HANSEN — It’s about 10 minutes after 7 a.m. and eerily still in a Hansen-area cornfield. The golden sun has just slipped over the horizon, and sleepy-eyed farmhands are beginning their chores.
They work in silence until the serenity of this rural Idaho morning is interrupted by the drone of a low-flying plane to the east. A farmhand stops fiddling with a tractor and looks skyward. It’s coming.
The aircraft is still out of sight but closer, lower. The engine noise is the high whine of a diving plane.
Suddenly, a bright yellow biplane roars over a barn, dips low through swirling dust, swoops full speed over the field — mere inches above the stalks — and climbs skyward with wings dipped in a wide turn. A maneuver the Red Baron would be proud of.
VROOM!
The pilot, Larry Wright, waves, swings the plane around and makes another pass.
Maybe it looks like he is barnstorming this morning in the yellow Grumman Ag-Cat, but he is not. Wright is working. He is a crop-duster pilot, one of more than 90 in Idaho.
Aerial applicators, as these pilots like to call themselves, are as integral to Idaho agriculture as potato farmers, though over the years they’ve garnered a reputation as shoot-from-the hip mavericks.
Not the case anymore, Wright said early one morning last week in a hangar at Joslin Field, Magic Valley Regional Airport, as he prepped his Ag-Cat for a day of sweet corn spraying. Crop-duster pilots of the old school may have taken liberties with safety, but today’s ag aviators play by the book. They can’t afford not to: The job is too important, the equipment too expensive.
“That’s the difference between today’s pilots and the old crop-dusters,” said Wright, who’s been spraying since the 1970s and remembers old-timers drinking in the airport bar.
Talk to any crop-duster and he’ll tell you stories from the old days about crash landings, snapped power lines and hairbrained stunts. Then he’ll tell you about ag aviation’s stellar safety record of the past 20 years.
“We’re educated now,” Wright said. “We try to be more sensitive to people and animals — the old pilots didn’t used to care.”
The new face of ag aviation is one the industry hopes to make well seen.
“People need to know we’re being more careful about flying and the environment compared to the old days,” said Gooding crop-duster Rod Thomas, who’s vice president of the National Agricultural Aviation Association.
Thomas said million-dollar ag aircraft have replaced World War II-era planes. Today’s pilots use the Global Positioning System via onboard computers. And the chemicals are less hazardous and more disease- and pest-specific.
It all makes for safer flying.
According to National Transportation Safety Board reports, there have been 23 ag aircraft-related crashes in Magic Valley since 1985. Only one of those — a crash in Burley in 1996 — was fatal.
There have been two ag aircraft crashes in Magic Valley in 2006.
The NAAA reports the number of nationwide aerial-application accidents fell 47 percent between 1995 and 2002, thanks to a safety program presented to more than 10,000 participants.
Crop-dusters aren’t any more dangerous than general aviation, Thomas said. “In fact, we’re safer.”
They have to be. Farmers, the Federal Aviation Administration and the businesses crop-dusters fly for won’t tolerate antics. Companies can’t afford to replace lost chemicals or damaged planes. And because all but three of the more than 90 Idaho crop-dusters fly for ag-aviation companies — according to Bob Spencer, Boise program manager for the U.S. Department of Agriculture pest compliance program — ag aviation today is big business.
“Some of these guys can put down 1,000 acres a day, probably more,” Spencer said. In many cases, crop-dusting is cheaper than ground spraying because planes can cover in one hour what a ground sprayer might take a day to complete.
Planes have other advantages: They don’t compact soil, they’re ideal for canopy crops (think orchards) and planes can choke disease outbreaks quicker than ground sprayers without transmitting disease from one field to another. When potato blight strikes, crop-dusters are called in first.
“Not everything can go on by ground,” Spencer said. “These guys are essential to Idaho agriculture, and we sure hope we never see them go away.”
But as airplane technology improves, crops become genetically enhanced and farmers get higher yields from less acreage, the number of crop-dusters in the air plummets. There were about 2,900 American crop-dusters in 2004, according to the FAA, down from nearly 5,000 eight years earlier.
Still, it’s an industry that refuses to be grounded, Thomas said. “Times have changed, but we’ll never completely go away.”
It was the barnstorming allure that drew Thomas and countless other pilots to ag aviation, but it’s the thrill of flying and the most dramatic views of rural Idaho that keep them determined to fly.
“It’s just a great job.”
Times-News features writer Matt Christensen can be reached at 735-3243 or at
matt.christensen@lee.net.
