Air Tractor 802 Spraying Beans - With Commentary

oh okay back at it again today is a different day I'm not not fertilizing today well per se I am but I'm spraying liquid today instead of dropping granular fertilizer on the ground which is a bit different so today I'm going to be about 10 foot off the crop um go a little faster because uh the plane's a little slippery here with uh with the spray system versus the fertilizer spreader and I'm spraying fungicide on beans beans are cool because the leaves are a little light and when you fly over them it turns all the leaves and you can see all your passes in the beans it says well I think it's cool but most of y'all probably won't care about that at all anyway I'm playing this build right here I've got a couple fields of spray and there's a bunch of trees in the mix I've got about a 10 mile an hour south wind which is uh always fun when there's trees around so I'm doing all these beans over here to the left I'm doing this right here I'm just I'm going to survey the field it's important when you fertilize it's extra important when you spray because you're In Harm's Way basically you're down amongst things to hit when you're spraying so it looks like we got some logging guys right here and that's right on the edge of my field that kind of sucks the wind's blowing away from them so that's good so uh it's against the laws of physics for my spray to move upwind so that means that these guys will not get sprayed and if they say the dudes are lying but those guys are probably cool I bet they're not going to care that I'm here so anyway I'm going to start right here on this edge of the field just uh I'm gonna Circle back around these logging guys again make sure that they see me I don't want to fly over the top and scare the crap out of them I will be going towards them on that side of the field because that's how my racetrack pattern is going to be set up so anyway everything looks good the fungicide there's really nothing to hurt I don't really need to worry about adjacent crops or anything like that I just I need to worry about houses I need to worry about people like that those guys down there in the uh doing that logging looks like they're clearing all those trees out which is good well I guess it depends on how you feel but in Farmland uh it's better for me anyway let's just put it that way because trees are big and hard and they break airplanes when you hit them so I'm gonna zoom on in I'm gonna get started I'm gonna do a race track pattern just like uh so like I did previously [Applause] uh on the last video that I talked in I've got a pretty similar load today so I've got uh 700 gallons of water chemical and liquid fertilizer the liquid fertilizer weighs 11 pounds a gallon I've got 250 gallons of that uh basically what that equals uh with my fuel and chemical and everything I've got about a 8 500 pound load and that's payload that's not gross weight the gross weight at this point right now is about 16 000 pounds so what that means is I need to build it real easy with the stick especially when I'm pulling up over stuff in my turns it's very easy to get into an accelerated stall in this plane when it's at a higher you know heavy weight uh the gross way to the plane is 16-5 like the maximum gross weight so I'm under that but I'm pretty darn close to it so we're flying about as heavy as you can fly a plane uh one of these planes anyways there's the logging guys gonna pop some smoke right here so they know that it's blown away from them so the accelerated stall is uh a real thing I got an argument once with an airline Captain had 18 000 hours and I do that because the hands and feet on the controls of the plane are what I call hours when you're sitting uh flying in Australian under autopilot I think that should count for not a full hour anyway uh and he was under the full belief that you could not stall an airplane below its stall speed and really the stall speed is is relative to your angle of attack you can install a plane at 50 you can stall playing at 150 because the speed is not what causes the stall of course it's exceeding the critical angle of attack is what causes the stone well this 18 000 hour pilot didn't know that and uh [Applause] anyway it's a very uh it's a very big problem in this industry especially when you're heavy especially when you're in a downwind pass and you're making a big hard pull-up over trees with the wind at your back that's a all that's a combination for dying and nobody wants to die so I'm paying a lot of attention to that um believe it or not I'm not really looking at the trees that much it's kind of the same principles riding a motorcycle like if if a deer runs out in the road and you stare at the deer you're probably gonna hit the deer so if I stared at the tops of these trees the likelihood of me hitting them is a lot so I look above the top of the trees which is where I'd like to go and uh make nice easy pulls on the stick you don't want to stick jockey these planes really ever you especially don't want to uh tell them what to do when you're heavy you got to ask to find what to do and be ready for it to say no I have a plan B and uh Plan B in this case um would be my flap so I've got flaps uh they're on a rocker switch on my stick right here my pointer finger works I'm just kind of like the guns in a fighter plane and if if I'm easing above these trees and I feel a small buffet from you know a stall I'll get a little flaps and I don't care how fast I'm going either so I'd rather do that than run into those trees I don't get a lot of plants just a little bit just a little bump you know we'll go a long way and uh calling the name of not crashing and not dying so the basic rule when it comes to diving over trees is and this is my rule I don't know how everybody else flies but I do not push over the trees and pull any negative G's that's a kind of a No-No for me mainly because I usually haven't opened a cup of coffee in here and today's a little bumpy so I've got a little yeti cup but it's still got a little hole in the top of the lid and I do not want to spill my coffee okay I also don't want all the stuff that I've got sitting in here like my pins and my clipboard and all the stuff in my little like the little box that I'm talking to you through if you pull negative G's all that stuff is going to leave where it's sitting and float in the air and then when you round out your dive it'll slam back down onto the ground usually not in the place that it was before uh you did that and that's not good uh you don't want to stuff getting up under your Rudder pedals or anything like that sure you know uh you just don't want you just don't want to avoid that so I don't pull negative G's I basically I put it into a zero or not a zero one G dive um so I'm not pulling positive enough one negative I'm just basically going at an angle straight down and then I round it out at the bottom and now rounding out's another situation where you can get in trouble especially if you're uh you're going downwind uh with this big heavy plane if you get in a steep dive and you are too aggressive pulling it out you will uh buff it and you could possibly stall the airplane and another thing you could do which and I've actually done this before a long time ago uh you can the final mush which means like your nose will go up but the plane is going to continue to sink like that uh you'll get into the crop and I've I've got into some corn pretty good doing that uh several years ago on a 502 and it scared me pretty good um I was lucky I didn't crash the plane because the corn is corn doesn't play like it looks nice and soft from there but it'll ruin your plane uh and you if you let it I've known several people that have got their wingtip in in the corn uh when they were Landing you know the corner was beside the runway and uh it's it's broke it's ripped wing tips off it'll pull the whole plane into the crop I mean it'll total a plane it's just a that's not good so I learned a hard lesson that day yeah but anyway so my spray system is much like my fertilizer system uh it's computer controlled I've got a spray handle I don't actually have a switch I've got a handle that and I open a ball valve with it and uh I've got an air driven pump on the front of the plane it's got a magnetic brake on so I can shut it off if I need to the pump recirculates the chemical when I'm not spraying so right now it's all recirculating in my Hopper staying good and mixed up and I've got a computer that monitors the volume so I basically tell it what volume so what I'm doing now is I'm doing 200 acre loads and I'm taking 700 gallons so that's a three and a half gallons per acre is what I'm spraying so I'll type that in the computer and the computer monitors my ground speed and it's got its own ball valve down there that's got an electric motor on it and it opens it up and causes it to hold my volume consistent or steady or whatever [Applause] um it's about a lot like my fertilizer gate and you can actually see that in this red box over here the top number is my boom pressure the bottom number is the gallons of my Hopper so this is an upwind pass my boom pressure was about 50 which is a little bit high it's not too high I like to keep it at 40. this next pass is a downwind pass now watch what happens with my boom pressure I'll be going across the ground quite a bit faster my boom pressure is going to be quite a bit higher on this pass and that's uh that's what that computer does before the computers we'd have to open the basically the stop on our handle and open open our spray valve a little bit more to get more pressure so we'd uh put the spread at the appropriate volume so I'm at 55 on this pass I pulled the power back a little bit we'll have to check that again I bet you uh 55 on this pass I'll mentioned my next pass is probably going to be around 45. we'll just keep the power where it's at I'm at 1550 on the prop uh 2760 on the torque I don't know how many horsepower that is it's probably 750. uh torque times RPM divided by 5252 equals horsepower all right so it's 55 on that last pass and I got to watch out for these trees it's only 20 right now Milo's going pretty darn slow I gotta go around because I uh I was in not in the right situation to hop over those trees I was going a little bit slow and when I got right when I got down in the field I would have needed to pull up and then push over the trees and like I said before I don't like to pull negative G's so we're just going to make a big circle then I'm going to dive in on the other side of those trees you don't want to hit a tree I've hit trees before it's not fun my first season I hit a tree doing exactly what I was talking about earlier I was on a heavy hot downwind pass and when I pulled up the plane started to buff it so naturally you cannot pull up anymore when that starts to happen you just have to ride it out and I wrote it out all the way through the top of the tree and it destroyed the Leading Edge of that wing it was the right hand wing it just bashed it in I mean it looked like you shot it with a bunch of golf balls and through a gallon gun it was terrible yeah I got lucky on that one if I was a couple feet lower it might have it might have broke the wing off it might have thrown me into a spin uh I mean there's no tailing I got really lucky that was within the first uh 100 hours of me flying one of these and I got into my first spray plane I had about 300 hours total time like it was uh I was pretty darn fresh and I've been doing nothing but this ever since I've got about 7 000 hours now I've had a couple of people planes I had a Mooney M20 and all that stuff so I've done a little bit of other flying but pretty much this is it I'm pretty much a stick and rudder only guy and uh about 90 percent of the 7 000 hours is tail wheel time too it's just basically it's just doing this this is a goal of mine when I first uh before I even got my pilot's license I basically I took a summer job I was in college I took a summer job I don't even think I'm gonna get to spray on this pass I'm there's gonna be a couple Passover these trees until I move over to that side of the field so I think what I'm going to do is a couple back to back passes over here and uh it'll get me I won't have to deadhead like this again um but anyway I took a summer job in college uh loading chemicals it was just something to do in the summertime I liked airplanes you know I put remote control airplanes growing up um I built some flu and all that stuff uh I played the heck out of some flying simulator when I was a kid just I just always really liked airplanes I took the summer job mixing the chemicals and pretty whoa the wind about rolled me over right there uh pretty quickly you figured out that this is what I needed to be doing with my life so I was pretty focused on this and only this and that's why I got in one at 300 hours I mean that's all I ever wanted to do and so I just made sure to take all the necessary steps to make it happen and uh with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck uh it happened so anyway I'm gonna do a back-to-back pass right here and then I'll do one more on this side of the field and I should be on the other side of those trees by that time so my laser altimeter when I'm spraying uh I like to keep it around 10 feet uh if you watched my last video on the fertilizer you'll notice I'm quite a bit lower uh spraying and that's because if you if you fly really high with this stuff I mean it'll just vaporizer blow off somewhere else before he gets down to the field it's not not the same as the the dry granule or the granular fertilizer pretty won't fall straight down so you can be a little bit higher also we need to be higher for the patterns to develop better this step you need to be about 12 feet and that's all you need to be so there's my laser altimeter three to nine feet eight feet nine feet in feet it's sensitive just like my uh my Crosstrack is sensitive um You Can't See the Light Bar up there but the Crosstrek basically that tells me how far I am to the left or right of my line it's super sensitive I mean it updates like 20 times a second so it's pretty real time I'll try to read it out to you on the snakes pass it's windy enough but I'm not going to keep it dead center the whole path so it you might be able to see how sensitive it is let's see here see I'm 27 28 46 five four three two one uh there's 10 foot and I put eight seven six five four three two one zero zero right one zero zero left two left one zero right two red two right three right two right one zero okay I gotta stop looking at it now it was pretty much dead zero for the last part of that little pass all right so I've done several passes over here the whole time I was clicking through my passes on the other end of my pattern but they were all over those trees so there's no point in turning around and just flying over those trees for no reason so now let's see if uh if it's moved over far enough where I can spray a pass in this field right here and it has well it's pretty close it looks like if I stayed on my line my left wing would be in those trees so I'm just going to move over a little bit uh the wind's blowing towards those trees anyways a little bit I'm just going to stay a little bit High I'm gonna let the wind blow it over there just make sure I got the edge of that field oh gotta miss that tree all right there's that logging crew down there again can't forget about those guys that guy on that little logger picker upper man if he's not paying attention I fly right over the top open they could scare him half to death if he had a heart attack in there I could probably get sued so I'm gonna stay away from those guys I'm not worried about spraying them because the wind's blowing away from them at about 10 to 12 miles an hour all right there we go a little hairy today it's not bad um but it's definitely a lot harder to stay on your line and turn around and all that stuff when the wind's blowing like this and this particular chemical it's it's fungicide so I'm not real concerned uh there is a legal wind limit it's on the label of the chemical and I think it's about 15 miles an hour for this chemical and I don't mean I don't think it I know it's 15. usually has a higher wind limit than uh herbicide does and I mean even if a herbicide some of it does have a limit of 15 but you're not going to find me out of here spraying herbicide that's just irresponsible gotta pull up a little sooner some left wing and it's enough there it's a Ford Raptor down there would you look at that looks like this corn below me is not in that great a shape it's probably not irrigated might not have got enough water it doesn't look that good it's real short too so anyways uh you know besides uh staying on the line keeping my laser altimeter and making sure I don't run into stuff I'm gonna constantly check to make sure that my my flow control the computer that controls my spray volume I'm going to constantly check to make sure that it's working because if it stops working and I don't catch that that could be a problem you know what can happen is it could be putting out way too much chemical in which case I wouldn't have enough to finish the job in which case we'd have to buy more chemical uh to finish the job and this stuff's probably 30 to 40 dollars an acre this job is uh 2300 acres and that's a lot of freaking money so I need to pay attention to all that to make sure that uh that doesn't happen and um but yeah that's pretty much it you know I'm checking to make sure the situation around the field doesn't change I'm watching for cars and trucks to come down the Scrabble Road here at the South End um um uh you know I'm kind of paying attention to the wind what it's doing because if it starts picking up anymore I'm going to have to shut down watching these guys here making sure they don't uh try to get Brave and get a cool picture which happens a lot believe it or not um you know I've had kids run out in the field before that I was spraying to get a cool picture uh you got to pay attention to all that if you spray somebody's kid dude it's not going to be a good day for you Maya my first season I had a guy chasing me around on a riding lawnmower he was I don't even know where he come from because I was out in the middle of Tennessee there wasn't even a house within a couple miles so I don't know how far this guy drove this mower but anyway like I was playing a field and I see this guy Park his riding lawn mower right on the road downwind of what I was spraying and so I couldn't spray because this guy's the head didn't have a shirt on or anything and like he's just standing there and I was like what is this guy doing so I went to a different field that was kind of close by it's a half mile away or so it'll lower behold about 20 minutes later Here Comes This riding lawnmower pulling up to my field downwind again that was my first season luckily I had enough sense to stop spraying because I was spraying bug juice that time and bug killer is not that good for you well I'm sure most of this stuff isn't good for you but uh bug juice especially if it gets on your skin it'll kind of burn like it's just not it's not pleasant and this guy didn't even have a shirt on here's that crew again I'm gonna blow some smoke so that they can see exactly where this stuff on the sprain is going it's just some courtesy smoke there hopefully they can put two and two together watching that smoke blow away from them they'll realize that they're not getting sprayed I'm turning the plane around in this wind is uh it's not super difficult you just have to pay more attention to what you're doing you know when you're turning downwind I mean you can't be jockeying this thing around and then you also have to pay enough attention even if you get far enough away from your field if the wind doesn't blow you so close to your field you can't make any corrections to get on your line uh because you're so close to it oh it's a tall tree oh hey uh but it's I mean it's it's just flying an airplane you know Bitcoins aren't that complicated to fly really it's it's I mean at this point in time it's more of a feel anyway you know probably this thing like uh one weekend a month would be a different story but uh I fight a lot this particular aircraft um I got in this plane at the end of 2019. it had 800 on the Hops meter and by the way this hops meter only runs when I'm about above half throttle so no taxi time gets counted uh when I pull the throttle back to land it stops counting so anyway I got in it at the end of 2019 had 800 even on it now right now it's got 29.90 so I put 21 almost 2 200 hours on it uh since the end of 2019. plenty of time so I'll enables to say I'm good and comfortable in this airplane I like this airplane it's a 2018 model uh 802 a I think uh it's got a Pratt Whitney Dash 65 on it I had a comment on my last Channel they're like 93 gallons an hour they're surprised well I mean it's a big motor the chat horsepower rating on this motor is 1300. you know 4 000 foot pounds of torque it takes a bit of fuel to make that much power this actually um is pretty similar to the motor that's on a Pilatus there's there are several differences but uh it's in the same family anyway I'm getting pretty close to being done with this I'll have some trimming to do I need to make a trim pass along the South edge of the field because I've got a good south wind and I'm not able to carry my spray out over the edge because of these trees and that loading crew so I'll need to do that probably need to make some trim up passes around these trees because I can't get down on the crop real good right up next to the trees the wind's going to help with that a little bit the wind will blow the tree the chemical up into the trees if the trees are downwind not all these trees are downwind is the problem [Applause] you can see in the beans the wind is blowing the bean leaves that's not the beans are I guess they have light leaves I don't know they blow a five mile an hour wind the corn however won't and when the corn starts moving around that's when you need to really consider uh stopping because uh it takes about a 15 mile an hour wind to move that corn around it also takes about a 15 mile an hour wind to make a little white cap like in a lake or a pond so if you've got a little body of water around and you see little white caps in it uh you know the wind's at least 15 miles an hour and it's time to stop spraying you can fertilize it in whatever you want to but like fertilizer is it's it's like cat litter pretty much consistency maybe a lot of it's a little bit bigger than that um it's just going to fall down it's not going to hurt anything either it'll just fall down it'll be okay uh spraying not so much you know when you're putting out a volume like three gallons to the acre if you think about it that's really not a lot it's not like a flood coming out of the back of this plane it's it's pretty fine droplets and uh if it's windy it's you know the wind's going to move those small droplets quite a bit and so to make a good accurate application and not waste anybody's money um it's it's better to not spray when it's 15 or above not to mention it's pretty much illegal so there's that I'm 59 pounds of pressure on this downwind run I'm not going to touch the power I'm at 2880 on the torque right now I'm gonna go over here I'll see what my let's see my boom pressure is going upwind I didn't look at my ground speed it was probably around 180. gonna guess oh it's bumpy right here all right my boom pressure on this pass is 40 39 40. so that's a pretty big difference that's about a 20 psi difference and it takes that much of a difference to put out the same volume upwind versus downwind now what I got to do is uh I got to run over here and spray this little Nook that was it was in between two sets of trees and not enough for me to get down and back up uh efficiently I could have done it with the airplane but I would have been so high in the air with that spray on to the spray would have just blown off somewhere else so I'm gonna go do this the long way I'm gonna do a back to back pattern on this which is basically like you mow your yard and I'm going to start on the upwind side so the uh the wind is blowing the chemical away from my next pass and also allows me to turn into the wind on every turn oh that's set up on the left back to back I need a right back to back press this little button right here press that again all right so these turns are going to be a little bit more quote unquote extreme they're not extreme by any means but my last ones are pretty laid back and easy you know I had a pretty wide you know my lines were probably 1400 feet from each other uh on this particular pattern Summers don't pass after pass after pass my passes are like you know 75 feet from each other so I have to go way out here this is my downwind turn right here that was pulling this is also a full aileron by the way it's as fast as this point rolls and I got uh 13 115 feet away from my line so that's actually a little further than I need to be uh considering this wind I could I could have turned a little closer anyway back here on pass number three and I'll pop some smoke on this pass so you can kind of see when I turn around you can kind of see what the wind is doing and you'll see how far away the chemical and the smoke is from me uh on my next pass I've got this set up so that the wind blows it away from me because I don't want to fly through it I don't know if it causes cancer RFK says it does he's a pretty smart guy so I'm just not gonna I'm gonna flirt with disaster here so it smokes way over there some of my chemical that's good that's what I want ooh Tall Tree okay okay and full Ali around again that's full left early around right there this is as fast as this thing rolls flaps down to two-thirds a lot going on in this turn I mean I could pretty much take my hand off the stick I didn't need just a slight amount of back pressure on the stick the uh the flaps really pull the nose around really a lot they a lot a lot like if you put if you're going 130 miles an hour and you start putting your flaps down this thing will pitch straight up in the air it's actually kind of scary okay one more I think I got one more pass here I'm getting about 500 foot in these turns these aren't crazy turns I got several more passes here so my uh my shape file ends right there but I know that you know all these beans need to be sprayed so I'm gonna keep going here the shape files basically the file on my computer that's got the outline of the field they're not always 100 accurate and in this case they're not and now that I'm thinking about it I spray this field a couple times a year so it's always this way I need to mention that there's also a part of the trees over there that are included in the shape file so the acres are always right but uh we should probably just fix that just because all right this will be a little more of an aggressive turn so I got 500 feet away from my next line I might overshoot it by 100 feet or so because 500 feet is pretty aggressive over shot about 86 feet it's full left earlier on pull it out of the turn so I got in a little bit of a situation where my aileron kind of stalled that's what you get for for not flying easy and smooth you know they said in Bays of Thunder that uh what is it uh slow is smooth and smooth as fast so kind of the same principle applies to Flying these things like if you're in here throwing this stick around hard uh it's gonna bite you in the ass there's no point no point in doing that you're not going to gain any time you're not going to get any more loads done than the other guy but crashing this thing around all you're going to do is put yourself in a situation to get hurt and do a bad job for the farmer you know first and foremost our duty to the farmers to make this application as accurate as possible like I said before this stuff is really expensive and when these guys are spending 30 40 bucks an acre plus the fly-in which is about eight dollars an acre uh that's a lot of money and I know that if somebody was out here doing that bad of a job with my money I'd be really mad about it so it's important that we do everything that we can do to make the best application possible and uh most of us are very responsible like that and we we really do care about our application you know it's like my name is all over these jobs that I do and I don't want a bad reputation and speaking of being responsible if any of you guys saw that video circulating around of that guy flying across the Interstate right in front of the semi truck that guy's a and where did you do stuff like that you will not have a very long career in this industry so nobody thinks that's cool except the morons except fellow morons all right well I'm done with this field actually I'm not I need to make one more true pass one more turn pass along those trees and then I'll be done with this field these are not my favorite Fields by the way um I had a like a mile and a half two mile long field I did earlier uh but those are boring to watch nobody wants to watch that it's just like I dive in the field and I just spray for days and then I make a turn and then turn around and then I spray for days like this build is more interesting it's got trees they had a crew down here working on something

Channel: Patrick Cohen

Views: 189,008

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Id: 4Z401yTRNCU

Length: 33min 54sec (2034 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023