Spray pilots gather to tune up planes at Colfax airport

Approximately one dozen of the state’s top ag pilots buzzed the Colfax airport last Thursday to tune up their spray planes in the wake of a busy year.

The fly-in was put together by the Association of Washington Aerial Applicators.

Local planes and pilots welcomed their colleagues from the Tri-Cities, Moses Lake, even some from as far away as Quincy to the Colfax airport, where they all fine-tuned their spray systems.

One at a time, the pilots flew inches above the airport to measure the effectiveness of their spray nozzles.

They sprayed pink-dyed water across thread and little yellow pieces of paper. State Department of Agriculture officials then put that information into a series of computers and machines with spinning wheels to produce reports on how evenly the nozzles on each plane applied water.

Pilots then used that information to adjust their spray systems.

But more than a technical exercise, the fly-in gave the pilots that spray vital pesticides onto some of the richest farmland in the world a chance to talk shop.

Dusty ag pilot Steve Passmore compared his late-spring flywork with Willie Maxim, who flew up from Kansas to fly for TLC out of Colfax this year.

Both were busy into July spraying Palouse fields with a fungicide to fight off one of the worst outbreaks of stripe rust ever.

“Did you see many skips?” Passmore asked Maxim of his work last spring.

“There were a few times I had to go back and hit the middle strip again,” replied Maxim.

Changing wind patterns and the fungicide’s penetration into leaves made the pilots’ first pass the trickiest.

“Yeah, I could see where that middle strip needed another pass,” said Passmore. “There was definitely a little strip of orange in places it missed.”