tell me about crop dusting.

As the previous poster stated, Ag pilots are generally a breed
apart and you will not get a job doing that with only 250 hours.
It takes a lot of skill for one thing, and the planes you would
be flying and big powerful brutes and nobody will let you fly one
to build hours let alone **** away thousands of dollars of Ag
chemicals while you learn how and build time.

There is a lot of that activity around these parts (the Southeast)
but the guys that fly these missions are professionals with tons
of experience. You can do it but you will have to dedicate a lot
of time to learning the trade and the aircraft to get good at it
(if you don't accidentally get killed in the process).

kontiki wrote:

As the previous poster stated, Ag pilots are generally a breed
apart and you will not get a job doing that with only 250 hours.
It takes a lot of skill for one thing, and the planes you would
be flying and big powerful brutes and nobody will let you fly one
to build hours let alone **** away thousands of dollars of Ag
chemicals while you learn how and build time.

There is a lot of that activity around these parts (the Southeast)
but the guys that fly these missions are professionals with tons
of experience. You can do it but you will have to dedicate a lot
of time to learning the trade and the aircraft to get good at it
(if you don't accidentally get killed in the process).

And you can buy your own plane (used are alot cheaper than new) and
support equipment and put yourself into the business...

Having insurance on the above, is another thing...

"Darrel Toepfer" wrote in message
...
kontiki wrote:

As the previous poster stated, Ag pilots are generally a breed
apart and you will not get a job doing that with only 250 hours.
It takes a lot of skill for one thing, and the planes you would
be flying and big powerful brutes and nobody will let you fly one
to build hours let alone **** away thousands of dollars of Ag
chemicals while you learn how and build time.

There is a lot of that activity around these parts (the Southeast)
but the guys that fly these missions are professionals with tons
of experience. You can do it but you will have to dedicate a lot
of time to learning the trade and the aircraft to get good at it
(if you don't accidentally get killed in the process).

And you can buy your own plane (used are alot cheaper than new) and
support equipment and put yourself into the business...


I used to work at a co-op in Idaho delivering fertilizer and chemicals. One
customer with a lot of land decided he could save money on spraying by
buying his own Pawnee. Sent the oldest kid through flight training. All
went well the first day; the second day he rolled it into a ball and they
drug it behind the potato cellar where it still lie years later. Kid lived
though.

Delivered to another operator that only worked three months a year, the rest
of the time he vacationed in Florida. Flew sunrise to sunset those three
months though. Never shut the engine off during the day, even to fuel and
eat.

Allen

Allen wrote:

I used to work at a co-op in Idaho delivering fertilizer and chemicals. One
customer with a lot of land decided he could save money on spraying by
buying his own Pawnee. Sent the oldest kid through flight training. All
went well the first day; the second day he rolled it into a ball and they
drug it behind the potato cellar where it still lie years later. Kid lived
though.

Delivered to another operator that only worked three months a year, the rest
of the time he vacationed in Florida. Flew sunrise to sunset those three
months though. Never shut the engine off during the day, even to fuel and
eat.

Seen it from both sides. Newbie started this year with 2 radial engined
biplanes that they had to make airworthy. Dunno where they got the
support equipment from, but that ain't nothing fancy and he stayed
pretty busy. Need the equipment to do both seed and booms for spraying
liquids though. All the others are flying planes that are many years
old, some turbine and some with radials (southamerican low wing
Drombadiers (sp?) in one fleet). Mosquitoes are done with the small
Lycontsores, all very underpowered from what I'm told. There are some
helo operators here in LA but are fairly rare and are usually trucked
around the nation doing rights-of-way spraying...

I was there when we extracted the turbine biplane from ontop of the C150
that landed together in Jennings. Both pilots met up at the left wingtip
and were very lucky to have survived... Turboprop chewed through the
cowling and 0-200 of the Cessna and the landing gear was right behind
the flaps, in a perfect mating position...

Dunno where my photos of it are at the moment...