Allen wrote:

I used to work at a co-op in Idaho delivering fertilizer and chemicals. One
customer with a lot of land decided he could save money on spraying by
buying his own Pawnee. Sent the oldest kid through flight training. All
went well the first day; the second day he rolled it into a ball and they
drug it behind the potato cellar where it still lie years later. Kid lived
though.

Delivered to another operator that only worked three months a year, the rest
of the time he vacationed in Florida. Flew sunrise to sunset those three
months though. Never shut the engine off during the day, even to fuel and
eat.

Seen it from both sides. Newbie started this year with 2 radial engined
biplanes that they had to make airworthy. Dunno where they got the
support equipment from, but that ain't nothing fancy and he stayed
pretty busy. Need the equipment to do both seed and booms for spraying
liquids though. All the others are flying planes that are many years
old, some turbine and some with radials (southamerican low wing
Drombadiers (sp?) in one fleet). Mosquitoes are done with the small
Lycontsores, all very underpowered from what I'm told. There are some
helo operators here in LA but are fairly rare and are usually trucked
around the nation doing rights-of-way spraying...

I was there when we extracted the turbine biplane from ontop of the C150
that landed together in Jennings. Both pilots met up at the left wingtip
and were very lucky to have survived... Turboprop chewed through the
cowling and 0-200 of the Cessna and the landing gear was right behind
the flaps, in a perfect mating position...

Dunno where my photos of it are at the moment...