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

agreed 100% and more…

and of course, the purpose of my post was not to 'glamorize' ag ( or SEAT) flying for that matter, nor was it intended to insinuate that those of us that do choose to fly ag are some kind of jedi super pilots…

The intention behind the post was to illustrate the fact that the giant ultra picturesque wingover you see that almost empty 2014 AT-602 pulling next to the highway on a cool still summer morning, is not an accurate portrayal of the day to day grind of either of these careers.

Yes they are all hard work, and yes I believe that is true of the vast majority of flying careers. And sorry to burst any bubbles but…

whee wrote:Parts of Rob's story sounds great but then stuff like getting beat up in rough air with no option to quite make me wonder if I should just go back to a desk job

I know of no other phenomena (short of mother nature) that creates more 'weather' than fire! Guess what? being a SEAT driver, you're going to have to fly fires! you're not going to get the luxury of choosing when you want to fly, and it's guaranteed not to be the flying wx you'd choose for a nice sunday morning breakfast run


Breaking into ag…. there are a million ways to skin that cat, but Skaly, pretty much sums the whole thing up well. The one thing I will add is that if you truly want to fly a SEAT, then you are targeting the Air Tractor 802. This is essentially the top of the ag aviation fleet…. you will have to align your elected career path accordingly, and treat it as such.

Sorry Mike, there are no more pistons on Federal contracts, and most states are following suit. Arkansas still has Dromaders operated by Western Pilot Services, and there are a couple others, but not for long...

There is no one that is going to flip you the keys to a multi million dollar single seat aircraft without some way of showing you are competent to operate that aircraft (that by the way doesn't even begin to touch on the fact that operating the aircraft is secondary to actually performing the job of either fire fighting or aerial application). How do you get competent in an AT-802? well flying a 602 would be a pretty great in! Competence in a 602? well... flying a 502, 402, or Thrush of various flavor would do…. you get the idea… Just like no one is going to toss me the keys to a triple 7, without having taken some steps to reach that destination…

There are exceptions to every rule, and as such I know of two glider pilots who made it into the cockpit of working 802's with very minimal powered airplane time. Both were amazing sticks for their young years, both had solid 'ins' and both took other steps in their training to compensate for the areas they were short in. This is probably a lot less likely to occur flying ag, because there the task of flying (in most applications) is truly secondary to the task of applicating… you simply can't fake a 'kill' nor can you undo that potentially bankrupting demon called 'drift'… This is why Skaly will not be allowed to fly herbicide until he has gained experience.

Schools… There is no way in heck you are going to learn a whole lot about aerial application in the small time allotted to you by the financial constraints of your educational budget. Notice I didn't blame the school, because most schools have at least one working ag pilot on staff, several actually function as operators as well as schools. Consequently they should be thought of no differently than any other operator who is willing to train you. What a school will provide you with is insurability… This may or may not be of value to you. If you have an 'in' who is willing to take the time and expense of training you on, and if their insurance carrier will sign off on it, you will be time and money ahead to pass on the school. If you are not so fortunate, having gone to a school will make you insurable, and consequently more marketable to an operator who is not willing to risk their equipment or insurance training someone the basics. I have seen it done both ways, many, many times.
Even after attending an ag school you will probably know nothing of the application practices related to the region and / or crop you are tasked with taking care of. Insurable it will make you, an ag-pilot, it will not... Spraying fungicide on corn is vastly different than taking care of produce, which is a world apart from fertilizing timber or seeding rangeland, all of which are completely foreign to the guy planting rice… None of that will be a part of your ag school curriculum...

A couple last thoughts on training for now...

Make no mistake, regardless of how much weight an operator thinks he carries, it is ultimately his insurance carrier who will determine who sits in that cockpit. beyond that, using our company / equipment as an example, our Thrushes need to make $1,000/hr. to pencil out. So just how many hours do you expect the average operator wants to donate to a potential employee who just might walk the minute he learns a thing or two?

Stuff to chew on...

Take care, Rob

Friend of mine went to an Ag school in E. CO then bought himself and old Ag Wagon and did his own thing. Wheat from chaff was separated within 3 years and he went back to construction. I think he really dug the flying but the regulation was overwhelming for him.

If you are interested in Ag, go find George or someone else and spend an hour with them making runs and turns (insert emoticon for "about to hurl"). Might be your cup o' tea, might not.

Oh and there's also the helicopter way to do it. Much nicer ride, but probably harder to get a seat.

A1 Skinner,

Ground rigs have always done a superior job and the majority of the work. The bowl weevil eradication project got airplanes started after WWII. Farmers look at what the neighbor is doing and when an airplane comes into an area and does a good job, sometimes that evolves into an airplane heavy area. People crop growers prefer ground and will use ground until the wheels start hitting expensive plants. Small guys just don't like to keep an expensive rig up and can get scammed by ground operators who are behind and just send them a bill rather than get around to their small acreage. Same with air. Capitalism/competition is good.

Aviation was never as big a deal in dry land farming except the delta and wheat. The price of corn and the number of acres in the midwest had driven the use of air to get through the volume. Also the change in parity rice in the delta is sending a lot of big airplanes north.

After the military, the greatest innovation driver in this country is agriculture. Look at the deadlined equipment out behind every barn or headquarters in the country. New and extremely more efficient equipment, more ground than air, happen on a regular basis. A threshing machine is an antique but has no value. There are thousands sitting around the country. Same with small bale square bailers, tractors, and every kind of implement. Jack Darbyshire, who used to own a large steel plant in El Paso, now custom builds bed graders, laser levelers, and various steel implements for growers up and down the Rio Grande.

I'm still listening guys, just no time to respond. Lots of good stuff to think about.

Couple of comments on ground rigs. I'm an airplane type if what the crop needs is doable by air. I rented this field to my cousins that plant 20 inch wide corn rows. I've had them plant for me and with my tractor and pull type sprayer I can take my time and drive with the rows. They farm big and go fast with their new $250,000 high clearance rut maker as they go crosswise with the rows. I figure they take out 3 or 4% of the stand as seen in the picture. The ruts going down a slope also cause erosion. Another thing that happened last summer when talking to some other cousins that like applying fungicide on corn that I found funny. They've been doing it with the airplane for several years but switched to their own expensive ground rig since everybody decided a ground rig does it better. On a different day we were talking and I said I wasn't doing fungicide and they said they've seen 25 bushel per acre increase in yield. After I left, I got to thinking, the airplane doesn't work well because it only increased yield 25 bpa and I'm thinking so that means the ground rig must get 50 bpa increase.---Give me a break. I plant Pioneer corn that stays green and would never mature if I put fungicide on it. Here's a pic of ground rig destruction.

Hey 180. We grow mostly canola and wheat up here. The tracks left by the ground rigs always fill back, except for the final pass of desicant. Even the guys that are straight cutting canola are leaving tracks in the field with the ground rigs, but after combining you can hardly tell where the tracks were as there is very little actually tracked down to the ground. If we were losing 25bpa, or even 5bpa we would be doing things differently. But it all comes down to a 50000+ acre farm that runs 4-5 big high clearance machines around the clock when its go time. We'd need a hell of an airplane crew to get the acres done, and it just doesn't pencil out for us.
Sorry for high jacking your thread whee, not trying to discourage you. I would love to fly ag, I pretty much fly the same way for fun. Just not much money in it up here and don't want to move to make it happen.

180Marty wrote:Couple of comments on ground rigs. I'm an airplane type if what the crop needs is doable by air. I rented this field to my cousins that plant 20 inch wide corn rows. I've had them plant for me and with my tractor and pull type sprayer I can take my time and drive with the rows. They farm big and go fast with their new $250,000 high clearance rut maker as they go crosswise with the rows. I figure they take out 3 or 4% of the stand as seen in the picture. The ruts going down a slope also cause erosion. Another thing that happened last summer when talking to some other cousins that like applying fungicide on corn that I found funny. They've been doing it with the airplane for several years but switched to their own expensive ground rig since everybody decided a ground rig does it better. On a different day we were talking and I said I wasn't doing fungicide and they said they've seen 25 bushel per acre increase in yield. After I left, I got to thinking, the airplane doesn't work well because it only increased yield 25 bpa and I'm thinking so that means the ground rig must get 50 bpa increase.---Give me a break. I plant Pioneer corn that stays green and would never mature if I put fungicide on it. Here's a pic of ground rig destruction.

I'd say from looking at the pic that the reduction in yield came from compaction from too many trips across the ground. Where I grew up farming, those guys love to drive tractors. As soon as the field was as hard as the road, it was time to plant. We went to minimum tillage the last 4 years...what a difference! Only down side was more weeds.

The only guy that says the ground rigs don't work better are the aerial applicators and vice-versa. Then there is the helo/fixed-wing debate too. Always good coffee shop fodder.

The only way helicopters pencil out is when they have a monopoly. Some cities outlaw spraying in the city limits except by helicopter. Same with pipeline patrol. In St. Louis and Tulsa I just kept on trucking down my line at 200.' When approach call me as traffic for someone, they said "pipeline helicopter down low" In El Paso spraying I just worked very early.

gb, if you're looking at the diagonal streaking, that's because the NH3 applicator is a piece of junk and didn't apply equally. After the anhydrous was put on, it was hit once with a field cultivator pulled by a Cat track tractor. The only compaction is the wheel tracks of the sprayer and it killed the corn. Made for easy walking when I was out in the field investigating. After this year, I think I'll go back to farming it myself since I think I have a better handle on weed control and erosion since I no till with good results.

Here's the same field a few years ago with 20 inch rows that I sprayed with my tractor and sprayer(a lot cheaper than the new Hagie and no dead tracks) and you can see the fungicide test that my friend with an Air Tractor did for me. The greener is fungicide and the combine showed no yield increase. the field at the top of the picture was done at the same time. P.S. I just found out that the tax stategy of renting to the cousins won't work so I goofed.

Ahh, the fertilizer job makes sense.

Sorry whee for the total hijack, you know how it is with farmers. Get us all in a basement and you have a whine cellar.

One of the ag guys should be able to confirm or deny this, but the mixer job doesn't seem to be a bad job. The ones I know seem to be mvp's to the owner operator pilots and drag some good checks home. I think it's better than grunt work to work yourself into the seat.

Rob wrote: I know of no other phenomena (short of mother nature) that creates more 'weather' than fire! Guess what? being a SEAT driver, you're going to have to fly fires! you're not going to get the luxury of choosing when you want to fly, and it's guaranteed not to be the flying wx you'd choose for a nice sunday morning breakfast run

That was one of the biggest problems with new guys I saw in the Arctic. First day on the job we'd walk from the pilot house to the airport, and they'd be staring wide-eyed at the wind and weather.

"We're gonna fly in THIS?!?!"

"Yup, hopefully all day long. We got 20,000 lbs of bypass to move, and we don't get paid if we just sit here."

It was real culture shock, and a lot of guys really thought it was going to be like flying for fun on a nice, calm Sunday afternoon.

Gump

Lots of good advice that I appreciate very much. I which I could respond to everyone's thoughts but I just don't have the time. Honestly, really rough air wears me out quick and I'm not sure I have what it takes to fly ag or seat when you have to spend the whole work day in bad air. This is something I am really going to have to think hard about.

I found out today that an engineering job I have been gunning for for several years should be coming open in the next few months. I'm going to focus on that and see what happens. Thanks guys!

Most guys I have trained have started out in the Pawnee. In calm air your knees will be bouncing uncontrollably after six hours. The control surfaces are flat and hard to move. Bigger, faster airplanes will work you until they get big enough to have hydraulic assist on the controls. Really big and they fly like a big bus with wings. It is not like backcountry where you can have a bigger engine without having a bigger load. You takeoff fully loaded every flight. It gets better as you work off the load. CallAir is the only exception. Same size and engine as Pawnee, but with ribs in all control surfaces. Flys like a dream. Ugly as sin.

Whee: Sent you a pm