The Pilot Whose Name Was on the Maps

What the work actually is

People think crop dusting is a man in a biplane waving at kids. Let me tell you what one morning of it is, because it matters to the rest of this.

I was up at four and at the strip by four thirty. I tugged the plane out and did the walk around with a flashlight in my teeth: oil, fuel, tires, boom hangers, every nozzle on both wings.

Nick rolled in at a quarter to five with his hair flat on one side. He mixed the fungicide in the trailer at the job sheet rate, usually three gallons of total mix to the acre for wheat scab.

A full load did about a hundred and sixty acres. Nick filled the hopper through the belly hose while I sat with the engine idling and the job sheet on my knee.

The job sheet had the farmer, the legal description, the crop, the product, the rate, the acres, the wires and houses and bees, and the wind limits. I read every one twice.

The plane carried a satellite guidance unit with a screen on the panel and a lightbar on the glare shield. It laid out my swaths, and the lightbar told me, a foot at a time, if I was off my line.

It did something else that mattered more than anything in this story. Every time I opened the spray valve, it recorded it. Every pass, every gallon, the exact time and ground. At the end of each field it saved the as applied map.

Each map showed the field outline with my passes laid in it like blue ribbon. The header filled itself in from whoever was signed in. Mine said L. Olheiser, Pilot in Command, with the tail number and the date.

I signed in every morning. I never thought about it. It was like punching a clock.

And every night I wrote the day into my pilot logbook at the kitchen table: date, aircraft, flight time, and in the remarks the fields and acres. My dad taught me to keep a logbook like a Bible.

You feel a field more than you see it. The wheat bends ahead of you in the prop wash. The smell comes in the vents, green and sweet, with the faint sour of the product under it.

You pull up, roll into a teardrop, and drop back in on the next line. You do that until the low light comes on, then fly back to Nick, and he fills you, and you go again.

On a good morning I’d spray six or seven hundred acres before the wind came up past ten. Then I’d eat a sandwich in the shade of the wing and wait for evening.

That summer was wet, and wet summers mean scab. Everybody wanted fungicide on their wheat in the same ten day flowering window. By the end of July I had flown six thousand four hundred acres.

Every one of them I flew. Don did not fly one. He could not. He did not have a medical, and a man without a medical cannot fly a spray plane over anybody’s field.