biplane for the work, dubbed The Puffer, and forming an agricultural division, Huff-Daland Dusters, in 1925. The company’s 18 planes represented the largest privately owned fleet in the world at that time, but it was just the beginning; 20 years later, Huff-Daland rebranded as Delta Air Lines.

Today, there are about 1,560 aerial application businesses (the industry’s preferred term) in the United States, with at least one located in all but five states, per NAAA. Aerial applications, however, are conducted in all 50 states, treating about 127 million acres of farmland or roughly 28 percent of the nation’s agricultural acres. Use on timber lands is even more robust; NAAA reports nearly all of the nation’s forested acres are treated via air.

Anderson’s operation, which he bought in 1994 after 11 years as a staff pilot, runs roughly from Pine Bluff in Jefferson County to England in Lonoke County, treating corn, soybeans, cotton, rice and wheat. Contrary to popular perception, his services aren’t just limited to the growing season.

“We start off the year with what we call the burndown sea- son,” he said. “Minimum till or no-till agriculture is much more popular than it was 30 years ago, so we’ll spray and clean the ground up. Also, we’re fertilizing the winter wheat crop, so that’s something that keeps us going. Rice planting, the normal season, will be around the first of April and go through the first of June.

“June is our busiest month; we will do sometimes 20 percent of our year’s business in the month of June, and then we’re still busy in July and August. September, it starts tapering off, but in 2022, we did some flying all 12 months.”

Anderson is typical of most operators, the vast majority of whom are either current or past crop dusters. Stan Clark, owner of ChrisAir in Lake Village, however, is an anomaly. While he holds a pilot’s license, he doesn’t actually spray fields, instead focusing on overall strategy and executive leadership where he keeps a steady hand on the rudder, navigating changing market slipstreams.

“Any [agricultural aviation] operation in the country, probably more so than any other business, operates under a unique environment,” he said. “No two operations are the same; number of customers, relationship with customers, how far you go, what you apply and in which season. There’s a lot of different dynamics.”

“In our case, we used to do aerial seeding, but there’s not a whole lot of that in our part of the world; we may only see a few hours of actual seeding anymore. But we’re fortunate enough in southeast Arkansas to retain a pretty diverse crop mix, and we’ve continued to have a decent amount of cotton and rice and soybeans and corn. A lot of places in the country, that hasn’t really been the case, and as things have come and gone, it’s been a little more volatile.”

Clark said the advantages to a farmer using aerial application versus pulling a spreader behind them on a tractor generally boil down to time and practicality. He said serving a 15-to-20 mile radius, as ChrisAir does, ensures the company can respond quickly to customer needs.

“There are times where there’s an economic benefit to using the airplane because it’s wet and you’d be rutting up the field and damaging your surface there. Obviously, there are some situations you get into, like a flooded rice field, where you could never do it [with ground equipment],” he said.

“You may have limited time, like maybe ahead of some weather, for putting out fertilizer. And then later on, when you start irrigating, you’ve got to shut off irrigation water before you can run across with ground equipment. Then you’re out there running over all your pipes because they run right up to where you’ve planted. A lot of times, once they start irrigating, especially cotton, that’s usually the end of ground operations, so as not to damage irrigation piping.”

Crop dusters face unique obstacles to making their businesses fly but also some run-of-the-mill issues like the volatility of fuel prices.

For everything that’s unique to the crop dusting business, there are equally pressing concerns that are more run of the mill to other industries, such as regulation, attracting and retaining personnel, capital and equipment investment and controlling operating costs.

“Well, of course, the cost of fuel is a huge one,” Clark said. “The airplanes we operate now burn a tremendous amount of it, and [price is] so volatile, you can’t count on it one load of fuel to the next. It’ll jump around rather dramatically.

“The cost of the equipment makes it a little more restrictive, probably not so much from our standpoint, but for a new pilot to get into the business. In the 1970s, it was all small, inexpensive, slow ag planes, and there wasn’t much of a step to get into something like that. Now the airplanes that we operate are giant, 1,300 horsepower, and they can carry as much payload as a B-17 could carry on a long-range mission with bombs.”

More specifically, each crop dusting outfit in the U.S. runs 2.3 aircraft on average, per the NAAA, each costing from $100,000 to $2 million, depending on hopper size, engine type and engine size. The vast majority of aircraft are fixed-wing models — 81 percent turbine powered and 19 percent piston engines — with 16 percent of applications done by helicopters.

Compared to other private planes, ag aircraft is designed to be the burros of the sky, with fewer frills in terms of comfort but built exceptionally tough to withstand between 30 to 100 takeoffs and landings daily, much of it on rough landing strips.

Costly though it may be, improved aircraft and other technology has helped companies be more efficient. In the past, human flaggers on the ground moved along the length of a field, showing the pilot where each pass ended to ensure even coverage. Today, advanced sprayer controls and GPS guidance have taken over to make crop dusting much more precise.

“We’re held to a lot higher quality standard than we would have been decades ago, plus the cost of the products we’re putting out is a lot more expensive and potentially a lot more damaging to adjacent crops,” Clark said. “The GPS guiding systems and centimeter-type accuracy and flow control systems have made the pilot’s job less subjective, as far as where you are in the field, and given them the tools to do a more precise job.

“It’s a completely different business than it was 20 years ago, as technology improves and equipment improves. Even something like our scheduling software that we use, which is all cloud-based, I can email map files to pilots that they install in the airplane. You used to have someone come out and point on a map, if you had one available, what they wanted you to do. It’s just very different than when we started.”

A&M Flying Service

Carlisle

Arkla Flyers

Portland

Ark Mo Aviation

Pollard

Ark Tex Aviation

Texarkana

Ashley Air Demott

Dermott

Aufderheide Flying Service

DeWitt

Bell Flying

Newport

Bullock Flying Service

De Witt

Bush Hogging

Malvern

Cameron Aerial Application

Omaha

Cartillar Flying Service

Hickory Ridge

Chism Flying Service

Brinkley

ChrisAir

Lake Village

Corning Farm Supply

Corning

Custom Air

Roe

Desha Flying Service

Tillar

Dixie Flying Service

Bradley

E & M Flying Service

Holly Grove

Farm Air

Minturn

Farm Brothers Flying Service

Altheimer

Farm Brothers Flying Service

Gould

Farm Brothers Flying Service

Pine Bluff

Arkansas Crop Dusting Providers

Farmers Aerial Seeders

Stuttgart

Farms Gwin

Stamps

Flanigan Aviation

Pollard

French Agri Services

Jonesboro

Frost Flying

Marianna

George Tidwell Flying Service

Carlisle

Gibson Flying Service

Marianna

Girdley Flying Service

Keiser

Glosup

McGehee

Glover Flying Service

Tillar

Grubbs Aero

Harrisburg

Hamlin Flying Service

Wynne

Hammock Flying Service

Walnut Ridge

Hartley Flying Service

Stuttgart

Hickman Crop Dusting

Hazen

Holly Grove Flying Service

Holly Grove

Hoxie Flying Service

Walnut Ridge

H T Hankins Flying Service

Oil Trough

Ives Brothers, Inc.

Wheatley

James Price Flying Service

Blytheville

J Harmon Flying Service

Jonesboro

J & R Flying Service

Alicia

J T Hall

Weiner

Keller Flying Service

Weiner

Keo Flying Service

Keo

King Agricultural

Flying Services

Dumas

Larry Lester Flying Service

Augusta

Lepanto Crop Service

Etowah

Marked Tree Flying Service

Marked Tree

McCormick’s Crop Care

Paragould

Morrison Aircraft Corporation

Cash

North Hughes Flying Service

Brickeys

O & K Aviation

Grubbs

Osceola Aerial Services

Osceola

Penrose Flying Service

McCrory

Perkins Air Service

Dumas

Poorboys Flying Service

Bay

Propst Helicopters

Black Rock

Quinn Aviation

Caraway

Rice Flying Service

Corning

Richard & Toni Whitehorn

Piggott

R & W Flying Service

Knobel

Sandy Kings Bush Hoggings

Bonnerdale

Shivers, Inc.

Proctor

Simpson Flying Service

Dell

Skarda Flying Service DeValls

Bluff

South Delta Aviation

Helena

Southern Aire

Cotton Plant

Southern Airworks

Tillar

S & S Flying Service

Bono

Standridge Flying Service

Lake Village

Stokes Airport

Earle

Stokes Flying Service

Parkin

Summit Helicopter

Western Grove

Tommy’s Flying Services

Sherrill

Trites Flying Service

Gillett

Turrell Flying Service

Turrell

United Agri Products

Blytheville

Wallin Agri Aviation

Walnut Ridge

Ward’s Flying Service

Eudora

Webb Flying Service

England

Weldon Flying Service

Tupelo

Whirlwind Aviation

Fisher

Wilburn Johnson

Weiner

Wilmot Aero Wilmot

Wilson Flying Service

Walnut Ridge

Source: CropDustingServices.com