Ag Aviation

5 Pages 1363 Words

It’s 4:30 in the morning when the alarm goes off. You crawl out of bed and look outside through the dark to see a starry sky and a slight rustle in the leaves. It’s time to move, the aphids and leafhoppers have been busy working all night causing destruction to the crop and the weeds are still choking the yield out of a good crop, both of which threaten the farmers future. You have a busy day lined up…over 9,000 acres to spray and more coming in every day. You hope that the wind doesn’t pick up too much so that you can get in a full day of work. You can hardly believe that you have logged nearly 100 hrs in just the past week alone trying to stay caught up filling customer orders. Your muscles burn from the strain of piloting the heavy, overloaded aircraft through so many low-level high-G turns.
You preflight your aircraft and go over the work orders that you prepared the night before looking for critical information such as environmentally sensitive areas and field borders. You notice a light north wind blowing which means that half of your spray runs in the field will be into the rising sun. Very beautiful, but also very deadly as the bright sun likes to hide field obstacles.
The cool morning air is smooth and you drag your heavy airplane up to 300 feet to fly out to the field. You fly over the field and look very carefully, sometimes poles are hidden in the trees on either side of the field leaving just the wire in between. This scenario has killed quite a few pilots. You check for other obstacles and plan how to maneuver to avoid houses as your 600 H.P. P&W engine is very loud. You make a wide sweeping turn to line up on the field while you set up and calibrate your GPS swath guidance equipment and check the flight instruments one more time. You enter the field at a wheel height of 3 to 5 feet and 110 MPH for optimal results and make constant altitude adjustments to maintain swath height. You take in...