[Joeaksa]

Tim,

Come on out here to Arizona and will take you (and the wife if she wants) up for a ride. As a former crop duster and spray pilot, am guessing that 99% of the people on the forum could take about 2 minutes of our normal spraying flights.

Under the wires, inches from the plants (and the ground) and so on usually gets on most people's nerves in a short time frame. Some go silent, some jabber and some even try to grab the controls and take control. Not that they know how to fly but they do not like it...

Was just giving some dual instruction to someone recently who wanted to be a spray pilot. Finally sat them down and broke the hard news to them that they just did not have what it took to do this and that they needed to find something else in the aviation world to do. They locked up when we got near the ground and just not where you want to be.

You make a mistake flying most things and you have a chance to recover. Dusting you normally do not. Good friend of mine was one of the original pilots selected to the group of 10 to be the "Freedom 7" group of astronauts. He got bounced out due to what they thought was a funky heartbeat only to find out later that there was nothing wrong. Just over 10 years later after he retired from the Air Force he was crop dusting in the Dakota's when a bird flew into his windshield.

He could not see and went down hard in the field he was spraying. He had over 200 gallons of chemical in his hopper and he was covered in it, not to mention injured really badly with a punctured lung and numerous broken bones. Had to be cut out of the plane and he stayed in the ICU for a couple of weeks then into recovery. Hospital officials could not figure out what was going on as every bunch of flowers anyone brought into the wing where he was wilted and died within hours. Turns out the chemical he was spraying was oozing out of his body in such a high concentration that it killed everything around him.

Dusting is a young mans game and someone 20-40 years old is par for the course. If you see them at the local pilots hangout they usually have a lot of friends buying them drinks. What you do not see is the wheelbarrow they need to carry their balls out nor the life insurance policy that they have to support their family when they go down. Most spray pilots move on at age 35-40 as they realize that they have a chance to live and that chance is not being a spray pilot.