Aerial Topdressing - Developing Specialist Machines

Developing Specialist Machines

Entirely new designs were clearly needed in Australasia. In Britain Auster produced the Auster Agricola and Percival the Percival EP-9 for the New Zealand market. Both robust but primitive fabric-covered aircraft. In Australia the small but more advanced Yeoman Cropmaster was developed.

In the United States Fletcher Aviation Corporation was persuaded by a delegation of New Zealanders to develop an aircraft for the New Zealand market and Jim Thorpe adapted a design for the FD-25 Defender light attack aircraft into the Fletcher Fu24, a stressed skin monoplane with a high lift wing. It had more than three times the load capacity of the Tiger Moth and the cockpit located well forward, ahead of the hopper, giving the pilot all round view. This—with a few changes such as an enclosed cockpit—turned out to be the winning formula and orders soon reached three figures. Cable Price Corporation funded two prototypes with the New Zealand Meat Producers Board acting as financial guarantor—Gibson having brow-beaten a reluctant Fletcher board into building a prototype. Airparts was formed to assemble the American kits. The first prototype was flown in America in June 1954, the second in New Zealand in September 1954 and it received type approval in May 1955. A hundred Fletcher kits were delivered to New Zealand that year. Airparts bought out the rights and continued development locally.

Specialist crop dusters such as the Schweizer Agcat emerged in America in the mid 1950s, designed for the flat mid-west. These generally had poorer forward vision and lesser payload to weight ratios than the Fletcher, which continued to dominate the New Zealand market—however, in places where aircraft primarily were used to drop insecticide, these American designs were superior.