Idaho crop-dusting pilot retires after 43 years

EMMETT, Idaho (AP) — Where most people see a bright yellow airplane, Charlene Taylor sees temptation.

"I want to get it sold before spring so he won't jump into it and take off," she said. "I don't trust him."

Her husband, Don, smiles — but not very much. Newly retired from crop dusting after more than 150,000 takeoffs and landings, he isn't entirely sure he likes the idea.

"If it was just me, I'd still be up there," he said. "But there are other people involved, and she's put up with it for a long time."

To ease the pain of retiring, he's building a new plane — a single-seat aerobatic model so there won't be any passengers to get sick — and plans to learn scuba diving, parachuting and hang-gliding.

An ambitious list, considering that Taylor will celebrate his 74th birthday next week. When he retired this fall after 43 seasons at the controls, he was Idaho's oldest crop-dusting pilot.

That's 43 seasons of what the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks as the nation's third-most dangerous occupation, after commercial fishing and logging.

Life insurance?

His wife laughs.

"It's so expensive you're better off to put the money in the bank," she said.

Or a motorcycle, which her daredevil husband sheepishly admits to buying while she was out of town.

Federal researchers have concluded that a pilot who spends an entire career as a crop duster has nearly a one in three chance of dying on the job. As Taylor sees it, whether that happens depends a lot on what's in the pilot's head, or, more bluntly, the size of the pilot's head.

"You have to realize your limitations," he said. "The most dangerous thing is an ego. People with big egos think they can break the rules. You can't."

His stories, however, are proof that not even the most careful pilot spends a lifetime dusting crops without having near-death experiences.

There was the time another pilot encroached in Taylor's right of way while he was spraying a field.

"We were coming crankshaft to crankshaft, and he wouldn't give way. It doesn't do any good if you both pull up, so I poured the coal to it. I decided I was going to hit him harder than he hit me. At the last second, he pulled up so hard he almost snapped his plane. A guy on the ground said we missed each other by about 15 feet."