The troubles in the commercial air
industry have had a ripple effect on a distantly
related business agricultural aviation.
Insurance rates for aerial applicators
better known as crop dusters have risen
in lockstep with the increases imposed on
commercial airlines since Sept. 11, 2001.
But it isn't due to the discovery that
some of the men involved in the terrorist
attack that day had investigated learning
how to fly crop dusters.
"It's because our insurers use the same
reinsurance market as the airlines," said Pat
Kornegay, owner of Sun Valley Dusting
Co., in San Benito, Texas, and president of
the National Agriculture Aviation
Association, at the group's national convention
in Reno last week.
"There has never been a terrorist incident
or attack using these type of aircraft,"
he said.
Kornegay estimates that rates have risen
an average of 30 percent.
But it isn't the only difficulty the industry
is facing.
"There's drought in agricultural areas
and commodity prices are in decline," said
Kornegay. "So there is a decreasing amount
of dollars dedicated to protecting crops."
And aircraft now equipped with Global
Positioning Systems are able to do the
same work as older planes in a fraction of
the time.
All those factors have led to a shake out
in the industry, said Kornegay.
"There is a trend toward smaller, more
efficient companies," he said.
That hasn't been all bad, said Jerry Frey,
owner of Frey-Spray in Fallon.
"It got rid of the flakes," said Frey.
"There used to be a bunch of yahoos in the
business.We've all been held at gunpoint a
number of times," by operators trying to
horn in on new territory.
Frey grew up in Fallon and has been in
the ag aviation business for 30 years. In
that time, he's seen Fallon transformed.
"It changes now on a yearly basis," he
said.
And he's seen the aerial application
industry in Nevada reduced to four operators
that blanket the state.
Frey-Spray, which owns three aircraft
and employs one other pilot and a bookkeeper,
covers about 350,000 acres annually
for 200 clients. The crops involved include
alfalfa for both hay and seed, timothy for
horses, and garlic for seed, said Frey.
That's only half the company's agricultural
business. Frey-Spray also has contracts
for 14 mosquito abatements around
the state's valleys. And Frey is looking at
doing firefighting work too, which uses the
same type of planes equipped with different
delivery systems. (Pesticides are
sprayed on crops while fire retardants are
dropped on fires.)
Frey is also in another line of business:
He flies a 10-seater Lear jet owned by a
wealthy California woman. At one time,
he chauffered her, but now he uses the
plane primarily to manage her different
properties on Martha's Vineyard, in
Oregon and in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
He got into that business, he said, when
a friend inherited a lot of money in the
1980s and he began flying Lear jets with
him in the winter, during the off-season of
the ag business. That led to an introduction
to the Californian heiress.
"The lady needed a pilot when the airlines
were already hiring a lot of pilots,"
said Frey.
Now that work takes up about half his
time.
But Frey said he still loves agricultural
work despite the moments at gunpoint,
the drastic changes in his hometown,
intense government regulatory oversight,
the $500,000 price tags on today's planes,
and the rise in insurance rates, which he
says have quadrupled in the last five years.
"It's a great way to make a living."
