Ag flying jobs?
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Ag flying jobs?
There is not a single thread in this forum having to do with agricultural flying, it seems. I've always in the back of my mind wanted to do this type of work, but it seems impossible to get started in. I have never seen a single job posting looking for people to do crop dusting. Is this sort of thing even still done? I remember when I was a CFI in California, it was almost impossible to look down and not see an uncharted or charted private agricultural airstrip below you somewhere. Are all these fields abandoned? Is this line of work still around, and if so, how does one get involved with this kind of flying?
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Ag flying jobs?
If you're U.S. based, good place to start digging is:
AgAir Update Online
National Agricultural Aviation Association (Crop Dusters)
AgAir Update Online
National Agricultural Aviation Association (Crop Dusters)
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There have been quite a few threads on the topic before, but the search engine won't look up "ag" because it's less than three words, and I can only go back four pages on this forum...so apparently we need to go over it on more time.
Ag work is not entry level work. It's also somewhat of a catch-22; most operators won't hire you unless you have a thousand hours of ag time. Most won't hire you unless you have satloc experience (a guidance system for spraying fields), herbicide experience, night experience, state certification, you're insurable (back to the 1000 hours of ag, again), etc. All depends on their needs.
Today the trend is for more and more larger airplanes, with the AT-802 being the biggest and increasingly, most common. Larger turbine ag airplanes means that one airplane does the work of 3-7 others...meaning fewer jobs, and more qualified pilots being sought...nobody is going to throw you in an 802 as a beginning job.
A search of Trade A Plane will reveal several ag jobs each year, but less and less these days. Ag work in general has been reduced by the use of ground rigs and chemigation (in which chemicals are applied through irrigation), and in some cases various hybrids of crops which are resistant to certain pests. In the few places where ag flying is done year-round (rice country, for example), the seats are held tightly and won't come up very often.
Other types of work aside from spraying row crops are also available, but again, usually only for very experienced pilots. This includes work such as forestry, putting fertilizer on trees, and aerial firefighting. This is done nerly exclusively with AT-802's these days, and it's definitely NOT a beginner's airplane. The work can be demanding, exacting, and is very, very unforgiving for errors in judgement, mechanical problems, or anything else that might occur or be allowed to occur. Additionally, such work places you close to terrain that varies from uneven to sheer cliffs in the mountains, somtimes in high winds, low visibility, minimal performance (as you're loaded to gross), and not uncommonly, working dawn to dusk with little or no breaks and an extremely high work load.
Some areas require spraying at night for various reasons. This may include the environment; it's hot during the day and the airplane flies better at night, there's less evaporation at night, less risk of drift at night, less wind at night, etc. It also means you can't necessarily see what you see in the daytime, as you can imagine. Some areas require night flying to prevent damage or loss of benificials, such as bees, which don't service fields at night, and so forth.
The traditional path into an ag seat has involved going to work for the operator on the ground, with several seasons (years) spent mixing chemical, working on equipment, and eventually being allowed to fly tank rinse out over fields and do small work in small airplanes. Today fewer and fewer small airplanes exist, and the flagging that we did long ago is mostly all done by GPS, so even those kinds of entry positions are mostly gone. It's not uncommon to spend the first few years being gradually introduced to the business, however.
Bear in mind that very few ag airplanes have more than one cockpit or seat. An operator who puts you in his airplane is trusting you with his entire business and gambling it all on your first takeoff, as you go teach yourself about the airplane and check yourself out. He can't do it for you...he needs to know that you can fly the airplane, do the work, and bring it back everytime, without getting him into a law suit.
Navigating to a field isn't like navigating to an airport on a GPS database. There are a lot of them, they all look the same one, and spraying the wrong field can cause a lot of heartburn, as well as destroy your profit for an entire year (when chemical can go for as much as a thousand dollars a gallon). Spraying the wrong crop with the wrong chemical brings big law suits; drift damage and drift caims are a very big issue in ag aviation; it's got to be right every time.
The actual flying of the airplane is only part of the job. The smallest part, really. Other aspects of the job are the ability to know crops, know insects, inspect crops, make recommendations, handle chemicals, know chemicals, mix chemicals, and a mechanical aptitutde. While you don't need to have a mechanic certificate (A&P, etc), it's strongly preferred. You may find yourself having go visit fields in your area on a regular basis to inspect crops, take samples of insects, make determinations on chemicals and treatments, and so forth...and farmers have a lot riding on that; their entire ability to survive. Farmers tend to trust those whom they know, and 15 years after you've arrived, you may still be considered "the new guy."
Ag work isn't an entry level job like the airlines. It's a very specialized job. It's hard to get into. It's not a stepping stone, or even something that most try for a little while. It's also very hard to go between doing ag work and flying other types of aircraft...I've done it, and jumping from a business jet or other type of airplane back into a Dromader or Air Tractor each year after doing something else is a tough transition. Same going back to the jet...when your instrument skills have rusted away over the season.
On that note, it's seasonal work, and while that might sound good, it often precludes you from finding other work in the off-season. That means you might have three or four good months of work, but nobody wants to hire you for the winter...and what you just made in those few months had better be able to last you the winter...because you may or may not find other work. Nobody wants to hire you knowing they'll lose you a few months down the line to go back and do ag work, either.
You ought to know about the risks, if it's something you really want to do. Years ago the National Aerial Applicator's Association put out a stastic in the monthly magazine that caught my attention; it said the average ag aviator had a seven year lifespan. That's a working lifespan, from the time they entered the business until it killed them. That's taking into account the number of guys who didn't make it through their first season, and the number of guys who died in bed after a life of spraying and doing other types of work. It was the average. I'd guess that as technology and things have evolved,that statistic isn't entirely accurate any more, but it makes a good point; the business isn't like taking off at the local airport for a three hour flight to another metro airport with a load of passengers or boxes bound for market.
If you're thinking you'll be comfortable doing steep turns at 75' all day long, if you feel comfortable doing a stall recovery from that altitude, if you don't mind working very close to powerlines, standpipes, and trees (close meaning you're looking up at them as you fly, not down, and you can parallel them within a few feet without striking a wingtip), and you can maintain your altitude and course over the ground within a foot or so...it may be something you would enjoy. There's no shame in that...a lot of people love doing ag work. I'm one of them. No matter what I do, I always think of myself as a light airplane person and an ag aviator at heart. But do it knowing the risks.
When I entered the aerial firefighting world, I was sent an article by a concerned firefighter. She wanted me to know what I was getting into. It asked the reader how many people might go to work at the office on any given day, knowing there was a one-in-ten chance their desk might explode. Not many. With that in mind, it went on to detail by name and mode of death, each person lost in the business, and showed that a ten percent fatality rate isn't uncommon. Many pilots know someone who died in aviation. Ag and fire pilots know many someones who've died doing aviation, doing just what they did. Not long after I started my first season, the boss and I hopped in a small airplane and flew about 75 miles south to see the fresh wreck of a competitor who had caught a landing gear on a hidden fence post insome weeds on the edge of a corral. He'd been flipped inverted, the spar broke over the cockpit. The chemical hopper, which forms the forward wall of the cockpit, broke. He drowned in the chemical. A month or two later I watched my first ag crash, and ended up putting out the fire. It's something you might as well prepare yourself for, now. Two years ago I found myself on a hillside after an engine failure in a single engine turbine Dromader. Unhurt, and fortunate. Is this something you're prepared for?
Most ag airplanes don't have air conditioning. Some do; I enjoyed it in the 802 and one of the Dromaders. But generally not. Under a nomex suit, in a hot, enclosed cockpit in the summer time, being bounced about such that your legs dance continuously on the rudders, your knees hurt after a while, and your diet is gator aid, can take it's toll. It can make for long seasons and years...I've had jobs that ended abruptly after two weeks, and others that lasted ten months without ever a chance to go home to see my family. Frequent moves for several months at a time,living out of hotels constantly, or a little trailer like many do, is a way of life that many don't consider when they think about getting into the business.
If you're thinking of trying it because it looks fun, start talking to some ag aviators and see how many have had one or more mishaps; a crash, caught a wire, etc. Then consider how this looks to employers outside the business who don't understand it. Try going to the airlines with a couple of aircraft crashes on your record. Employers don't see it as a highly skilled profession; they view it as a reckless, cowboy background, and it WILL count against you. I can vouch for that.
Some of the chemicals you use are not friendly to your system. Concentrated parathion, for example...one drop on your tongue could kill you. It accumulates in your bloodstream and you don't build a tolerance to it. If you saw "the rock" with Sean Connery...the chemicals they used there...same thing. Organophosphates...and common farm chemicals like Parathion 8E, Dimethoate, Disyston, and others are all in the same family. As a pilot, it's not uncommon to come back from a field for a quick turn to load and find that you have a nozzle leaking; it's often as not up to you to grab that nozzle, covered in leaking chemical, and take it apart by hand, clean up the diaphram, put it back, and get back to the field as quickly as you can. Are you prepared to do that?
I can recall many calm mornings in Kansas, spraying Atrazine on wheat. The chemical is white, and it was often combined with a herbicide called 2,4-D. The spray would hang in the air, or drift slightly, and on subsequent passes would coat the windscreen such that after a couple of passes I couldn't see out of the airplane. This meant flying and trying to reach through a small access hole in the side window to rub a little spot on the forward windscreen with a cloth...and the rest of the flight conducted a foot off the ground,over and around powerlines, by looking through that little spot...with steep turns at each end of the field at 75', obstacles in the field, etc. It can be like that. Or doing the same thing through smoke down a burning canyon, or through mist or low clouds while trying to fertalize christmas trees, or a single pass over poppies or coca on a hillside with people shooting at you. All parts of the ag business, but you have to ask yourself now if it's what you want, or what you thought.
If you want work, Trade A Plane, Ag Air Update, and other such places will have listings. Sometimes you can find a job in a Pawnee or Ag Cat that will give you a chance. At a minimum generally you're going to be expected to be very proficient in conventional gear (tailwheel) operations and a good stick and rudder pilot. You'll still need to pass all the ag tests for certification in the state in which you intend to work. It may take some work to find an operator who won't require a significant amount of ag time to hire you; getting the first few seasons in can be the hard part. After that, you shouldn't have too much trouble.
A word on ag airplanes. Older airplanes such as the Pawnee are forgiving flyers, up to a point. Deceptively so. They'll let you go until you're all out of energy and lift, until they've got nothing left to give, if you need to, without any significant bad habits. The problem is that when you do run out of juice, you're usually too low to recover. It happens. The Ag Cat has a lot of room for error, too. Biplanes can be like that. But not Air tractors. They perform well, they fly well, but when they run out of lift or energy, things can south very quickly. More modern ag airplanes tend to be fairly unstable; that is, you don't really trim them up like you might most airplanes with which you're familiar. The CG is constantly changing anyway, but the airplanes tend to always want to go somewhere; you never stop flying them. They don't really fly like most conventional aircraft, and it's not a matter of simply flying an other airplane when you jump into one. Most airplanes fly themselves; one simply reminds the airplane what one wants it to do from time to time. Ag airplanes; you either fly them or they fly you, and you must fly them actively. Very actively sometimes, especially in wind and turbulence. They're designed that way for the job.
The traditional way of getting a job in ag flying is to visit every operator you can find and ask them. Sending resumes usually doesn't mean much. Most operators aren't impressed with type ratings of total hours, or paper. They want to meet you, they may throw you in a supercub and go fly with you; you never know. In person, shaking hands in a hangar or over a desk is usually the only way to go. It's also the way business is usually done. Don't expect life insurance, simulator rides, or contracts. Most business is done with a handshake and an agreement.
I recall going to work for one operator who told me "If you crash, make sure it's destroyed, for insurance. If you can still move, I want you to drag yourself clear and set fire to it. Then get out of the country, because I'll find you, and kill you." I believe he meant it, too.
I belive in telling people the bad sides up front, the discouraging sides first. Tell it like it is; it's not the type of business one should pursue on an illousion. That said, there's a lot of good in the business, and to my mind, there's nothing better. I do a lot of other kinds of flying too, but ag will always be my center and the way I define myself as a pilot. For all it's image, ag work is a very exacting job, most often performed by consumate professionals who strive for precision and excellence; it's not a cowboy job, it's not reckless. There are those operators out there who give it a bad name, but they're few and far between (hopefully), especially in this modern day and age. If it's something you really want to do, then welcome to the business. If not, thanks for checking, but you're always welcome at the airport. I strongly suggest you take the time to visit a few ag operators and sit down when the work is done for a chat. If it's during the season, bear in mind that many operators get going before the sun comes up and have put in a longer and harder day by noon than most ever see in aviation. They may not have much time to chat, they may still be busy. It doesn't hurt to ask, if you can catch them on the ground. Who knows? You may find your foot in the door.
Ag work is not entry level work. It's also somewhat of a catch-22; most operators won't hire you unless you have a thousand hours of ag time. Most won't hire you unless you have satloc experience (a guidance system for spraying fields), herbicide experience, night experience, state certification, you're insurable (back to the 1000 hours of ag, again), etc. All depends on their needs.
Today the trend is for more and more larger airplanes, with the AT-802 being the biggest and increasingly, most common. Larger turbine ag airplanes means that one airplane does the work of 3-7 others...meaning fewer jobs, and more qualified pilots being sought...nobody is going to throw you in an 802 as a beginning job.
A search of Trade A Plane will reveal several ag jobs each year, but less and less these days. Ag work in general has been reduced by the use of ground rigs and chemigation (in which chemicals are applied through irrigation), and in some cases various hybrids of crops which are resistant to certain pests. In the few places where ag flying is done year-round (rice country, for example), the seats are held tightly and won't come up very often.
Other types of work aside from spraying row crops are also available, but again, usually only for very experienced pilots. This includes work such as forestry, putting fertilizer on trees, and aerial firefighting. This is done nerly exclusively with AT-802's these days, and it's definitely NOT a beginner's airplane. The work can be demanding, exacting, and is very, very unforgiving for errors in judgement, mechanical problems, or anything else that might occur or be allowed to occur. Additionally, such work places you close to terrain that varies from uneven to sheer cliffs in the mountains, somtimes in high winds, low visibility, minimal performance (as you're loaded to gross), and not uncommonly, working dawn to dusk with little or no breaks and an extremely high work load.
Some areas require spraying at night for various reasons. This may include the environment; it's hot during the day and the airplane flies better at night, there's less evaporation at night, less risk of drift at night, less wind at night, etc. It also means you can't necessarily see what you see in the daytime, as you can imagine. Some areas require night flying to prevent damage or loss of benificials, such as bees, which don't service fields at night, and so forth.
The traditional path into an ag seat has involved going to work for the operator on the ground, with several seasons (years) spent mixing chemical, working on equipment, and eventually being allowed to fly tank rinse out over fields and do small work in small airplanes. Today fewer and fewer small airplanes exist, and the flagging that we did long ago is mostly all done by GPS, so even those kinds of entry positions are mostly gone. It's not uncommon to spend the first few years being gradually introduced to the business, however.
Bear in mind that very few ag airplanes have more than one cockpit or seat. An operator who puts you in his airplane is trusting you with his entire business and gambling it all on your first takeoff, as you go teach yourself about the airplane and check yourself out. He can't do it for you...he needs to know that you can fly the airplane, do the work, and bring it back everytime, without getting him into a law suit.
Navigating to a field isn't like navigating to an airport on a GPS database. There are a lot of them, they all look the same one, and spraying the wrong field can cause a lot of heartburn, as well as destroy your profit for an entire year (when chemical can go for as much as a thousand dollars a gallon). Spraying the wrong crop with the wrong chemical brings big law suits; drift damage and drift caims are a very big issue in ag aviation; it's got to be right every time.
The actual flying of the airplane is only part of the job. The smallest part, really. Other aspects of the job are the ability to know crops, know insects, inspect crops, make recommendations, handle chemicals, know chemicals, mix chemicals, and a mechanical aptitutde. While you don't need to have a mechanic certificate (A&P, etc), it's strongly preferred. You may find yourself having go visit fields in your area on a regular basis to inspect crops, take samples of insects, make determinations on chemicals and treatments, and so forth...and farmers have a lot riding on that; their entire ability to survive. Farmers tend to trust those whom they know, and 15 years after you've arrived, you may still be considered "the new guy."
Ag work isn't an entry level job like the airlines. It's a very specialized job. It's hard to get into. It's not a stepping stone, or even something that most try for a little while. It's also very hard to go between doing ag work and flying other types of aircraft...I've done it, and jumping from a business jet or other type of airplane back into a Dromader or Air Tractor each year after doing something else is a tough transition. Same going back to the jet...when your instrument skills have rusted away over the season.
On that note, it's seasonal work, and while that might sound good, it often precludes you from finding other work in the off-season. That means you might have three or four good months of work, but nobody wants to hire you for the winter...and what you just made in those few months had better be able to last you the winter...because you may or may not find other work. Nobody wants to hire you knowing they'll lose you a few months down the line to go back and do ag work, either.
You ought to know about the risks, if it's something you really want to do. Years ago the National Aerial Applicator's Association put out a stastic in the monthly magazine that caught my attention; it said the average ag aviator had a seven year lifespan. That's a working lifespan, from the time they entered the business until it killed them. That's taking into account the number of guys who didn't make it through their first season, and the number of guys who died in bed after a life of spraying and doing other types of work. It was the average. I'd guess that as technology and things have evolved,that statistic isn't entirely accurate any more, but it makes a good point; the business isn't like taking off at the local airport for a three hour flight to another metro airport with a load of passengers or boxes bound for market.
If you're thinking you'll be comfortable doing steep turns at 75' all day long, if you feel comfortable doing a stall recovery from that altitude, if you don't mind working very close to powerlines, standpipes, and trees (close meaning you're looking up at them as you fly, not down, and you can parallel them within a few feet without striking a wingtip), and you can maintain your altitude and course over the ground within a foot or so...it may be something you would enjoy. There's no shame in that...a lot of people love doing ag work. I'm one of them. No matter what I do, I always think of myself as a light airplane person and an ag aviator at heart. But do it knowing the risks.
When I entered the aerial firefighting world, I was sent an article by a concerned firefighter. She wanted me to know what I was getting into. It asked the reader how many people might go to work at the office on any given day, knowing there was a one-in-ten chance their desk might explode. Not many. With that in mind, it went on to detail by name and mode of death, each person lost in the business, and showed that a ten percent fatality rate isn't uncommon. Many pilots know someone who died in aviation. Ag and fire pilots know many someones who've died doing aviation, doing just what they did. Not long after I started my first season, the boss and I hopped in a small airplane and flew about 75 miles south to see the fresh wreck of a competitor who had caught a landing gear on a hidden fence post insome weeds on the edge of a corral. He'd been flipped inverted, the spar broke over the cockpit. The chemical hopper, which forms the forward wall of the cockpit, broke. He drowned in the chemical. A month or two later I watched my first ag crash, and ended up putting out the fire. It's something you might as well prepare yourself for, now. Two years ago I found myself on a hillside after an engine failure in a single engine turbine Dromader. Unhurt, and fortunate. Is this something you're prepared for?
Most ag airplanes don't have air conditioning. Some do; I enjoyed it in the 802 and one of the Dromaders. But generally not. Under a nomex suit, in a hot, enclosed cockpit in the summer time, being bounced about such that your legs dance continuously on the rudders, your knees hurt after a while, and your diet is gator aid, can take it's toll. It can make for long seasons and years...I've had jobs that ended abruptly after two weeks, and others that lasted ten months without ever a chance to go home to see my family. Frequent moves for several months at a time,living out of hotels constantly, or a little trailer like many do, is a way of life that many don't consider when they think about getting into the business.
If you're thinking of trying it because it looks fun, start talking to some ag aviators and see how many have had one or more mishaps; a crash, caught a wire, etc. Then consider how this looks to employers outside the business who don't understand it. Try going to the airlines with a couple of aircraft crashes on your record. Employers don't see it as a highly skilled profession; they view it as a reckless, cowboy background, and it WILL count against you. I can vouch for that.
Some of the chemicals you use are not friendly to your system. Concentrated parathion, for example...one drop on your tongue could kill you. It accumulates in your bloodstream and you don't build a tolerance to it. If you saw "the rock" with Sean Connery...the chemicals they used there...same thing. Organophosphates...and common farm chemicals like Parathion 8E, Dimethoate, Disyston, and others are all in the same family. As a pilot, it's not uncommon to come back from a field for a quick turn to load and find that you have a nozzle leaking; it's often as not up to you to grab that nozzle, covered in leaking chemical, and take it apart by hand, clean up the diaphram, put it back, and get back to the field as quickly as you can. Are you prepared to do that?
I can recall many calm mornings in Kansas, spraying Atrazine on wheat. The chemical is white, and it was often combined with a herbicide called 2,4-D. The spray would hang in the air, or drift slightly, and on subsequent passes would coat the windscreen such that after a couple of passes I couldn't see out of the airplane. This meant flying and trying to reach through a small access hole in the side window to rub a little spot on the forward windscreen with a cloth...and the rest of the flight conducted a foot off the ground,over and around powerlines, by looking through that little spot...with steep turns at each end of the field at 75', obstacles in the field, etc. It can be like that. Or doing the same thing through smoke down a burning canyon, or through mist or low clouds while trying to fertalize christmas trees, or a single pass over poppies or coca on a hillside with people shooting at you. All parts of the ag business, but you have to ask yourself now if it's what you want, or what you thought.
If you want work, Trade A Plane, Ag Air Update, and other such places will have listings. Sometimes you can find a job in a Pawnee or Ag Cat that will give you a chance. At a minimum generally you're going to be expected to be very proficient in conventional gear (tailwheel) operations and a good stick and rudder pilot. You'll still need to pass all the ag tests for certification in the state in which you intend to work. It may take some work to find an operator who won't require a significant amount of ag time to hire you; getting the first few seasons in can be the hard part. After that, you shouldn't have too much trouble.
A word on ag airplanes. Older airplanes such as the Pawnee are forgiving flyers, up to a point. Deceptively so. They'll let you go until you're all out of energy and lift, until they've got nothing left to give, if you need to, without any significant bad habits. The problem is that when you do run out of juice, you're usually too low to recover. It happens. The Ag Cat has a lot of room for error, too. Biplanes can be like that. But not Air tractors. They perform well, they fly well, but when they run out of lift or energy, things can south very quickly. More modern ag airplanes tend to be fairly unstable; that is, you don't really trim them up like you might most airplanes with which you're familiar. The CG is constantly changing anyway, but the airplanes tend to always want to go somewhere; you never stop flying them. They don't really fly like most conventional aircraft, and it's not a matter of simply flying an other airplane when you jump into one. Most airplanes fly themselves; one simply reminds the airplane what one wants it to do from time to time. Ag airplanes; you either fly them or they fly you, and you must fly them actively. Very actively sometimes, especially in wind and turbulence. They're designed that way for the job.
The traditional way of getting a job in ag flying is to visit every operator you can find and ask them. Sending resumes usually doesn't mean much. Most operators aren't impressed with type ratings of total hours, or paper. They want to meet you, they may throw you in a supercub and go fly with you; you never know. In person, shaking hands in a hangar or over a desk is usually the only way to go. It's also the way business is usually done. Don't expect life insurance, simulator rides, or contracts. Most business is done with a handshake and an agreement.
I recall going to work for one operator who told me "If you crash, make sure it's destroyed, for insurance. If you can still move, I want you to drag yourself clear and set fire to it. Then get out of the country, because I'll find you, and kill you." I believe he meant it, too.
I belive in telling people the bad sides up front, the discouraging sides first. Tell it like it is; it's not the type of business one should pursue on an illousion. That said, there's a lot of good in the business, and to my mind, there's nothing better. I do a lot of other kinds of flying too, but ag will always be my center and the way I define myself as a pilot. For all it's image, ag work is a very exacting job, most often performed by consumate professionals who strive for precision and excellence; it's not a cowboy job, it's not reckless. There are those operators out there who give it a bad name, but they're few and far between (hopefully), especially in this modern day and age. If it's something you really want to do, then welcome to the business. If not, thanks for checking, but you're always welcome at the airport. I strongly suggest you take the time to visit a few ag operators and sit down when the work is done for a chat. If it's during the season, bear in mind that many operators get going before the sun comes up and have put in a longer and harder day by noon than most ever see in aviation. They may not have much time to chat, they may still be busy. It doesn't hurt to ask, if you can catch them on the ground. Who knows? You may find your foot in the door.
