No Field Is Worth a Life

I flew aerial application for a living. My first commercial helicopter job was crop dusting and I stayed in the industry for years afterward. I have friends still doing it, and I have a lot of respect for the people who are good at it.

That is exactly why I want to write this down plainly.

The numbers

The National Transportation Safety Board ran a special investigation into agricultural aircraft operations and published it as SIR-14/01. A few figures from it, quoted directly:

• From 2001 through 2010, there were 802 agricultural operations accidents, including 81 fatal ones.
• In calendar year 2013 alone, the NTSB investigated 78 accidents involving ag operations. Nine were fatal and killed ten people.
• Ag operations rank sixth or seventh among general aviation sectors by hours flown — but third by total number of annual accidents, with a ten-year accident rate above the general aviation average.

Read that middle line again. Ten people, in one year, doing this job.

Why the work is dangerous

None of this is because ag pilots are careless. It is because of what the job physically requires.

Application flying happens low, fast, and repetitively. You fly a pass, pull up, turn around, come back, and do it again, dozens of times over the same ground, at an altitude where there is no room to recover from a mistake. Every turn is close to the numbers. There is no altitude to trade for time.

The NTSB found the top three defining events were in-flight collision with an obstacle, loss of aircraft control, and system or component failure. Obstacle collision is called out as consistently one of the most common and most often fatal.

Wires

Sixteen ag-related accidents in 2013 involved an in-flight collision with an obstacle — power lines, guy wires, trees, and a meteorological evaluation tower. Three of those were fatal.

In the NAAA's own survey of operators and pilots, the hazards rated most critical were power lines, communication towers, and MET towers. Not weather. Not the aircraft. Wires.

A power line is nearly invisible from the air at application speed. A guy wire supporting a tower is worse — thin, unlit, unmarked, and often not on any chart. The NTSB noted that in some obstacle-collision accidents the pilot simply was not aware the obstacle was there and did not see it in time.

Fatigue, in the season you actually need spraying done

The report's first recurring safety issue is the lack of ag-specific fatigue management guidance. Pilot fatigue was found to have played a role in three collision accidents and two loss-of-control accidents in 2013 alone.

This is the uncomfortable part for those of us who buy the service. The application window is short. Disease pressure does not wait. Everybody wants their acres done in the same ten days, and the person flying is trying to get everyone covered before the weather turns. The pressure that makes an applicator say yes to one more load at the end of a long day is pressure that comes, indirectly, from us.

What this has to do with the grower

I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice. Talk to yours, and to your insurer, about your own situation. But there is one practical thing worth saying:

You know where the hazards on your ground are. The pilot does not.

You know about the line running diagonally across the back forty because it has been there your whole life. You know about the guy wires on the tower at the corner, the irrigation pivot, the new pole the co-op set last spring. To someone seeing that field for the first time at 140 miles an hour, none of that is obvious.

Tell your applicator. Every time. Walk the field boundaries with them or mark it on a map. If something changed since last season, say so. It costs you five minutes.

What changes with a drone — and what doesn't

The honest version: the single biggest difference is that nobody is in the aircraft. A wire strike that kills a pilot in a manned aircraft costs me a drone. That is not a small distinction, and it is the main one.

Drones also fly slower, closer, and with obstacle-detection sensors and terrain-following radar that a 1970s ag plane does not have. They can be shut down mid-field and restarted, so there is less pressure to finish a pass you should have abandoned.

But I am not going to pretend unmanned application is risk-free, because it isn't. Drift is still drift. Rate errors are still rate errors. Batteries, airspace, and the regulations around Part 137 all still apply, and a drone flown by someone with poor judgment is a bad outcome waiting to happen. The aircraft did not remove the need for a competent operator. It removed the body from the cockpit.

"But an airplane covers more acres"

Per aircraft, on big contiguous ground, today — yes. That is the rebuttal I hear, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But per aircraft is carrying that whole sentence. Nobody buying application is choosing between one airplane and one drone. You are choosing between operations — what somebody can put over your ground inside the window you have.

Field size does not change our economics. We stage batteries and product at the edge of the field. There is no ferry back to an airstrip between loads, no tender truck to meet somewhere across the county. A section is just more passes. That is why our per-acre number gets better on bigger blocks rather than worse, and why we price volume the way we do.

And when we need more capacity, we add aircraft. Multiple drones work the same field at the same time. Need to double the acres covered before the weather turns? Put another airframe on the ground.

Now run that same arithmetic on the other side. Doubling a manned operation means a second airplane and a second person inside it. Every increment of capacity is one more human being at fifteen feet, at 140 miles an hour, looking for wires. Ours comes out of a trailer.

That is the part that never closes. The capability gap is a math problem, and math problems get solved — tank capacity, swath width, flow rate and battery cycle time have all improved every season for five years and not one of them has gone backward. But scaling a manned fleet means scaling the number of people you are putting at risk. Scaling ours does not. That is not a technology gap that engineering will fix. It is the design.

The point

When the work can be done just as well without putting somebody in the air at fifteen feet dodging wires, that is the option worth choosing. And every season, "just as well" covers more ground than it did the year before.

Ten people in a year. Eighty-one in a decade. Every one of them went to work to put product on somebody's field.

No field is worth a life. Not mine, not the pilot's, not anyone's.

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Premium Ag Services flies unmanned aerial application out of Newark, Illinois, serving Kendall, LaSalle, Grundy, DeKalb, Kane and Will counties. If you have hazards on your ground you want mapped before anyone flies it — manned or unmanned — call 630-465-4539.

Source: National Transportation Safety Board, Special Investigation Report on the Safety of Agricultural Aircraft Operations, SIR-14/01.