Charles' Comment

I am an aerial applicator(crop duster) with 33 years experience and over 23,000 hours of flight time.

I am not anti-drone but I am concerned for my safety as well as my other pilots. Giving drones free range operation without line of sight verification will only add to the dangers that already exist in the airspace that I spend most of my day in.

I have worked fields adjacent to drones this year(2025), and not a single one obeyed the already existing rule of yielding to a manned aircraft. While this was nerve racking for me at least I could see the operator and knew that he saw me. Safety should always be the number one factor when adding new regulations.

You can not replace the human factor when it comes to aerial application, surroundings are constantly changing and you need the human there to be able to react quick enough. I can’t count the times I’ve had to abort an application because the change in wind direction was going to cause the chemical to drift off target.

People are constantly riding or exercising on these rural county roads and you have to have the human eyes and reaction there to keep from spraying them. I am very much against these new regulations.