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Registered User
Abbeville, Alabama

Rules from my first flying job (circa: 1982) - Extended wing light frame 450 Cat in spray mode:

I was hired to fly a 1962 extended wing (into a B-model) “light frame” AgCat with a PW 985 spreading fertilizer. Few pilots wanted that job so it was a time builder for younger pilots trying to break in to better equipment. You would be flying at about this height over citrus trees, which meant you were out of the safety of ground effect and in line with power lines:

The fertilizer spreader’s increased drag, seen beneath this A-Model (short wing) AgCat meant running the engine at more manifold pressure so there was less power available to pull up and turn.

The early 1980’s were both a weird & amazing time to be a junior bird man. The WWII pilots were in their late 50’s to 60’s & still on the payroll, so you could learn a lot from them. But times were changing, turbine equipment was coming into the general aviation agricultural field. The WWII high time pilots were getting the turbines, and the junior pilots were getting the old cast off radials to learn with. A WWII pilot grew up with radials - knew everything about them there is to know and could listen to one and tell if it has piston slap, cracked cylinder or any number of things that signaled it was about to retire. New guys, unless they grew up in an operation with them knew none of that. Oddly, the WWII guys didn’t know the turbines very well, and that is what the young guys had studied extensively - so it was somewhat of a comedy waiting to be written about this time in aviation as far as I could see as we were all flying mismatched equipment but the older guys (of course) got the new equipment, naturally, because they had one thing we would never match: the raw flying skills and judgement from WWII.
The mismatch of equipment was hard on the new guys at this time though. A lot of us took off in airplanes and landed in gliders with predictable results. I landed two gliders myself and one resulted in being 3” shorter than I was then. I always felt safe in the AgCat though, I (not just me, anyone I ever talked to) knew as long as the engine ran that beautiful bird would bring me home and it always did, no matter what stupid thing I did with it. You just knew it would bring you back. With 4 ailerons it handled like a sports car or personal WWI fighter in relation to all the rest when lightly loaded and thankfully I was spreading a prilled product: 15-0-15 ammonium nitrate instead of a very heavy urea type fertilizer which we (I had a loader for big jobs) loaded in bags. I don’t know what they use now or if they still use it, but the good thing was it didn’t hang in the spreader like urea and some of the others did so you got light fairly quick. Prilled fertilizer:

New fields or orange groves were always surveyed by 2 pilots in the SuperCub so hopefully all power lines and obstructions could be double covered and noted on a field chart we had. Sometimes this led to uncomfortable situations, especially when directions to a grove weren’t clear or we flat missed something and vivid examples were being down on the deck with the cars and dodging semis while trying to read a street sign to get our bearings. That didn’t happen much, but often enough to make it uncomfortable. Since the big boss flew the SuperCub it was in immaculate condition engine wise, so at least that wasn’t much of a concern.
The AgCat itself had a safety feature built into biplanes that saved some of us from ourselves. When you pull up and make that hard turn into the wind it isn’t for show, it’s to get back down and put the product out as efficiently as possible: you’re being paid by the acre - not hourly. In looking back, it’s very easy to add a little stick pressure and stall - deadly at low level with a load. In the AgCat though, the top wing is flying at a different angle of attack than the bottom wing (on biplanes this is accomplished easily by adding washers or shims to the struts to whatever the engineers designed) and the top outside wing is pulling slightly more g’s than the top lower wing so it stalls first. The result: the 2 flying wings overcome the stalled (no lift wing) and the 1 flying lower wing and roll the airplane level. If you’re in a left turn the stick flies out of your hand and lands in the right corner of the cockpit with a loud bang. Of course you think you’re dead and wonder what happened but the airplane is flying level as if nothing happened - so back to the WWII guys to find out what the heck just happened? And then we pass that info on.
I see these slats being hung as a similar safety feature for the SuperCub as long as they are aerodynamically employed (not manual or electric). We all want to land shorter and take off faster, but that little bit of edge can make a huge difference in a tight turn and that bang when deploying like a Helio Courier or Rallye definitely gets your attention that you’re close to the edge. If I was still flying I’d definitely be hanging them on my airplanes. Helio takeoff (the CIA pilots used to practice this at a field I was at - it was amazing):

My flying job came to an end abruptly when the big boss said it was time to recover the tail of my airplane. We took our knives, cut the fabric and pealed it all off, revealing the fabric was the only thing that had held the tail together for my two seasons - the metal in most cases had been long gone. with only the slightest amount of it remaining as a skeleton. The Cat had served me well, but the Thrushes I flew had already let me down twice, and I took all that into account and decided there were better things for me to do . . .
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