Searching For Crop Dusters

I’ve spent more than just a few moments of my time on earth searching the skies for crop dusters. “That’s nice” you might say, “but what’s a crop duster?” “Whoa” I thought to myself. “That’s another of those age-related questions that didn’t used to be a question at all but the passage of time and the imposition of slang and technology makes it a topic that requires explanation where none used to be necessary.” If you are under the age of 40, for instance, a crop duster is that kid in elementary school that walks the long way around the edges of the room on his way to the pencil sharpener silently passing gas as he goes, graciously sharing his internal noxious odors with every other student in the room. That’s not the one I’m talking about. For those of us lucky enough to have lived past the age of 45 or so, a crop duster is an agile airplane in the hands of a master pilot that sprays insecticide or defoliant or a mixture of both over fields of soybeans or cotton, mostly in the spring and summer and mostly in areas where the land is fairly flat. In the 1920’s when crop dusting started, the planes were often retired military biplanes and flown by ex-military pilots. It was and is both cheaper and faster for farmers to have the crop-dusting services doing the application process for their fields than buying the necessary equipment to do it themselves.

My dad was a crop duster when my brother Glen and I were little. He had finished his basic training for the Army Air Force before the end of WWII but served out his enlistment as a propeller mechanic on B-29 Superfortresses in Fairbanks Alaska. He told us he had spent three of the best years of his life in the 8th grade in Mathiston MS and the Headmaster there had told him he should probably just go ahead and enlist rather than coming back the next fall. His older brother had already enlisted in the army the year before, and his mother gave permission for him to enlist when he was 17. He went through basic training and was sent to Biloxi MS for propeller mechanics training. He said he loved learning to fly in the old 2 seat version of the Boeing PT 17 biplane trainer, but when he graduated to the single seaters, he discovered that most of his piloting confidence seemed to stay on the ground with the instructor, so he learned to be a propeller mechanic instead of a military pilot. He said he thought plowing behind a mule all day in the Mississippi spring and summer was hard until he had to work on metal props in the subzero Alaskan winter, so when he finished his enlistment he went back to North Mississippi, met mama and opened a service station in Ruleville MS just a couple of blocks from our house. That didn’t work out well because gas sold for less than $.15 a gallon and most farmers worked on their own cars and tractors back when the engines and drive trains were simple enough for that to be something normal people could do.

He heard about a guy named Fred Link that had bought several Army Air Force surplus PT-17 Stearman biplanes and needed mechanics and pilots. This was pretty close to what dad had done in the service, so he jumped at the chance. He still had his pilot’s license from the AAF and working on propellers in the service also meant working on the engines, so the experience was there that made him a perfect fit for crop dusting. I’m not exactly sure why they chose to build several hangers and a grass landing strip directly behind the Sunflower County Hospital in Ruleville, but there was plenty of flat land and thousands of acres of crops that needed crop dusting services. Daddy always said that the land in that part of the Mississippi Delta was so flat you could stand on an anthill and see 25 miles in any direction, and that it was hard to get lost as long as there was a tree to climb or an anthill to stand on.

The Boeing Company bought the Stearman Airplane Company and first began producing the Stearman (Boeing) Model 75 as a training aircraft in 1935, and over 10,600 were built in the US during the 1930’s and 1940’s. They were the primary trainers for the US Army Air Force, the US Navy (designated the NS and NS2), and the Royal Canadian Air Force (known as the Kaydet) until the end of WWII. After the war, thousands of the PT-17 biplane trainers were sold as surplus to civilians because of the introduction of jets to military service, and the old propeller driven biplanes were no longer needed. Many of the prop planes were used as crop dusters and aerobatics and wing walking demonstrations during air shows.

The Stearman stands 9 feet, 8 inches tall and has a steel tube body covered with aluminum. The double wings are made of spruce ribs covered by fabric and the landing gear is static. The tail wheel assembly is small, and the tilt of the plane on the ground gives the pilot little or no forward view. Students quickly learned that in order to see in front of them as the plane traveled forward on the ground, they had to use the rudder pedals to make an S figure to see where they were going. The plane is 25 feet long and the wingspan is a little over 32 feet. The engine is usually 220 hp and is large enough for safe flying but slow enough to give student pilots recovery time for poor or questionable decisions. The engine itself is a piston radial engine and has a distinctive sound that can be heard for miles. The plane’s maximum speed is 124 mph, and its cruising speed is 104 mph. Its range is about 500 miles and can operate at up to 11,200 feet. The stall speed is 55 mph and is an important fact for pilots to know. When the aircraft airspeed falls below 55, the wings lose lift, and the aircraft can no longer support itself through the air and bad things can happen. Aircraft without airspeed essentially become rocks and will exhibit the same flight characteristics.

The biplanes, constructed originally for military use, were extremely sturdy and reliable. They were built to endure thousands of takeoffs and landings with minimal upkeep and survived many minor and some major accidents and returned quickly to the flight line. I have a vivid memory of riding with dad in a pickup truck several miles out to an open field where the silver Stearman was lying upside down amid the rows of cotton. Even at my young age, I could tell the pilot had clipped a power line at the end of one of his runs and had landed upside down amid the cotton plants. The pilot wasn’t injured, and helped dad tie a heavy rope to the tail wheel of the inverted plane. Together they lifted up the tail and held it as another guy tied the rope to the pickup trailer hitch in front of the upside-down plane, used the truck to flip the plane over, checked for prop damage and, discovering none, started the engine and flew the plane back to the landing strip. I asked dad when I was 16 or so if I had remembered that incident correctly, and he told me “Yep, that was ole Johnny. He wasn’t the first or the last to have that happen, and most of the time we could fly back to the landing strip, make a few minor repairs and have that plane dusting again the same afternoon.”

At the beginning of WWII in 1941, the United States had just been through what was later called The Golden Age of Aviation. Aerobatic shows and aviation “barnstormers” had traveled the country and even sold short rides in planes to farmers and teenagers, and Charles Lindbergh had completed his transatlantic flight only 14 years earlier. The Stearman was the perfect plane for these enthusiastic would- be fliers to begin military aviation instruction, and many thousands of prospective pilots had their first ever flight in a plane just like the one below.

The student pilot sat in the front seat and the instructor in back, and there were controls and gauges in both cockpits. The gauges were rudimentary, and the stick controlled direction and the throttle was on the left-hand side of the cockpit. Left and right rudder pedals assisted the stick with turns, and the engine had to be started by a mechanic or assistant on the ground. The oil in the engine was preheated for at least one minute, the propeller was turned clockwise (from the pilot’s perspective) a few times to make sure there was no hydraulic lock, the pilot yells “clear” and the mechanic inserts a special hand crank into the inertial starter on the side of the engine. Turning the crank spins up the inertial starter and the engine is started with 7 quick shots of prime and the throttle in idle. Blue smoke billows from the exhausts and the engine begins a steady roar. The pilot lets the engine idle for a few moments, clicks a switch between both magnetos to make sure both are operational, and the mechanic removes the wooden chocks from the wheels so the aircraft can roll.

When the big tires begin to roll down the grass runway, the pilot has to keep a light touch on the right rudder to keep the plane traveling straight because of the torque and gyroscopic precession of the prop as the tailwheel comes up off the ground. At 55 mph, the pilot eases the stick back, the plane is quickly airborne, and speed is slowly increased as altitude is gained.

On August 3, 1921, Army Air Corps pilot Lt. John Macready flew a modified WWI surplus Curtiss JN4 Jenny over a 6-acre grove of catalpa trees in Troy Ohio. The plane had a small metal hopper in the 2nd seat filled with lead arsenate to kill caterpillars eating the leaves of the trees. The backwash from the propeller blew the powder over the rear of the plane, and it only took a few minutes and 5 refills to cover the entire grove. It took a few more years for the idea to become popular, and in the early 1950’s the Civil Aeronautics Administration listed over 5,000 aircraft in use as crop dusters. Tractor drawn sprayers could cover about 100 acres per day, and planes could cover 60-70 acres per hour. Most of the early sprayers used dust, but today liquid sprayers provide more precise applications. Present day crop dusters are much more efficient and versatile than the originals, and can deliver seeds for cover crops, fertilizer for growing crops, spray for weed control, plant disease control, pest control and even operate as firefighters. Aerial applications by over 2700 registered ag pilots cover over 71 million acres in the US each year. Products distributed by the planes require EPA approval before use, and every chemical compound used in applications must pass years of EPA testing before its approval for crop dusting.

Aircraft today, both fixed wing and helicopters, are much more efficient and advanced than those from just a few years ago, and contain global positioning systems, geographical information systems, aircraft integrated meteorological measurement systems, flow control valves for variable rate applications, single boom shutoff valves, and even smokers to identify wind speed and direction. They are also built to handle 30-60 take offs and landings each day with the additional weight of the liquid being applied. The cost of new planes with all the additional bells and whistles can range from $100,000 to $900,000 and used crop dusters usually run between $100,000 - $500,000. The average salary for experienced pilots is around $84,500 per year.

Playing in our front yard it was easy to hear the planes long before we could see them returning to the grass runway behind the hospital. Their return usually signaled that dad would soon be home and that the day would soon be over, evening would come and everything would be okay. I remember the solid yellow Stearman biplane, the one with the blue fuselage and yellow wings, the solid silver one, the yellow fuselage with blue wings. Daddy almost always flew the blue one with yellow wings, and all of them had been modified with the sprayers below the lower wings and the front cockpit that had been taken over by a metal bin where the malathion dust, defoliant or fertilizer went. As dad flew over our house, he would waggle his wings if he saw us in the yard, and we would holler and jump up and down like he could hear us over the sound of the plane’s engine. He would come home almost covered in insecticide or defoliant except for around his eyes where he wore his flying goggles. The sun had browned his entire face and neck and arms except where the goggles kept his skin white. His coming home meant we would be safe, there would be food on the table, the lights would protect us from darkness and Dad would protect us from the danger and fear that, at least for kids, often came with the night.

I still pull over to watch for a while when I see a crop duster at work now and then, especially in the spring when the sky is robin’s egg blue with a few fluffy clouds and the deep, deep rich smell of the earth that’s been disked and tilled overpowers every other scent. It’s funny how much smells can contribute to memories, and the combination of oil, avgas, engine exhaust and defoliant combine to take me quickly back 65 or 66 years or so. I watch how, with military precision, the pilot guides the Ag Cat or Stearman down, clearing the telephone or power lines by what seems to be inches and he holds the plane steady not more than 10 feet off the ground, opening the spray nozzles for almost the length of the field and pulls up just in time to miss the lines on the other end of the field, stopping the spray as he pulls back on the stick at the same time and going just far enough out to turn so he can make the next pass perfectly adjacent to the one he just did. Every time I watch, I can imagine him after his runs covering the entire field - maybe it’s his last one for today. As he finishes his field and turns for home, I can easily imagine him flying purposefully over his own house and looking for his kids playing in the front yard. In my mind I can see them jumping up and down and waving ecstatically as he waggles his wings to let them know he sees them and will be on his way home soon. There are few feelings in the world better for a kid than knowing that the people you care for most are all at home together and, while all might not be right with the world, for that moment all's right in your house and with your own small world. It won’t always be that way, and there are trials every family has to go through. Some make it through together, but many don’t. In a few years, they will be stopping on the side highways adjacent to the big field and looking for crop dusters and for that family that existed, for a little while anyway, so long ago. Those are things worth remembering. I hope they enjoy the sight and the sounds and smells and the symbolism and the memories as much as I do.