Let me explain the apologies. Mother was a born English teacher. She lived to be 91 and corrected everything I ever wrote. She would get a copy of my AirportBusiness column, “Ground Clutter,” and write corrections in the margins saying “Ralph, Junior, you know better than this.” If she were still around she’d get rid of the preposition at the end of the sentence by changing the above title to Airports of Which You Have Never Heard.
Decades ago I sold and insured crop duster airplanes. That’s a lot of fun because you get to “airports” in the boondocks. Some were the home base of the crop dusters—or, as they were prone to say when being proper, “aerial applicators.” Those base strips were often fairly nice, with perhaps a bit of pavement at one end and the rest green grass. Others might actually have power lines running right across the strip, so that you were forced to fly under the wires while landing or taking off.
Then there were the working strips, which were as close to the crop being sprayed (or fertilized or even planted) by the airplanes. Some of those strips scared me nearly ‘bout to death when I first started working this market. One such strip was 1,200 feet long. I landed in a 1958 Cessna Cardinal with the original 150 hp engine. Unbeknownst to me, the operator on that strip had owned that same Cardinal at one time. After we finished the paperwork on his insurance, I got up to leave and he said, “Now I’m gonna watch you take off, ‘cause when I owned that ground-loving airplane I wouldn’t let nobody land it here.” Scared me badly, but it did takeoff fine.
Many of those strips weren’t on the map, of course, so we’d call and get instructions from the aerial applicator. Typically, he’d say something like, “You’ll be comin’ from the east, so when you hit town go on through and turn left at the first four-way stop after Stuckey’s. Follow the road and look out the right window. You’ll see my strip in about a mile. We’ll be spraying, so watch out for us.” Usually the directions were spot on.
One operator in Alabama would sign your logbook if you managed to land on his strip without wrecking. He always joked that if you wrecked on the way out that was okay, you could still brag about getting in.
Truth is, most of these “airports” weren’t as bad as they sound. Yes, they were short, often rough and sometimes muddy. On the other hand, one end was usually wide open. Heavily-loaded ag aircraft didn’t climb well, so once you took off it was important that there was nothing over which you had to climb.
Once I got used to that no-radio, no-guvmint and no controller flying, I enjoyed it. Doubt I’ll ever do it again, though.
