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Most people recall the famous scene from Alfred Hitchcocks movie, North by Northwest. Cary Grant is standing alone out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farm fields. He hears the droning of an airplane, and casually looks to the sky. When he spots the airplane, he watches it for a moment, and then realizes that the airplane is headed his way. Suddenly, the airplane dives toward him, and with no shelter in sight, he begins to run through the field. Moments later, he is engulfed in a cloud of presumably noxious chemicals. He has just been attacked by a Crop Duster. Grants character survives the attack (though the evil crop duster does not!), but outside of the world of Hollywood fantasy, agricultural aviation is indeed a fearsome and effective weapon in the continuous war that farmers wage against pests. The first occurrence of using an airplane to apply pesticide was in 1921, when the Ohio Department of Agriculture supervised an experiment that utilized an airplane to spread pesticide over Catalpa trees in an effort to control the sphinx moth. In 1923, Huff-Daland Dusters, Inc. became the first commercial agricultural aviation company (and later evolved into Delta Airlines). Now known as Aerial Applicators, the early aerial applicators were called crop dusters due to the fact that most of the pesticides they applied were in a powdered form, rather than the liquid form that is more common today. Aerial applicators help to control a wide variety of the pests that threaten agricultural crops. In addition to insect pests, applicators help to control weeds and fungal diseases through the application of herbicides and fungicides. Though the majority of products applied by aerial applicators are pesticides, applicators are regularly utilized for other purposes. Aerial applicators plant wheat and rice, sowing acres in just seconds. They also fight forest fires, help to control mosquitoes and even feed fish. Technological advances have radically changed and improved the science of aerial application. The first agplane was a modified World War I trainer, with barely enough power to get off the ground, and for decades, most agplanes were modified versions of designs that were originally intended for other purposes. But modern agplanes are designed specifically for the function of aerial application. Costing as much as a million dollars, the largest of modern agplanes can carry up to 800 gallons of product, and are powered with turboprop engines. GPS technology has also fine-tuned the precision with which modern agplanes can apply their cargo. Aerial applicators have become an integral part of agriculture, with much as 25% of all agricultural production products currently applied by aircraft. |