FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1962
1962 - 0623.PDF
FLIGHT International, 19 April 1962 621 Total cost per ton to the grazier of the fertilizer on the ground is around £A18-19 (say £15 sterling); of this the fertilizer itself will have cost £A12-14, and the contractor's charges are around £A5-7 per ton. This business is now highly organized, with around 50 firms (there are 13 in NSW alone) specializing in aerial work; local agents are in almost every town. One Northern NSW company known to the writer operates 11 de Havilland Beavers, 12 accom panying loader-lorries and employs 18 pilots. As well over 100 tons of fertilizer are generally put down in a day by one aircraft, the returns are high—but so are costs. Capital costs are high, and so are running costs. A Beaver costs just about £A30,000, to which must be added airframe and engine maintenance and renewals in service, and a lorry when fully adapted as loaders for this work costs £A5,000. Administrative costs are not high, but insurance is £60 per week for one aeroplane, and the nature of the work makes for high fuel consumption. The pilots are very well paid, too—justifiably so. They can earn from £A3,5O0-5,OO0 annually, with a statutory maximum of 100 hours' flying per month. About a year ago I was lucky enough to be passing the pioneering property mentioned previously when a record for tonnage of fertilizer distributed by one aircraft in one day was set up. The property in question is situated in the New England region of Northern NSW and is some 3,000ft up in the tablelands of the Great Dividing Range. Returning from a trip I stopped to watch, attracted by the way the pilot was throwing his aircraft around the sky on his approaches to the strip; this, conveniently for an observer, ran parallel to the road some 100yd inside the fence. I stayed watching for at least half an hour, mesmerized by the skill, speed and efficiency of the The pilot normally works it so that, flying at about 120 m.p.h., he drops half the load in one straight run and then, having turned, comes back alongside the previous swath and drops the remaining half. He flies at about 100ft to 150ft, and the swath-width of fertilizer by the time it has dispersed and reached the ground is between 25yd and 30yd. Rate of application is controlled by a gate at the bottom of the fertilizer hopper and the pilot can, of course, adjust it whilst in flight. Also, by law, the outlet is so designed that all the fertilizer can be "dumped" in emergency. With so many take-offs and landings there is obviously a tremen dous strain on the pilot; he is always flying fairly close to the ground and often in very undulating country. Accidents do occur, but in relation to the number of flights these are not numerous. Fatal accidents are rare—surprisingly so in view of the apparent risks that some pilots take to speed the operations along. Most of the fatal accidents in aerial agriculture occur in crop-dusting, which demands that the pilot flies very close to the ground indeed. The writer has nothing but admiration for the skill and nerve of agricultural pilots. The man flying the Beaver featured in the illustrations is an ex-RAAF Meteor pilot, and he really makes his aircraft "sit up and talk." In addition to top-dressing and crop-dusting and spraying, pasture seeds can also be sown from the air. Charges just issued by the Queensland Aerial Agriculture Association are of this order: "For sowing grass seed at a rate of 21b per acre plus 3d per lb in excess of 21b per acre (exclusive of cost of seed)—up to 1,000 acres, 5s; up to 2,000, 4s 6d; up to 3,000, 4s; up to 5,000, 3s 6d; over 5,000, 3s. This seems an almost incredibly cheap service, especially as a price of 5s Australian shillings means only 4s sterling. operation. The aircraft touched down, taxied up the runway (with a gentle natural slope at its loading end to help in slowing down), turned, had a load of fertilizer dumped into it from the filled and waiting hopper of the lorry-loader and was away back down the runway and airborne—in never less than 16sec nor more than 20sec in all the time I was there! The actual spreading of the fertilizer took 3min to 4min; then the aircraft returned to reload, and so it went on. 1 heard on the radio the next day that a record 130 tons of fertilizer had been spread. This was with a Beaver; and since then 163 tons have been put out in one day by a similar air craft : at the normal distribution rate this implies coverage of well over 3,000 acres (more than 4£ square miles). The usual rates of application are one or two hundredweight of superphosphate per acre but higher rates can be applied if desired. One of the advantages of aerial distribution is the tonnage which can be handled in a day—a factor of some importance when a 1,000- acre property is considered "small." Using conventional methods— i.e., tractor towing a fertilizer drill, or a lorry with a revolving spreader behind it into which two men shovel the fertilizer from the lorry as it goes along) one would be doing very well to cover 100 acres in a day. The 163 tons quoted above would probably have been put out in the following manner: 12 hours of operations at 13£ tons per hour, i.e., at a rate of one ton per load and one load every 4$min. Of the 4Jmin, the one-third minute would be spent loading, and four minutes taxying and airborne. In the pictures above, left to right, are the one-ton hopper in the Beaver's fuselage; the loader filling the hopper—this takes only about 10 sec; and the aircraft taking off from the dusty strip. These pictures were taken by the author; the other (below) from another source, shows a Beaver of the seme company—Aerial Agriculture Pty Ltd—distributing a super phosphate load
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
