Still, agricultural pilots are in a dangerous line of work. There’s no guess work involved.” Horvath launched Jim’s Flying Service Ltd. You position your initial lines and when you’re coming around, you have light bars in front of you ahead of the cockpit. You can do a side-by-side pattern, a racetrack, or a squeeze, and you can set it up for a 60-foot swath. If you weren’t, the farmer didn’t invite you back. “You had to be pretty good and pretty accurate. “In the old days, we’d count the swaths and pick out landmarks to make sure we were doing a good job,” recounted Horvath. Now in his 56 th season of ag flying, he’s often found skimming treetops in the Pawnee, spraying for gypsy moths, or applying fungicides to wheat, corn, or soybeans. With about 10,000 hours of spraying time - “at plus or minus five feet or nothing” - Horvath is one of the most experienced agricultural pilots around. “So, I stayed, and the next year he said we should be doing this and that, and he asked me to fly one more season. “Come corn time, he asked me to stay and help with the corn,” recalled Horvath with a laugh. He had a retirement party, but then Bennett asked him to stay on and help apply fungicide to the spring wheat crops. He said, ‘Get in there, do the best you can and don’t bust your ass.’”Īfter 40 years in business, Horvath sold Jim’s Flying Service to Rob Bennett in 2017. I remember one guy who was teaching me we were practicing going back and forth across the field. You got to know how many swaths it would take to cover a field. Everything was eyeballed when you were doing your runs. “Back then, you needed a commercial pilot’s license and an exterminator’s license from the Ministry of the Environment. We sprayed liquids, seeded, and applied dry fertilizer. “By the time I got into it, dusting was pretty much done. “I got my business license to air spray in April of 1977,” recalled Horvath, now of age 75. Down the road, the business moved to a farm Horvath purchased in Seaforth, Ontario - and today, Jim’s Flying Service is based at Nixon Airport in Norfolk County, using Tillsonburg Municipal Airport and various other airstrips to support its operations as needed. from Stratford, Ontario, later that same year. He traveled down to Indiana to buy a brand new Piper Pawnee, launching Jim’s Flying Service Ltd. In 1977, he asked Lammens if he could be his business partner - but the idea didn’t appeal to his boss, so Horvath decided to go his own way. We took the windows out and it became a sprayer.”Īfter a couple of years, Horvath became chief pilot and graduated to flying a 450-horsepower open cockpit Stearman, and then a Cessna 188 AGtruck. We took the back seat out of the Cubs and put 50-gallon tanks in it. “Sam had two airplanes and one pilot, so he hired me in 1967. One day, Horvath met Sam Lammens, who ran a small aerial application business out of Glen Meyer, Ontario, flying two Piper J-3 Cubs. Ag pilots sprayed for cut worms in the spring and again for horn worms before the August harvest. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, tobacco was king in southwestern Ontario. I saw John Tar, the owner, who had seven pilots and seven airplanes - so the best he could offer me was a job as a spare pilot.”įor a month and a half, Horvath worked as a “boy Friday” at Norfolk Aerial Spraying, hoping to get some flight time. She suggested I check out Norfolk Aerial Spraying, down the road in Nixon. Then one day, I was visiting my grandma in Delhi, Ontario. I was a flight instructor for a little while it was nice, but kind of boring. “I wrote about 200 letters to apply, and got two replies back,” he remembered. Horvath, 19, with a Piper J-3 Cub owned by Sam Lammens in Glen Meyer, Ontario. More than anything, he wanted to be a bush pilot. Horvath earned his commercial pilot license by age 18, followed by his float rating in Orillia. Growing up in Norfolk and Oxford Counties, he was fascinated by 1950s crop dusters who swooped in over the fields in Stearman biplanes and Piper Super Cubs.īy age 16, he’d begun lessons at Garth’s Flying Service in Kitchener, Ontario, where his instructor sagely advised him to “maintain thy airspeed lest the ground arise and smite thee.” Like many others, Horvath found himself bitten by the aviation bug. As soon as his chores were finished on the family farm, he’d ride his bike over to the Brantford Municipal Airport, where he’d do odd jobs in the hopes of lucking into the occasional airplane ride. When he was about 10 years old, Jim Horvath was a hangar rat. Estimated reading time 17 minutes, 4 seconds.
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