This has absolutely nothing to do with a Piper, not even a Pawnee, but I’d like to mention my dad. He just retired at the age of 79 from a 50 year career as an ag pilot. He logged 12,500 hours, with most of those around 10ft AGL. You don’t do that without being really good. He loved going to work every day and he worked hard. Crazy thing is, he didn’t want to retire but he knew he needed to. He had 8 “emergencies” throughout the years, requiring either landing in a field or on a road…never tore up an airplane, himself or anyone else. Last year, I got him talking about these incidents and recorded every one of them with my phone. I knew about most of them but there were a couple I had never heard. Amazing to say the least.
We’re from North Louisiana where it’s a huge business. I was planning on following in his footsteps working on my PPL in my teens. A good friend of mine, who’s dad owned another flying service, got his commercial / ag training at 20 and got killed about 6 months into the job. NTSB determined he fell asleep on a spray run (some of them are 1-2 miles long in that area) and flew directly into a tree line. Made me rethink my path. There are times I regret it but it is what it is.
He started off in a radial 600hp Grumman Ag Cat and finished up in a Air Tractor, AT-802. Extremely proud of my dad, Billy Beevers. Best Pilot I’ll ever know.
We’re from North Louisiana where it’s a huge business. I was planning on following in his footsteps working on my PPL in my teens. A good friend of mine, who’s dad owned another flying service, got his commercial / ag training at 20 and got killed about 6 months into the job. NTSB determined he fell asleep on a spray run (some of them are 1-2 miles long in that area) and flew directly into a tree line. Made me rethink my path. There are times I regret it but it is what it is.
He started off in a radial 600hp Grumman Ag Cat and finished up in a Air Tractor, AT-802. Extremely proud of my dad, Billy Beevers. Best Pilot I’ll ever know.
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