JESSE DAVIS, ALL WEATHERED AND toughened hide, faded jeans, dusty boots, with decades of living shining from his pale blue eyes, looks like an old cowboy from Okeechobee. And, in a sense, that’s what he is.
“Jesse’s a cowboy all right. But, one day, about 25 years ago, he decided he wanted to be a flying cowboy,” says Ray Dyson, who on most good days is out there low in the sky buzzing orange groves, scaring up buzzards, dodging power lines and practicing a little Zen in the cockpit just the way Jesse does.
Davis, 65, and Dyson, 38, are what are known in the trade as “agricultural aviators.” To must of us they’re known as cropdusters.
The history of cropdusting is a collection of legendary characters, men and women who gave up cowboying or the pursuit of an MBA degree to squeeze into the single seat of an Air Tractor, an Ayres Thrush or a Grumman Ag-Cat and go full-throttle four feet above the treetops, then into a straight-up climb over power lines with all 600 horsepower roaring, flying like some World War II combat ace dodging Nazi flak over Berlin.
Jesse Davis is one of those living legends.
“We were working an orange grove out by Indiantown,” recalls Ray Dyson, beginning another Jesse Davis story with a grin and a shake of his head.
Both men were flying Thrushes that day in the early ’80s, using a grass strip in the middle of the groves for refueling their planes and reloading pesticide.
“We’d been getting about two hours flying time on every refueling,” Dyson says. “I’d finished gassing and was back up, and Jesse gets on the radio. He’s been out dusting for a while already. He wanted to know how much time I got on my last load of fuel.”
Dyson told him 2.2, meaning 2 hours and 12 minutes.
Then, a little confused about Davis’ location, Dyson asked over the radio, “Say, where are you?”
“I’m down here in the grove,” Jesse radioed back. Dyson flew over and spotted the old cowboy’s Thrush sprawled amid the orange trees, propeller bent, wings twisted. Jesse was sitting calmly on the hood, and in his hand was the cockpit microphone. “Well,” he said over the radio, “I only got 1.8.”
“Cropdusters,” Dyson says, “are sort of known for being independent, and maybe a little stubborn.”
Take the time another legend, Clayton Deathridge (“That’s his real name,” Dyson insists), had an ornery farmer in West Texas try to tell him this was a three-drum strip, not a two-drum strip the way Clayton saw it.
A two-drum strip means a cropduster cannot load more weight than two 55- gallon barrels of pesticide, fungicide or plant food in his aircraft or he’ll run out of runway before the plane gets airborne.
The farmer came just short of calling Clayton a liar and accusing him of trying to make the job last longer and cost more by flying two drums at a time instead of three. No self-respecting cropduster would stand for that kind of insult, especially Clayton Deathridge.
“Clayton got real upset about it,” Dyson says. “He loaded up three drums, told the farmer he’d prove him wrong, and took off. He didn’t make it, of course. He bounced over a fence at the end of the strip, and kept right on going through a field, heading for an old, beat-up barn.
“Clayton was so mad he was going to cut right through that rotten old barn with the prop. Thing is, nobody had told Clayton a combine was inside. He hits the barn — and the barn, the combine, pieces of wood and the plane go everywhere.
“By the time the farmer gets there, Clayton’s buck naked, washing off in a horse trough with not a scratch on him. He turns to that farmer and says, ‘See, I told you it was a two-drum strip.”‘
THE DAREDEVIL STUNTS Clayton Deathridge and some of the other old-time cropdusters pulled are not standard operating procedure in the industry today.
“There are still a few out there, but there’s too much money involved for craziness,” Ray Dyson says.
But despite all the restrictions — a million dollars invested in one plane, crops and insurance, and a book of environmental regulations as thick as War and Peace — cropdusting remains one of the world’s truly daring pursuits. And cropdusters themselves are among the dwindling number of authentic American heroes.
“Everybody waves at a crop- duster. It’s uncanny sometimes,” Dyson says. “I’ll be dusting a grove and see a car stop on the highway, the people out watching me. I always wave back.”
Spectators who may know nothing about flying itself still recognize something extraordinary about a cropduster maneuvering his plane through dangerous stunts. They’ll admire this one-man, one-plane performance, an anachronism in this age of committees, team goals and corporate anonymity.
But hardly anyone would think of cropdusting as an act of Zen.
Zen is a form of Buddhism that emphasizes the value of meditation and intuition, living in and for a single moment, aware of each detail of that moment, yet not concentrating on any one of them.
“Flying and spraying at once is a Zen experience,” Dyson says. “You’ve got intense concentration going. Nothing exists but the focus of what you’re doing. Once you realize what you’re doing, of course, your concentration is broken. You can’t do it 100 percent of the time, but the degree to which you do determines your success.”
What Dyson and other cropdusters do, as part of their jobs, is not normal flying by any stretch of the imagination. It is aerial acrobatics, flying within four feet of danger in the citrus groves or over a field of tomatoes for a short run at 130 miles per hour, ending in a quick climb over power lines or trees, then a tight turn to fly back over the next rows.
In front of the pilot is a control panel lined with gauges: air speed, horizon, altimeter, tachometer, cylinder temperature, oil pressure, fuel and more. But he has little time to notice any of them. His hands and feet flick on and off the wheel, the spraying control, the rudder pedals, throttle lever and mixture control. He controls the ailerons, flaps, fins, rudder, stabilizer and trim tabs without consciously operating any single one of them.
“The plane is a living, breathing thing, and it talks to you,” Dyson says. “It talks to you by the seat of your pants, your feet on the rudder, your hands on the controls, and by sound: Don’t push me, we can do this, we can’t do that, is what it’s saying.
“You’re watching where the spray is going, how the spray system is working, how the airplane is doing, where you are and where the ground is. The thing is not to be distracted by all the stuff around you, but to take in everything and miss nothing.”
RAY DYSON IS A RUGGED SIX-footer who grew up in the suburbs of Boston and never wanted to do anything but fly. Sometimes he gets carried away by his own enthusiasm.
“The flying of an airplane is an art form,” he says. “Mankind has never made a neater machine than the one that can fly through the air like a bird.”
Chuck Stone, president of Southeastern Aerial Crop Service of Fort Pierce, is a cropduster himself and employs Ray Dyson, Jesse Davis and four other cropdusters. He is not as lyrical about flying as Dyson, but he explains the job in much the same terms: “You have to fly the airplane and concentrate on spraying — and do it all subconsciously.”
Stone, 64, got into the cropdusting business after World War II. During the war he had flown seaplanes out of the old Navy base on Cape Canaveral’s Banana River. The Illinois native spent his weekend leave-time at what was then the only civilian airfield in the area, a private airstrip for cropdusters in Fort Pierce, and went to work for a cropdusting firm in 1947.
Stone flew pre-World War II biplanes in those days, when both cropdusting and South Florida agriculture were in their infancy.
“There wasn’t any spraying then,” he recalls. “It was all dusting, mostly with DDT and copper sulfate, and only in the mornings when there was no wind and there was still dew on the plants to catch the dust.
“Out there where you see citrus groves now, it was all tomato fields. They didn’t have herbicides to control weeds, so instead they’d just plant a new tomato field every season.
“Dusting took more skill,” Stone adds. “With spraying, there are nozzles you can calibrate for the right amount. But with dusting, the pilot controlled the flow by hand from the cockpit. And you had to be careful right at the end of the row not to let the G-forces push out a lot of dust in a big blob and burn up the crop.”
Stone says that the spraying of crops started in the 1950s. Now it’s about 90 percent spraying and 10 percent dusting.
He founded his own cropdusting company in 1952, using two converted biplanes purchased from Army surplus sales. For more than a decade, Stone and his pilots dusted and sprayed citrus, tomatoes, vegetables, cotton, peanuts and tobacco from Fort Pierce to Texas and north to the Carolinas. His firm occasionally still takes jobs out of Florida, such as controlling a worm infestation of spruce forests in Maine during 1983. Aerial mosquito spraying for St. Lucie County is another side job.
But the biggest change in Stone’s business reflected the change in Florida’s citrus industry during the 1970s and ’80s. Not only did the groves spread south from the Orlando area, but the groves themselves were planted in rows spaced in widths to accommodate aerial spraying, with short, grass strips left between the rows that cropdusters could use for landing.
Stone’s hangar and offices at the St. Lucie County airport reflect the low- key, open-collar attitude of most cropdusters. His pet German shepherd, Mitzi, is lounging under a desk and a stray black cat is sleeping on boxes of office supplies. On one wall is a framed copy of John Gillespie Magee’s poem High Flight and its pilot credo: “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…”
But the casual attitude ends in the office. Cropdusting has become too big a business — and too dangerous — to approach with the cavalier attitude of the old days.
Three of Stone’s six cropdusting planes are Air Tractors, which cost $147,000 each and can spray three times the acreage in an hour that his old biplanes did. Six pilots, three mechanics, four warehouse loaders and five office employees work for Stone, and his list of clients includes major Indian River citrus growers such as Coca-Cola Foods and Dole.
Stone doesn’t allow his cropdusters to dust or spray in the rain or in winds much over 6 miles per hour.
“But we’ll go up when it just looks like rain,” he says. “In South Florida it can be raining two miles away, but not where you are, or raining now but not 15 minutes from now. We’ll go up even if it’s just for 15 minutes of spraying, because we can do 100 acres of tomatoes in two hours, and it would take a ground crew two or three days to do that.”
Anxious clients often press Stone to send up his cropdusters even in stiff winds.
“But I won’t do it,” he says. “You just can’t allow the spray to blow off the target area. People are almost overly conscious of cropdusting these days.”
BEFORE THE FIRST WAVE OF environmental movements in the ’70s, cropdusters often got away with slip-shod spraying, which drifted in the wind over residential and business areas. Today, anyone with a complaint about spraying can contact the local office of the state Department of Agriculture which will dispatch a field inspector.
Pilots also know that lawsuits, insurance regulations and Federal Aviation Administration rules can ground them quicker than wind or rain. The state Department of Environmental Regulation and federal Environmental Protection Agency also investigate cropdusting operations.
“None of the inspectors will tell you who complained,” Stone says. “But the truth is, if you go talk to them, lots of times you find it’s just someone who thinks you’re buzzing their house. They don’t even know about the cropdusting.”
Complaints are more frequent these days as growing numbers of city folks escape the urban rat race and discover some of the oddities of South Florida country life.
One homeowner living next to a citrus grove complained for three days about Stone’s cropdusters.
“The chief inspector finally came out. He knew me and knew I didn’t operate like that, so he just parked near the house and watched,” Stone explains. “It turned out the plane wasn’t anywhere near the house. Those people just didn’t like the noise.”
To avoid similar complaints, the Agribusiness Institute of Florida sells 3- by-2-foot metal signs to grove and farm operators that inform the public: “This property is zoned for agriculture. At times, odors, noises, spraying and insects occur due to normal food production. My right to continue agricultural operations is protected by Florida Statute 823.14. Parties interested in locating adjacent or near this property should take this into consideration.”
Unlike most other parts of the United States, South Florida’s cropdust- ers fly year-round.
Aerial spraying costs a farmer or grove owner $5.50 an acre, compared with up to $40 an acre for ground crews. The pesticide, fungicide or plant food is furnished by the farmer.
The relatively low cost to growers guarantees the future of cropdusting, as does the rule of thumb that a cropduster can cover a 1,000-acre citrus grove in two days.
It takes an extraordinary aircraft and a gifted pilot to work that fast, and the pilots rhapsodize about the rugged machines they fly.
The big cropdusters usually look like old World War II fighter planes, and, in fact, are powered by old fighter-plane engines. In most cases, that’s the Pratt & Whitney R1340, a nine-cylinder radial engine which turns out 600 horsepower. Pratt & Whitney, based in Palm Beach County, hasn’t made any new R1340s in decades, but the ones it did make were so well constructed that the engines are still overhauled and installed in new cropdusters.
It is such a massive and heavy engine that in flight the nose of the cropduster points slightly down.
A typical cropduster has a hopper in the nose section behind the engine and in front of the cockpit that holds 350 gallons of spray mixture. Pumps and tubes propel half the mix through booms under the wings, where the spray shoots out of some three dozen nozzles. The wings are 45 feet from tip to tip, nearly twice as wide as the aircraft is long, and are fitted with special flaps and ailerons to help the plane take off unloaded from an 800-foot strip, and loaded from 1,300 feet.
When spraying, the plane usually flies at about 130 miles per hour and covers an 80-foot swath of field or grove. The swirling air-flow created by the wingtips is used by the pilot to move the droplets of spray through the crop below.
Controlling all of these systems while keeping the plane out of harm’s way separates cropdusters from most civilian pilots.
“It can go to hell in a handbasket in a hurry,” Ray Dyson says. “Any loss of concentration can be severely punished.”
In 1987 there were 135 agricultural-related aviation accidents in the United States. Seven of them resulted in fatal injuries to the pilot, a relatively low rate considering the job’s inherent dangers.
No pilot has ever died in a crash while flying one of Chuck Stone’s cropdusters for Southeastern Aerial. However, several have had narrow escapes.
“Flying within six feet of a light pole is routine. So is flying no more than four feet above the crop,” Stone says. “You have to get that low for the spray to go all the way to the ground. And you have to avoid ‘Death Row,’ which is what we call the power lines and tall trees you usually find at the end of a field.”
The modern cropduster is built in much the same way as a NASCAR stock car, with an eye toward protecting the pilot in case of a crash. The nose is designed to collapse and absorb impact. The cockpit seat is suspended from web straps and tubular frames which cage the pilot. The fuel tanks are located in the wings, and the wings are designed to shear off on impact to put distance between the pilot and the threat of a fuel explosion or fire.
There also is a lever to dump the spraying load and lighten the aircraft during one of the most dangerous periods for any plane — takeoff.
“A crash occurs when you run out of air speed, altitude and ideas all at the same time,” Ray Dyson says.
GETTING INTO THE BUSINESS of cropdusting is probably tougher than the flying itself. It’s often a “Catch-22” situation. Insurance companies usually require a pilot to have 1,000 hours of agricultural aviation flight time before a policy will be issued. But how can a pilot get the time without the insurance?
Dyson got his start at the age of 21 in 1971 flying an old biplane for a cropduster in Belle Glade who had no insurance.
“My uncorrected vision would have kept me out of the military or commercial piloting, so I knew crop-
dusting was my best chance,” Dyson says. “I’d never seen it done, but I knew if I could do it, I’d get plenty of airtime.”
There’s never a shortage of candidates who want to pursue this highly specialized and dangerous brand of flying. Their personal ads often appear in the trade magazine AG-Pilot International.
“Twenty-season ag-pilot, owner-operator 18 years, sold my operation and am looking for a good, permanent seat,” writes one cropduster from Colorado. A 29-year-old college graduate in Fresno, Calif., writes that he prefers “flying an Ag-Cat to pursuing my MBA.” And a cropduster from Wyoming says he hopes to find “a seat in good solid company where paychecks don’t bounce and the farmers expect good work.”
Ray Dyson, who figures he has one of the best cropdusting jobs around, understands the hopes of out-of-work cropdusters.
“Some mornings it’s beautiful up there,” he says. “You’re putting out the first load and you look around and suddenly you realize that it just doesn’t get any better.”
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