Air Tractor 802 Fertilizing - With Commentary

all right I'd like to welcome everybody it's another exciting day of fertilizing rice what we're doing today is uh putting out 100 pounds of ammonium sulfate on a little bitty rice if you got planted probably two weeks ago and it's uh it's about this whole little stuff yeah the money something kind of helps it if it's a little bit sick it's not a nitrogen or anything like that and uh I got a couple of 40 acre Fields I'm gonna do they're uh caddy corner right next to each other and what I'm going to do is uh set up a racetrack pattern on these and uh you get to work it's about two miles away just send it now through uh through 500 feet and uh checking for other airplanes in the area don't see any but that's a good thing so right now I've got a 6 300 pound load of fertilizer I've got uh 1700 pounds of fuel if you do the quick math that's an 8 000 pound payload I've got in this airplane right now uh it's uh it's about 75 degrees outside today so it's not too hot and I've got a about a 10 mile an hour wind from the north uh Northeast and we're facing Southwest right now so it's directly behind us I'm coming up on my Fields right here I'm gonna do a quick little survey make sure there's probably working in them no little kids running around in there anything like that also double check again for airplanes make sure there's no new towers been erected over the last uh well since this morning I sprayed all these Hills this morning so I'm pretty sure nobody's built a tower since then but you may never know it's been a pretty nice day so far today it's uh it's getting a little bumpy there's a lot of little uh invisible uh little tornadoes like we call them dust devils stuff like that there's lots of those out today and then flying through one of those if you don't know it's about to happen it'll it'll scare the mess out of you sometimes it'll it'll knock the whole airplane over 90 degrees all right so I'm done with that none of my survey I'm just gonna double check make sure my GPS is all set up correct I'm on the right SWAT width which I'm not did it fix that real quick with check my fertilizing computer make sure I'm on 100 pounds and we're ready to go the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to set this field up in the computer I'm doing a closed pattern so the GPS but basically I've got a click uh button twice which will Mark two points uh during my first pass the GPS is going to draw a straight line between those uh two points and then it's going to set the passes out as wide as I just told it to which is 90 feet so there's first point I'm applying as straight as long as possible uh second point and so now what I got to do is I gotta fly all the way to the other end of the field and it's going to count my passes off the whole time I'm promising them so I'm going to pick the closest pass to the edge of the field over here got to give a little more power she's a little doggy right now it's eight thousand pounds of fuel and fertilizer and then I'm gonna click it and that'll tell the GPS how wide the field is so pass number 29 I'm just gonna click that so there's into the field I've got a Northeast wind so I'm going to hang out over these trees just a little bit I'm flying North right now and the uh the the Northeast wind is going to push the fertilizer uh over onto the edge of the field so now what I'm going to do go back to the other end of the field that I started on and I'm gonna work uh this will be my second pass and then the computer is going to put me in the middle of the pattern which will be uh basically the east side of this other build I'm doing so basically this whole field this little square 40 right here I'm going to work it going south and then I'm going to work that other one going north you'll see what I'm talking about here in just a second a little heavy still I'll be heavy for just a minute I'm putting out 100 pounds a acre I'm doing uh see I've done eight Acres well basically nine acres and three passes so I'm doing three acres of pass I'm only losing 300 pounds uh every pass plus you know whatever fuel I burn ing 93.5 gallons an hour fuel right now I've got the power pushed up pretty good I missed 3 600 foot pounds of torque and a 1570 on the prop now if you want to do the math times RPM divided by 52.52 will tell you how much horsepower I'm pulling and I bet you it's probably around a thousand if I had to guess all right so I clicked my next pass and I was doing the computers lined me up in the middle of my pattern which is gonna the way these fields are laid out it's going to be basically the first pass on this other field that I'm doing which is this one and all these trees right here and this turn is going to be my Tailwind turn so I've got a wind coming this way and uh turn this heavy thing around and this little Tailwind here uh it's it's not much of an issue you just have to pay attention to how far out you're getting from your line because the wind will push you uh outside of where you want to go like like it just did to me it I just blew my line by 400 feet just in which but I've got plenty of time to come back to it because the Field's still a quarter of a mile up here so basically every single pass what I'm doing is like a real precise ILS approach um so I've got this light bar up in front of me and it's telling me uh how many feet to the left or the right of my line that I am so like it'll say L4 and that means uh I'm four feet to the right I need to go left four feet but it's telling me it's really precise you know we try to keep that within five feet uh that's the goal it doesn't always work especially on Gusty days but today like today it shouldn't be in the shoe at all keeping that within five feet I've also got a laser altimeter which uh I try to keep within 10 feet so for fertilizer I try to keep it around 60 feet uh for spraying I like to keep it between eight and eight and ten feet from my Crosstrack which is my distance left to right and my laser altimeter are right next to each other on that live bar so I'm just basically I'm not staring at him but I'm you know glancing at them and making sure they're uh within the correct window if I get too far out of the window mainly on the left or the right I'll have to shut off and uh go around and try to you know to pick up where I left off without being so far off you know this stuff is real expensive um also the applications that need to be really precise uh just it's just a first of all it's a good habit you know we're professionals who want to do a good job but second of all some of these chemicals if you overlap too much I mean it'll kill the crop you're spraying so I'm doing 100 pounds acre I've got uh 60 what I say 6 300 pounds yeah 6 300 pounds in here so um so that that's a 63 acre load basically and uh what I'm gonna do is since we've got a bunch of kind of smaller Fields like this to do I'm gonna probably shoot over that by four acres I'd say so I need to hit 67. uh that's my goal for this load so if I don't hit 67 I'm gonna have to adjust my computer to put out a little bit of a different poundage like if I hit 63 then I need to you know take it down a couple pounds and vice versa if I go way too far over it's really important to be precise if you run out of chemical or fertilizer before the job is done well then you have to buy that and uh you know and that's expensive uh and if you've got way too much on the ground well you did a bad job you didn't give the farmer what he asked for and you got to figure out what to do with all that stuff you've got left over on the ground farmer will not be happy about that at all either by the way and the farmers are our customers and we got to keep them happy uh if at all possible but more importantly it's just important to do a good precise job this costs a lot of money it's as simple as that I got somebody on a on the backhoe right down there he's going away from my field that's good you'd be surprised you'll be fertilizing the field and some people just drive their truck right out in the middle of it or a tractor or whatnot so uh operating this uh fertilizer system is pretty simple I've got uh it's it's all computer controlled it's got a uh what you might call it it's got software that will uh monitor my ground speed and so uh it'll open my gate accordingly so if I'm going really fast it'll open the gate appropriately to put out the poundage that I've selected you know like in this instance I'm an upwind downwind situation where this is a downwind pass so my ground speed will be considerably higher than on my upwind pass which is the next one I'm going to do and if your gate opens the same distance or both those passes on the downwind pass you'll put out less material and on that one patch you'll put out a lot more so I'm doing 165 miles an hour across the ground right now and uh let's see what I'm doing on this pass but anyway what I'm saying is that my gate will automatically adjust for the ground speed difference which is really nice and uh anyway I've set on that up I set my swap with uh putting Hill on how many pounds I'm trying to put out and then I've just got a switch down here on my spray handle it's on my left hand and when I come in the field I lead it just a little bit so I'll turn it on right now and then uh you know the same thing on the other side of the field it'll shut off right now and that's really about it definitely got to pay attention there's nothing that tells you when when you run out of fertilizer and if you're not paying attention you know you'll run out and not know where you're in the field you were when you ran out which is an important thing to know but it's pretty easy to do believe it or not done 33 Acres um there should be about half my load it looks like I've got a little less than half of a load in here so uh we're just gonna keep rolling with this and we'll see where we end up I think a lot of you would be surprised um you know I get a lot of questions about uh the airplane flying part of it and really what I'm focused on in this plane is uh 99 focused on the application that I'm doing uh that's that's what I get paid to do that's what that's the service we offer uh flying the airplane is really I just uh something I have to do to do the job that I'm getting paid to do if that makes any sense uh it's really it's not something that I'm focused on so my back Hopper this up I guess I should preface this this airplane's got two hoppers in it there's a divider right down the middle um it's basically two 400 gallon Hoppers and uh this one particular one uh the back Hopper usually empties before the front Hopper when I'm doing fertilizer so my back Hopper is empty and I can't see the front Hopper at all because there's a wall so what I'm going to do now is I still think I've got about 20 acres to go um but I'm gonna watch my lid on top of the hopper because when I run out it'll suck the hopper lid down and that's how I know that I've run out of fertilizer another way to do it I mean I've got a window between my feet I can look down there but I'd really rather be looking out the windshield instead of down between my feet um or I could literally watch the fertilizer come out of the spreader through you know with my window over here uh neither one of those I really like to do because I like I said I need to be looking in front of me there could be other planes flying around here Medevac helicopter army helicopter spot through here at 200 feet for some reason uh there's you know you don't want to run into anything like that for sure also this fertilizer is kind of brown so I really can't even see it coming out of the spreader anyways so I couldn't do that if I wanted to I guess as far as flying the airplane goes the main thing that I really just want to make sure that I'm not do it all the time is I'm I want to make sure that I'm not uh uncoordinated in my turns um but these ailerons do create quite a bit of adverse y'all and uh anyways um if I if I'm uncoordinated a lot well number one if you stall the plane uncoordinated you'll either snap it upside down or snap it the other way around and at 300 feet that means you're going to crash and uh number two if I fly and coordinated my fuel will migrate to one tank like so if I'm my Ball's on the outside all the time if that's off to the right all my fuel will end up in that right fuel tank and this plane's got two tanks one in each Wing uh they go to a header tank in the middle under my feet and if one tank runs out all the engine could quit even if the other one's full so I want to make sure my fuel stays nice and even otherwise I'll have to stop for fuel prematurely not gonna have 100 gallons on my ride tank and 20 on my left and I'd have to stop for fuel because I've only got 20 gallons in my lifting so that's that's something I try to avoid um you know you always pay attention to which way the wind's blowing uh for reasons like so right now like I said earlier I've got a downwind turn coming up here and uh what it'll do is it'll push me into my line that I'm shooting for um and so I want to make sure that I've come out far enough also I need to know which way the wind's blowing because of my application but as far as the airplane is concerned it's mainly just making sure I don't uh blow way past my line and have to so I work real hard to get back to it before I get to the field oh man I've just run out uh 57 Acres I was shooting for like 66. this is my first load of this stuff all fertilizer flows a little bit differently the thrill size changes uh some of it's wet uh whatever uh it flows differently with different weights and so uh we always like to try to get pretty close on the first load so 57 um so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull it back uh 10 pounds and we'll see what I get next load

Channel: Patrick Cohen

Views: 149,656

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Id: 1E8hjARrvKg

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 10 2023