Drones Are About to Take Over One of the World's Most Dangerous Jobs

Manned agricultural aviation—crop dusting, essentially—is about to die as a profession. The industry is going down kicking and screaming, spending thousands lobbying against drones and filing court briefs trying to keep unmanned aircraft in a legal grey area.

As we mentioned in December, it has become clear that drones are going to revolutionize agriculture—the only question is when the Federal Aviation Administration is going to allow it to. Crop duster airplanes are extremely dangerous, expensive, and are completely replaceable by drones. It’s already happened in Japan, where just five percent of the nation’s farmland is sprayed with manned aircraft—the rest is sprayed with unmanned helicopters and drones.

In the US, the situation is different, but it won’t be for long, and the roughly 2,800 Americans who fly crop-dusting airplanes know it. The National Agricultural Aviation Administration spent $106,000 last year lobbying against drones in Congress. It was also the only entity to side with the FAA in its ongoing court battle with a commercial drone operator, suggesting that the National Transportation Safety Board judge was too hasty to make a precedent-setting decision about commercial drone use.

"I can tell you we have enough difficulties hitting other airplanes without hitting a 10- or 15-inch sphere that doesn’t announce itself," Alan Armstrong, the Georgia-based lawyer representing the NAAA in that case, told me. "If it hits my propeller over a congested area, I could be dead."

He's right, and he and the NAAA are of the opinion that drones need the ability to see and avoid agricultural pilots in order to make sure a drone doesn’t crash into a crop duster. The problem with that argument is the fact that there aren’t going to be any agricultural pilots for drones to crash into, not if farmers have any common sense. Drones are cheaper, safer, and more precise than manned airplanes. Why would they hire a gas-guzzling, unsafe airplane to do work that a robot can do?

"Aerial applicators are highly trained professionals who have made a very large investment in their business, and like all Americans, are concerned with human health, the environment, security and performing their job in a responsible and safe manner," the association wrote last year. "NAAA is committed to working in tandem with the UAS industry to ensure ag aviators are able to continue performing their jobs without the additional concerns of unidentified aircraft occupying the same airspace and potentially and unnecessarily endangering the safety of low-level ag pilots."

These are the words of people fearing the loss of their jobs. It's as delusional as factory workers thinking robots wouldn't take over their jobs in an automotive factory; as delusional as newspapers thinking Craigslist wouldn't have an impact on their classifieds section.

By the way—what crop dusting is taking place over a "congested area" and what farmer would hire both a crop duster and a drone to fly at the same time? The likelihood of a drone and a manned airplane that are both in the same area for the same purpose seems very small.

It’s happening. Even if the FAA wins its court case, it has just announced that it will expedite the government-approved use of drones in low-risk circumstances, such as movie making, flare stack monitoring, power line inspections and, most importantly, “precision agriculture,” including the surveillance of crops and livestock and the application of fertilizer and pesticides.

That’s crop dusting, folks, and it’s much easier and safer to do it with a small drone than with a manned airplane that at times gets as low as 10 feet off the ground and whizzes by at hundreds of miles an hour. Earlier this month, the NTSB said there were 78 crop duster crashes in the United States last year. Small drones, on the other hand, aren’t going to hurt anyone if they crash in a cornfield.

At the beginning, farmers will only use drones to monitor their crops, but the capability to spray fertilizer and other chemicals from them is coming, sooner rather than later. Northrop Grumman just announced plans to partner with Yamaha to take its RMAX helicopter (the one that has already killed manned agricultural aviation in Japan), completely automate it, and bring it to the United States. The R-Bat, as it’s being called, is already being tested in Arizona.

It’s time for agriculture pilots to learn to fly drones or prepare for a world in which they’re completely replaced.