Crop-dusters flying VERY low over populated area

J

JFlighttt

Well-Known Member
So I get home from the airport, crack open a beer on the patio and a crop duster just blows right over me. A few minutes later, he does the same thing again....and after a few minutes again and again.

I live in Naperville, IL which is a very densely populated area all the way around for miles. 1000 feet over a densely populated area is the regulation; this guy was more like 3-400 feet and just kept doing passes over and over all day long for hours, passing over the same spot every time. There are NO fields within 10 miles of here that need any dusting or attention via crop dusters. I walk out to a field a few houses down and watch him do about 10 passes in an hour. As he is doing these passes, I notice about a mile or so west of him there is the same airplane doing the same thing, flying super low and doing these passes in line with him. Any idea what they could have been doing? I see no reason for them to be flying that low over populated areas for that long and doing passes all day long.
 
Ayork62493 said:
Showing off to a buddy would be what I'm thinking, but maybe it was actually something productive.
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Yes, that is what I was thinking at first, just someone looking cool but once I noticed the other airplane a mile west doing the same thing in line with each other, it seems like they must have been doing something else but what?
 
JFlighttt said:
Yes, that is what I was thinking at first, just someone looking cool but once I noticed the other airplane a mile west doing the same thing in line with each other, it seems like they must have been doing something else but what?
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As a fellow guy from Illinois, ANY field is worthy of dusting, whether in the metro areas or not. You would be able to see the spray, though, as they flew low. Crops are getting too tall to take big rigs in there and tear up the plants. They could very well have been spraying a field, and what looks like the same spot may have been an airplane 100 feet over each time. It's possible.

Two other possibilities. They could be doing a calibration field with their onboard GPS systems. Very possible.

Or they could be doing spray evaluations of each aircraft. Sensors are set up over a field, airport, open area, etc., with a plane flying by full of water. The planes spray as normal, and the sensors pick up the coverage (how fine, whether spots are missed or too much in one area, etc.). From this information, they can then adjust the nozzles as necessary.

But hopefully, the REAL reason they were flying over Naperville was to give suburbia kids a glimpse at a dream. We all know they won't see any other airplane low and slow there, so these guys took it upon themselves to catch just one five-year-old kid in the yard today looking up in the sky.

Here's to you, kid. :)
 
400ft is still pretty high. Sounds like mosquito spraying. We do 200ft over densely populated areas for mosquito missions. We're pansies though, we shut it down at sunset. I know guys that do it all night long over the city with NVGs.
 
MikeD said:
Yeah, sure. Good answer. It's probably you or one of your cohorts in the video I posted.
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Probably!

One piece of good advice I got from a fellow Pawnee driver- always keep the trim slightly nose up. Because someday, for some reason, you will get distracted for a tenth of a second. Better to realize this as you drift away from the field, instead of realizing that you are in fact now driving on it.
 
stormchaser said:
As a fellow guy from Illinois, ANY field is worthy of dusting, whether in the metro areas or not. You would be able to see the spray, though, as they flew low. Crops are getting too tall to take big rigs in there and tear up the plants. They could very well have been spraying a field, and what looks like the same spot may have been an airplane 100 feet over each time. It's possible.

Two other possibilities. They could be doing a calibration field with their onboard GPS systems. Very possible.

Or they could be doing spray evaluations of each aircraft. Sensors are set up over a field, airport, open area, etc., with a plane flying by full of water. The planes spray as normal, and the sensors pick up the coverage (how fine, whether spots are missed or too much in one area, etc.). From this information, they can then adjust the nozzles as necessary.

But hopefully, the REAL reason they were flying over Naperville was to give suburbia kids a glimpse at a dream. We all know they won't see any other airplane low and slow there, so these guys took it upon themselves to catch just one five-year-old kid in the yard today looking up in the sky.

Here's to you, kid. :)
Click to expand...


Yes! I like that lol. No chemtrails or anything so doesn't look like they were spraying at all. In fact, I didn't see any of the spray bars/rods rigged onto the airplane. GPS calibration was what I was thinking as well. Who knows, I was just curious on what they were doing.
 
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