Martha Lunken, our region's first lady of flying, is grounded. 'It's like being disemboweled

[A64Pilot]

13 hours ago, Will.iam said:

Don’t ag airplanes routinely fly under power lines at end of the fields they spray? Or is that illegal now too?

Sometimes, depending on the need, most often in the country powerlines are located by a road, and very often have a fence under them, so it’s very tight and you have to look for road traffic too, so unless it’s really necessary to get good coverage on a field, no they avoid that. Wire strikes are often very expensive and sometimes deadly, the Thrush is the only Ag plane I’m aware of that has cutters on the landing gear and behind the wing there are deflectors, we don’t want to cut past there, just shrug off the wire, for instance there is what looks like an ADF antenna from the cockpit to the top of the tail, but what it is is a steel cable to deflect a wire from tearing the vertical fin off.

Average US Ag pilot / aircraft flies 500 hours a year, in Central America where there is no Winter it’s 1000 hours per airframe per year, So as you can tell the excitement is very quickly gone and it just becomes a very long day, in excess of 12 hour work days isn’t uncommon at all.

If your curious Part 137 is the Ag part, what’s interesting to me is there are several things that are different than part 91, like for instance in part 91 it says airplanes must maintain the 500 ft distance and gives no exemptions, 137 says essentially if necessary you don’t have to, part 137 is allowed to carry a facsimile of the registration and keep the original in the office, part 91 has to carry the original.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/part-137

it’s extremely uncommon to see an Ag plane with an ELT too, Not sure how or why.

Telephone poles as it’s not uncommon to have a pole in the middle of a field to power a well pump, and trees, center pivot irrigation systems and now windmills are probably hit more often than wires.

By the time I retired a big concern was unmarked “met” towers, that is meteorological towers, were a big concern as they were popping up everywhere.

Only wire I ever hit was a small one to power a pump, prop missed it and the landing gear cutters cut it.

Edited March 4, 2022 by A64Pilot

[AH-1 Cobra Pilot]

The scariest wires I have seen were in the Philippines.  They were several inches in diameter, unmarked, and stretched between mountain tops for logging operations.

[A64Pilot]

Even with the big power transmission lines, it’s usually not the power lines which are aluminum that will get you, above those two big arms that hold the wires are two smaller harder to see steel cables that are there for strength, those won’t break and you won’t cut them either.

‘With helicopters we always crossed wires at a pole to make sure we cleared those steel cables

In Hanau Germany we were aggressors to a German Roland anti aircraft missile battery.

They set up in one of two ways, on top of a hill they can see and engage at rather long distances and this is how they will employ against fixed wing aircraft, against helicopters they will often set up in a depression or valley, they can’t see as far , but they are nearly impossible to sneak up on as it’s hard to mask if your skylined,and hard to pick them out against the ground if they are camouflaged.

Well we had sort of figured out about where they were so I stopped short of the hill top and dismounted my LT front seater and sent him ahead on foot with a pair of binoculars, he found them and came back to the helicopter. I pretty much ground taxied across the field under a set of powerlines and had windmills behind me, just before my TADS getting line of sight with them, they called me dead on the radio. In Germany it’s almost always wet and you can get very low without any kind of dust signature. I figured he couldn’t shoot me on the ground.

The Roland battery could hear me as we were close enough so they knew I was coming, and knew where from. If I had been in a Longbow or an OH-58D I could have gotten him as their sensors are above the rotor.

Edited March 4, 2022 by A64Pilot