By Don Hall
News-Leader staff
Every year in May, the air in Howard County is filled for a few days with the roar of 1,300-horsepower ugly yellow airplanes flying low and loud. These chunky planes are owned by Crop Doctor, a company in Lake Village in the southeastern corner of the state, and they’re up here to fertilize trees for Weyerhaeuser.
Rex Lester, the senior of the two pilots working here this year, explains: “One way to look at it would be we’re providing plant food. Forty-year pine trees can reach full maturity in 20 years.”
Rex has more than 15,000 hours of flying time, all of it in crop dusting. “I started flying during the Lincoln adminstration,” he claims with a straight face.
The “junior” pilot, Rob Roberson, has more than 9000 hours in the cockpit.
How did you guys get into flying crop dusters?
“Just a lapse of judgment,” Rex says with a grin. “I grew up in farming and aviation with a grass strip in my back yard.”
Rob says his first first opportunity was 20 years ago when some friends got him a job offer. He’s been crop dusting ever since.
Before you turn green with envy of these two, consider this: they begin flying at 6:30 a.m. and finish at 8:30 p.m. six days a week. The only break they get is for a few slices of take-out pizza at lunch, and then it’s back in the air again.
More than 11 hours a day of back and forth, back and forth, and any lapse in attention and judgment would probably be fatal. Still, they keep on flying.
While they fly to all points of the compass around Nashville, they spend a lot of their time flying to the Weyerhaeuser forests around Dierks. A 35 mile, 20-minute round-trip, they’ll load up the airplane and make 35 flights a day.
Their airplane isn’t made for beauty. It’s a turbine-powered, 1,300-horsepower Air Tractor which can carry more than 9,000 pounds of product in its 800-gallon hopper at a working speed of 130-160 mph. It’s a workhorse.
Robert Murray, also of Lake Village, is the head of the ground crew. A large part of his day is spent waiting for the planes to return from a run, and then it’s his job to fill that hopper as quickly as possible so they can get back in the air.
“We start with the pine tree contracts in February and go through early June,” he said. Then the whole crew heads to the horizon-to-horizon fields of Illinois.
“We’ll fertilize corn for about five weeks,” he says, “then for another four weeks we’ll spray corn, beans and other crops with insecticide.”
They’ll finish out the spraying season when the crops are harvested, and then they’ll go home to Lake Village for a short visit.
In October the pine tree contracts start up again and continue until December. “We’re usually on the road about 10 months out of the year,” says Robert.
With springtime, it all starts over.
The next time you hear an engine growl overhead and you look up to see a low-flying yellow tank of an airplane, think about what a tough, dangerous job those guys have, and about how, in timber country, so many jobs depend on what they do, flying round-trips for 11 hours a day.
As they’re finishing their last slice of pizza and getting ready to strap in again, I ask the pilots, Do you guys fly for fun when you’re not working? Both shake their heads.
Rex answers for both:
“I’d rather drive.”
