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Rob wrote:Cam, and Meat,

Thanks! super informative. I'd like to try a set just because. But I still think it'd take a lot of thought to adapt them to night ag.

What about the light bar? We keep them dimmed down pretty much to the max, but I wonder how the NVG's would do with an LED light source 6 feet in front of you?

Another *interesting* moment might come checking the hopper level. We have lights mounted in the hopper that we will hit in the turns now and then to make sure what the flow control says and what is really in the hopper really jive with each other. It's always startling getting in someone else's plane and hitting a switch you thought was the smoker, only to have a ball of light illuminate in front of you

The weight is likely to be a deal breaker for me in the peak season... Although I think they're ugly as sin I have recently switched over from dual lens Gallet helmets to single lens ones. The weight savings makes a huge difference in the neck / shoulder blade tension at the end of a long night. Doubtful I'd want to hang even more weight out there unless it really made an earth shattering difference.

No prob!

Our goggles have a blue/green coating on them so colors in that range show up very dim in the goggle / also how much it will tend to "washout." Depending on what the spectrum of your LED lights are, it may or may not be an issue. The more red a light is the brighter it appears in the goggles. Easily remedied by switching for "bluer" light.

As far as the weight goes, I use a slightly heavier than authorized weight bag on the back of my helmet to help balance the goggles. 3 rolls of pennies does the trick. It's more weight but it really helps balance out the helmet. For day ops I remove the weight bag (Velcro) but keep the battery pack (also velcroes to the back of the helmet) which helps balance out the visors on the helmet. A little more weight but better balance really helps on long and stressful missions.

Here's those pics.

This one with the Soldier in it shows a drawback to the goggles, they stay focused on whatever optical distance you set them at, near or far. That means a lot of looking under the goggles for things in the cockpit, but after about 30-50 feet they're in pretty good focus to infinite if you focus them long like we do. If you focus them in shorter you lose a lot of benefits that NVGs have to offer. When I set mine up the first thing I do is set the tube focus to something about 150-200' away, then I dial in each eyepiece to ensure maximum focus for my eyeballs.





The bright lights in the background are super bright, though it was a night of pretty high illumination. That soft-sided hangar light you can see behind the aircraft was as bright as daylight inside. It was a 24-hour maintenance clamshell so we kept it extra bright for that reason.







The one you see that's not a full picture was taken with my iPhone in flight and I didn't quite get it lined up between my face and the goggles, but it shows what happens on a moderately illuminated night (moon cycle) with bright lights (Baghdad) in the background. The rest were all taken with a nice point-and-shoot and a pair of goggles that weren't mounted on a helmet.





Ok, done hijacking your thread!

Meat Servo wrote:Only difficulty with your cat skinning is I see is holding the ends from that height? My turn to say not being critical but trying to learn.

Touche ! I totally get where you are going there! which is what I get for making a hypothetical observation when a perfectly qualified person already did a real life assessment and undoubtedly made the correct choice

Meat Servo wrote:... and are above the working range of lights ....

and that range is not very far... In fact most people have the work lights on a momentary and just leave them off in the turns...


Cam, thanks for the cool pix... I am still really curious, but to be honest not completely sold what I see when the lights come on is really no different than what you see in broad daylight... I just don't get any distance, or long range peripheral... I can imagine it being very claustrophobic to some...

Here's an attempt at a night comparison, probably pretty grainy compared to real life, so hard to see the texture and color factors, but notice in the second one that even with poor photo quality, you can still see the sprinklers just like daytime;


Romaine lettuce



Leaf Lettuce and Romaine... too obvious of a color difference here... wish I had something closer like romaine next to iceberg or something.

And yes, apologies to Luke for the thread drift...

Take care, Rob

Yesterday I tied my previously biggest oh shit moment in aviation, only this time I wasn't in my 180 and had a full hopper with half tanks gas. Long story short skidded a power pole between my ass cheeks at 155mph. Hot, heavy, downwind, powerful thermal, 20-25mph winds.

My question is this, what conditions do you guys shut it down for? Seems like down here it'd take a hurricane to keep people from flying. I'm sure I sound like a pussy but many days I am in complete survival mode, it's like riding a rank bull for hours on end. The obstacles alone make this precarious flying in cool crisp air, add the winds that are usually 20 G35mph and the thermals that you'd have to have experienced in a loaded down plane like this to comprehend, and well I find myself asking what the fuck I'm doing out there and why I'm risking my life for a farm field that IMO could just wait for better conditions.

However, the other side of the coin is that I really do enjoy it most of the time and worked really hard to be here. Just wanting to know how other folks are getting it done and in what conditions they shut it down?

Higher economic threshold allows for more chemical more often. In my day it wasn't worth the waste of chemical.

add the winds that are usually 20 G35mph

I'm not sure I'd get anything to hit the ground or crop with my ground rig with a 60 foot boom at that speed. That would be 20 psi,10 gallons per acre, and boom about 20 inches off the ground. Did you go look at the field and check the results?

What kind of wind someone can applicate in is kind of like what kind of crosswind they can take, or how fast they can turn an airplane... No two peoples answer is gonna be the same. I made the mistake of second guessing someone else's technique a few posts up ... Wind questions just lead you down that same road.
And then as Contact alluded , different economic thresholds are going to mandate different actions. Sometimes an app may be so costly, critical, or limited, that the grower may require perfect conditions. Sometimes a crop is getting ate alive, and immediate action that is not perfect, but puts a dampening effect to control the rate of loss is warranted. This is when the grower asks you to 'push the wind'... No one can give you a blanket answer for those scenarios...

This, do this in your learning... specially when you get turned loose on herbicide work :

180Marty wrote:Did you go look at the field and check the results?

Wind and humidity issues are two of the several driving forces that push night work.... Undoubtedly wind makes hitting the target a challenge, and is obviously the number one reason for delaying, postponing, or even turning down a job. Many times we even need several different winds to complete one job. But when people get too wrapped up in what ambient windspeed the spray is leaving the airplane at, I wonder if they've forgotten that in no wind it is leaving the nozzles at 140+ / - mph... ... Hit the ground at 25? sure it will.... where and when it hits ground is what is going to put you out of business if you get it wrong...

Got any dry work? whenever I have dry to do I 'stockpile' that work for mid day, when it's gonna be windy, bumpy and miserable. Almost everything 'dry' I do is way lighter than spray (in the hopper), and most of it dense enough to fall right through a hurricane

Take care, Rob

Hey Luke,

Hope today spraying went smoother and as a very wise old owl once said...;

GumpAir wrote:If "X" type of flying job hooks you, it'll take more than a little bumpy air and stinking every day to keep you from doing it.

Welcome to the real world of driving airplanes for a living. It's mostly a lot of hard work, and doing awesome shit that no one but you is gonna know about.

Gump

Take care, Rob

Oh, and hey... the farmers thread is kicking our @$$ in cool pics.... which seems natural, because aside from the military farmers do have the coolest toys

These are not mine, I like them so much they hang in my shop;

one for the non diesel burning crowd;



and a couple for the rotor crowd

That's a nice pattern by the yellow Cessna. I first thought the exact 90 degree vortices were trick photography but I figured out it was on the ground behind the airplane.

Thanks Rob, today was a great day!!! Gumps words are spot on to my experience so far my goal all along has been to make it through this season and go from there. We've got a great crew here and that makes this job even better!

Those are awesome pics, especially the second one of the chopper, badass

The valley is experiencing a new bug that has never been encountered like this before, the sugarcane aphid. Supposedly before it's over every acre of grain will get sprayed by ground or air. Still waiting on feedback on the aerial application. These are crops that are not heavily infested yet in the picture


Sprayed grain again today n just finished up

Because of chemical and application cost and low value of some crops, we used to try to time some applications to get two broods. It never worked well. I have never seen a bug that was not so much easier to kill when young. When they get big, they drink the stuff. Revenge killing is not effective.

I wonder what the difference is between the sugarcane and chinese soybean aphid? I was the first one to spray for soybean aphids around here close to 15 years ago. Just happened to be out looking at my soybeans on a Sunday evening and they're covered with something I'd never seen before. My Air Tractor friend from Missouri stopped by here Monday morning on his way home from Jackson MN where he'd been spraying for the little buggers. They evolved over here from Wi. Anyway he wondered if I had any. I told him I had something but I didn't know what and we went and I showed him. We got his ground crew turned around and back to Paullina and sprayed. Even the experts around here thought I was wasting my money but at harvest it looked like the right thing to do. Ever since just about everybody sprays when the aphids show up which is pretty often. Anymore there are people that spray with a ground rig with herbicide that probably shouldn't because they do kill some beneficials when the aphids aren't really that bad.

Beneficial control requires a lot of organization and even dictatorial control. Stauman Pecan Farms were private and commercial crop dusters until they went to seeding June bugs on Pecan case borers. Everyone in the Mesilla Valley went to June bugs.

Another rotorhead cropduster here.

I spray in the Salinas Valley here in CA where the average job is somewhere in the neighborhood of 7-10 acres Not uncommon to have a 1.2 acre job...just one "planting" in a 7 acre "field". Sometimes we spray 3 different mixes in that 7 acre "field" of the same crop

Here's one of the rarities of the job! For one, it's a big job (32 acres), and two, you can actually see your work after the application. In this case I was spraying young peppers that were planted in a black plastic bed covering. The black beds would show the wet spray (20gpa) for a short time after application, so I decided to take a couple pics.





I'm sure some of you are wondering why I sprayed the field this way.
1. The long axis is across the rows which saves time and $$$. Longer passes equals less turns, and saves time (I figure on 7-12 seconds per turn depending on load/atmospheric conditions). In this case I had the field to the south to line up on to make it easier to stay on course during the spray run.

2. Obviously I was skipping rows during the application. We use antiquated Trimble AgNavs with simple path and speed guidance on the lightbar, so calibrating he field is always a math problem!! This was a 6 load job so I started the field with my "A-B" line and worked to the East. This means that if I spray all the even numbered passes and end up at the end of the field after the 3rd load, then my calibration is on, and I know the field is the size it supposed to be. Then, I just make sure to duplicate for the odd numbers passes to finish the job!

Here's an example of one of the shit fields we have to spray. It's a triangle, which no cropduster likes!! And it a wire patch..:which no cropduster likes This particular field is actually about 14 acres, but before this pic was taken, there was leaf lettuce in the field and I had to spray the north end, (4 acres) which is the lighter colored end under all the wires. Notice the wires going diagonal through the field, and also on each end parallel to the roads.


A little more perspective:

Another rotorhead cropduster here.

Thanks for the pic's. Definitely looks like an "interesting" place to spray.

Bart,

Awesome pics! I love being able to actually 'see' my work, but it's really cool when you can actually see it going down. For me this usually only occurs with something really heavy bodied and lots of color contrast to the crop, and then only in flat light with certain plants... it never looks like it'd be something you could capture on film.

Nothing more satisfying than going back on a good herbicide or defol job and seeing it from the air... Do you ever find yourself tooling along with a pax pointing out airplane 'tracks' ? I try not to point out the ones that would make the guy look bad even if it was the competition

Triangles .... I hate point rows specially wired up ones...

Salinas looks just like home to me.... Which probably comes as no surprise to you since Yuma is Salinas' sister 'produce' city... Dan's area looks exactly like your's, except with more mountains and wires. Mine tends to have HUGE fields in comparison... Tons of 20's and even giant 40's

Take care, Rob