I did my crop spraying training in Gettysburg with Ag Rotors under the guidance of a great old timer with around 20,000 hrs of piston under his belt .Hank Whitfield....mainly the 47 and the Hiller. After that my first job was spraying cotton in Egypt which was interesting to say the least ...the inside of a Bell 47 gets to a temp where the seat belts burn you if they touch your skin ...so you have the doors off and if you do a particularly vigourous torque turn you would be coming back into your own spray...after using one particular chemical the other pilots ( all Greek cypriot ex army )and i all had yellow finger nails and eyes
We also lost 3 aircraft in 4 months ....later i ran a company near Ripon called GSM Helicopters and we ( using 5 Bell 47,s) competed with an outfit near Thirsk called Farm Supplies using the Hughes 300. Those were great fun times flying with my old mate and chief pilot Dick Meston , who a lot of you will have known, with him fighting a losing battle trying to keep me out of trouble
I am afraid you are too late for the crop dusting era has gone and the little bit of bracken spraying left will be banned by the tree huggers
There were never many English pilots as the very best were usually the kiwis who followed the season around the world...now watching some of them spray a field was poetry
