Today in Things I Was Definitely Not Expecting to Happen
Posted on August 8, 2021 Posted by John Scalzi 21 Comments
The house being buzzed several times by an airplane.
To be clear, I don’t think it was buzzing my house in particular; it was flying a loop and my house just happened to be part of the loop. But why it was flying a loop at all is a bit of a mystery. The plane has since moved on and while I can still see and hear it, it’s looping about other parts of the countryside now. Very odd.
Update: It’s back! And I saw it spraying the field you can see to the right of the photo. Mystery solved.
How is your Saturday Sunday (I have lost track of days apparently)?
— JS
Probably had less glycophosphate particles in my Saturday.
Smell anythig funny? I hope you and yours were not downwind. It would be of interest to know what chemical they were dispersing, if you can findout.
Oh God…it’s happening! MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE!
Quick! Someone call Emilio Estevez!
PS: a review:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412019314898
Oh yeah, you can see the plumbing for the sprayer.
Crop duster!
That bar behind/below the trailing edge of the wing is a dead giveaway.
Crop duster pilots are crazy. Way too low, way too fast, turning right on the edge of stalling… I love that stuff.
The sticks on the wingtips look vaguely like the ones stunt pilots put on their planes to give them a visual reference for 45 and 90 degree pitch angles (i.e. line the horizon up with the stick for 90, or with the angled brace for 45).
Is Cary Grant waiting for a bus near that crossroads?
Check for chemtrails.
A plane like this one? An ‘oogle for crop duster Ohio turns up a whole lot, but not many that look like your picture. This may be close:
https://generalaviationnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Shadow-Chasing.jpg
So, IS making the jump to hyperspace harder than dusting crops?
Cropduster was my guess when I started reading the description. A couple weeks ago I drove across Illinois & Western Indiana on US24 and saw at least half a dozen of them over a couple of days.
Living in farm country as you do, I’m surprised you don’t have this happen every summer.
I got crop dusted today in the bottled water aisle at Kroger, I suspect by a woman wearing an unfortunate pair of bright green and way too tight shorts.
My Sunday is perfectly normal, as normal as can be expected in a hot zone of Covid-delta, thinking it was indeed Saturday for a moment there.
@Mike D I have a friend who as a boy in the mid-40s acted as a flag waver for crop dusters in the rural Missouri community in which he was raised. The crop duster pilots often dusted the wrong fields (all the fields looks alike from up there) so the farmers paid him to stand at the edge of the field to be dusted, waving a pair of brightly colored flags, after which he would be coated in greasy insecticides (today he is 85 years old in great health so apparently no harm, no foul).
Being so closely associated with the pilots at the local strip he began flying himself as a teenager, and after a stint as a helicopter mechanic during the Korean War, he became a commercial pilot, flying for Delta Airlines for 30 years between the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, the last half of those as a full captain.
He is a very modest “old country boy” but I’ve told him many times not to sell himself short. I’ve asked many, many people over the years who they find more impressive, a college professor or an airline pilot. The only people who answered with the former were usually college professors 🤣 although many professors are admittedly more impressed with the pilots!
He is certainly the most impressive man I have ever had the pleasure of knowing and fortunate enough to call my friend.
For all your sakes, I hope that wasn’t Randy Quaid.
😉
Just got home from the every-other-week D&D game. (Everyone is fully vaccinated, which is the only reason we went back to in-person gaming instead of online.)
We had some thunderstorms move through late Saturday night, but my neighborhood only got rain. Some parts of town got hail and/or flash flooding.
My brother lived in an old house in rural MO and we frequently saw planes spraying the nearby fields.
Watered the garden, which the local bird population appreciated, it being August in the DC area.
https://flic.kr/s/aHsmWoapzk
Having done a bit of ag flying myself in my (possibly misspent) youth:
1.) The vertical gizmos on the wingtips (called “winglets”) are a relatively recent innovation–they extract energy from the wingtip vortex, improving both airplane performance (that’s a Cessna “AgWagon,” by the way) and dispersion of whatever pesticide or other product is being dispensed.
2.) The “flagmen” of past years weren’t there to show the pilots which field to spray, but rather to show them the extent of their last pass, and where to start the next one–they’d move over one width at the end of each pass. Later replaced by a device called the “flying flagman:” at the end of each pass, the pilot would pull a trigger on the stick, and the flying flagman would drop a (biodegradable) paper streamer that the pilots could see when they lined up for the next pass.
Nowadays, of course, it’s all GPS.
Came for joke about Cary Grant, was not disappointed.
Did you make sure it wasn’t Snoopy, out looking for the Red Baron?