Imagine Louisiana Magazine - Louisiana, at our best.

Summer 2008
TAKE-OFF: Summer is high season for pilots at Riceland Aviation in Jennings, with as many as 50 take-offs and landings every day.	ON A WING AND A SPRAYER The crop dusting business began in Louisiana more than eighty years ago. Absent a new generation of pilots, it could end here too. Story by Kevin Allman Photos by Jackson Hill
“THAT THAI RICE THEY'RE IMPORTING?” asks Billy Precht, Jr., co-owner of Riceland Aviation in Jennings, La. “Who knows what they put on that?” Precht knows a thing or two about the chemicals and fertilizers they put on rice. He's a crop duster. It's mid-May in southwest Louisiana, high season for ag aviation professionals like Precht, his fellow pilot and partner Dwayne Bebee, and the crew at Riceland Aviation. They've all been up since 4:30 a.m., the pilots buzzing paddies and fields for 50 miles around like a swarm of yellow jackets, the crews scrambling out to service and re-load each plane 40 to 50 times a day until nightfall. In terms of frenzied non-stop activity, the closest thing in aviation may be a flight deck of an aircraft carrier on combat alert.

Riceland operates four M-18 Domaders from the Jennings airport – three runways, no control tower, and a short taxi-way to the Holiday Inn and the catfish plate lunches at Walker's Cajun Seafood, a pilot favorite. But Riceland's pilots rarely use the runways. To save wear on the plane's tires and tricycle landing gear, they take off and touch down on the airport's grassy aprons Not that you have to baby the stubby, dependable M-18 Dromader.
Built in Poland and favored around the world for the most demanding agricultural and firefighting missions, it's a muscular little beast with a 1000 horsepower supercharged radial engine. That's what it takes to get airborne at the maximum 11,700-pound take-off weight or to climb steeply out of danger at the end of a spraying run.

   A SPECIAL BREED
   The pilots who fly this unique machine are a special breed themselves. Most of them learn their trade from the ground up. “My daddy was an ag pilot, and I was a flagger,” Precht said, sitting on a desk in his office. In the days before GPS technology, flaggers would stand at the edge of a field, signaling the pilot where to bank, when to turn, and when to pull up. Precht recalls going into the fields before dawn to guide his father's plane with flashlights. Then he'd wash up and head to school. Like most flaggers, he got an occasional faceful of bug spray. Potential health hazards like these don't seem to bother him much – certainly not as much as the soaring cost of fuel, life and liability insurance premiums, and the staggering burden of red tape working in two of the most heavily regulated industries in America: chemicals and aviation.
    “You handle it [pesticide] like anything else,” he said. Precht knows the chemicals and finds them an acceptable risk. “My daddy is 71,” he said. “You go to these pilot conventions, and there are people there in their sixties and seventies. If it was that dangerous, don't you think they'd all be dead?”
   From the passenger seat of Ed Krielow's Cessna 182 Skylane, I look over a patchwork of flat green rice fields speckled by a few tiny towns: Welsh, Elton, Estherwood, Mermentau. To the east, the only relief comes from Crowley's rice mills and landmark seven-story First National Bank tower. It's a fine view. Then I try to imagine it at crop duster level, bumping through the sullen air and invisible thermals at 140 mph. Or streaking through morning ground fogs that may conceal deadly hazards: fence posts, trees, guy wires, cell phone towers.
   An accountant, Krielow is the kind of guy who says “the worst day flying is better than the best day behind a desk.” Including Riceland Aviation, he has several crop dusting services as clients and also serves as Louisiana state director of the National Agricultural Aviation Association (NAAA), the Washington D.C.-based trade group.
   Growing up on a farm in Welsh, Krielow remembers watching crop dusters with awe, sparking an early interest in flying. But he freely offers that the crop dusting profession is not for him. “This job is so rough, that if you don't enjoy it, you don't do it. Period.” In fact, the Centers for Disease Control, which keeps these statistics, ranks agricultural aviation as the nation's third most dangerous industry, behind logging and commercial fishing. In the last ten years, according to the NAAA, 26 crop dusting pilots have been killed flying into power lines, wires, and towers. “Cell phone towers,” said Precht bleakly. “They put ‘em up faster than they can be mapped. They just pop up overnight.”
   There haven't been any pilot deaths around Jennings in recent years, but there have been accidents and crashes. Given the chemical payload, even a non-fatal accident can be serious – and carry costly liabilities. "If you have an accident with a craft carrying pesticides, you call the state police before you call the ambulance," Bebee said. He's not kidding.

   WEEVIL WARS
   Precht and Bebee are the inheritors of a long tradition of agricultural aviation in Louisiana dating back to the 1920s. You could even argue that the industry was born here.

The first recorded aerial application of agricultural materials occurred in New Zealand in 1906 when a tethered hot air balloon was used to broadcast seed. Using airplanes began with a 1921 experiment in Troy, Ohio when a Curtiss JN-6 released dense clouds of lead arsenate over a catalpa grove that was being ravaged by caterpillars. What the “Jenny” lacked in precision, it achieved in massive killing power. Thousands of dead caterpillars littered the ground.

Enter C.E. Woolman, an LSU extension agent and entomologist working at a U.S. Department of Agriculture field laboratory in Tallulah, La. Manning the front lines in the war against the boll weevil, Woolman's team relied on hand-held or mule-drawn poison dispensing machines to stem the weevils' devastating invasion of the Louisiana and Mississippi cotton fields. Needless to say, the weevils were winning.
It happened that Woolman was also an aviation buff – he made his first airplane ride in 1910, just seven years after Kitty Hawk – and when he and his boss, entomologist B. R. Coad, learned of the Ohio experiments they immediately applied for help from the U. S. Army Air Corps. In 1922, they secured a few World War I surplus “Jennys” and began flying out of Tallulah on crop dusting missions.

DIVINE WIND: An early Delta Air Lines Logo from the 1930's features Thor- the norse god of thunder, war and agriculture - to symbolize the war against insect pests.

The Jenny, it was soon realized, wasn't enough plane for the job. In 1924, Woolman co-founded a company called Huff Daland Dusters, moved it from Georgia to Monroe, La. and began turning out a specialized plane designed for aerial application. Nicknamed the Puffer, it carried a high payload of pesticide and was able to disperse it more efficiently and precisely than the Jenny. Within a year or two, “Dusting by Aeroplane” was well-established, and the Puffers were an increasingly common sight over the cotton and sugarcane fields of Louisiana. By 1927, Puffers and other dusters were working half a million acres of American farmland per year.

   A year later, Woolman assumed control of the company, changed its name to Delta Air Service, and began passenger service, flying customers between Monroe and Jackson, Miss. for $13.25. The passenger business soon outgrew the cropdusting side. Now called Delta Air Lines, the company moved to Atlanta in 1941 from where it has grown to become a leading international carrier serving 311 destinations in 52 countries. Woolman died in 1966. For many years, his business card featured a picture of a crop duster in action.
   Crop dusting slowed during World War II as trained pilots were needed on the battlefront. When peace returned, there were suddenly thousands of new pilots who could fly small planes with precision, as well as surplus aircraft being sold to the public – J-3 Piper Cubs, Boeing/Stearman Kaydets. The industry took off like never before. In 1951, The New York Times reported that more than 6,400 pilots were working in ag aviation, almost as many as were working for commercial airlines.
   Aerial application has changed much since Woolman's day with more efficient planes, safer and more effective chemicals and fertilizers, and the all important GPS. The farmer's enemies change, too. Cinch bugs, water weevils, smuts, scalds, and rusts can become pesticide-resistant. Yet the demand for affordable food hasn't changed. Precht and Bebee point out that their work as crop dusters helps farmers to get higher yields providing nutrition to more people, more efficiently. They're proud of what they do and it shows.
   According to Krielow, there are 118 ag pilots in Louisiana who are members of the NAAA, as well as 58 designated “operators”, many of whom are also pilots. Nationally, there are 1,600 pilots and 1,600 licensed operators, according to Lindsay Barber, communications director for the NAAA. A veteran crop duster in Louisiana can earn $80,000 to $100,000 per year, according to Krielow. It's a chance to be your own boss, with a dash of excitement in your work. And it is still a man's world; Barber says she knows of a “handful” of female ag pilots across the country, and Krielow doesn't know any in Louisiana (“Not that women can't fly as well as men,” he's quick to add; Krielow has been teaching his wife to fly).
   Rice is by far the most important crop in Jefferson Davis Parish. Krielow says that some local farmers have experimented with winter wheat, others with soybeans. Bebee, who farms as well as flies, found soybeans more temperamental than rice. “We grew ‘em for ten years, and made a profit once,” he said. Now he's back to rice, and it's still a struggle.

DIE, ROGER THORNHILL! DIE, DIE!
   We all remember Cary Grant as the suave advertising man Roger Thornhill running for his life though a cornfield in Alfred Hitchcock's classic North by Northwest. But who played his would-be killer, surely the most famous crop duster in America?
   It was Bob Coe, a former Army flight instructor who worked as an ag pilot near Bakersfield, Calif. for 37 years. In 1958, he took a quick four-day job doing a stunt pilot job for Hitchcock. His son Bob told The Bakersfield Californian: “I just remember him saying he would have made more crop dusting.” In the 50 years since that sequence was filmed, millions of people have watched North by Northwest and enjoyed the thrilling aerial work of Bob Coe. Not one of them ever saw his face.
   Bob Coe died last fall at age 85. At his wake, this still photo of Cary Grant was placed on his coffin.

   “There are three rice mills around here. If you're a farmer and you've spent all year growing and they offer you a price, what are you going to do? It's take it or leave it. The prices haven't changed. I get what my daddy and my grandpa got in 1973 for the same amount of rice.”
   Like farming, crop dusting today is a graying profession as fewer young people enter thefield. According to a 2007 Associated Press story, the average age of an American ag pilot is about 60. One reason may be the steep cost of entry. Before getting licensed, an ag pilot must spend 500 hours training in a private plane (at $100 per hour) with additional time at the controls of a crop duster at $250 per hour.
   The initial investment can be $100,000 to $125,000 just to get started – the price of a college education. “I'm down two pilots,” said Precht. He and Bebee are both as likely to be found in a cockpit as a desk chair – partly because he doesn't have to pay himself workers' compensation.

   GUZZLING GAS
   Besides flying, the new pilot must also learn to navigate a thicket of regulation from the FAA, EPA, DEQ, and myriad other federal and state agencies. There are hazmat licenses, pesticide licenses, aviation licenses. There's a multitude of insurances, from “hull” insurance (covering the plane itself) to liability insurance, commercial property insurance, pollution coverage, and workers' comp.
   Then there's the soaring cost of high octane aviation gas. Bebee can tell me tothe penny how much he pays for aviation fuel: $4.41 a gallon in late May. How much gas does a Dromader guzzle? “480 gallons a day, if they're up all day,” Bebee said. Doing the math, Riceland's two planes cost $4,200 per day to stay in the air. Like most crop dusters, he and Precht have begun passing along a “fuel adjustment surcharge” to their customers.

Maintenance is also costly, and time consuming. After every 100 hours of flight time (about once a week in high season), each plane is grounded for a thorough inspection, which takes it out of the air for much of the day.
Once a year, each pilot must submit to a complete physical. Fail it, and you lose your livelihood. Not so much a problem if you're a healthy 25- year-old, but with an average age of 60…. I keep wondering: just how “gray” is the ag pilot world? “We don't keep those figures,” said Barber. “But there is a next generation. We get young people coming to our conventions, and I get five or six emails a week [from prospective crop dusters]. There's a steady stream of people coming in.” But when I ask for specifics about the ages of the NAAA's membership, Barber demurs: “We don't keep those figures.” (The EPA does; the number of crop dusters is down 20% in the last 15 years.)

   Back at Riceland, when I ask the same question, Krielow and Precht look at each other perplexedly. Krielow mentions the youngest Louisiana ag pilot he can think of, and asks: “How old is he now?” “Thirty-eight?” said Precht.
   Bebee has a son and a daughter. His boy is 10. I ask if his son is interested in becoming an ag pilot. “Naw,” he said. “He wants to play in the NBA. I farm rice, and he's sorta interested in that part.”
   Would Dwayne Bebee want his son to follow in his path, to become an ag pilot, rising before dawn to fly over the rice fields of Jefferson Davis Parish?
   “Not really. There's not much future,” he said dolefully. “There's no really young pilots coming up. Even farming…My daddy's 65 and he's ready to retire. Me and one of my brothers are helping him out. But the farming don't support your family, either.”
   “So what happens to the industry in twenty, thirty years?” I ask.
   Precht shrugs. The corners of his mouth turn up, and I'm not sure if I've asked the dumbest question yet, or I've raised the biggest question of all.
   Finally he said, “We're just trying to get through now.”

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