Inside The Cockpit:

DAYTON - Since 1988, Kevin Winger has been flying and refu- eling crop dusters at a small airport between Dayton and Waits- burg called Wing-Air.

On clear summer mornings with little wind, the crop dusters fly high into the sky for about 30 to 45 minutes, spraying 100 acres of crops for fungus, aphids and weeds and come swooping back into the airport for refueling. The whole scene is like a NASCAR pit crew, the crew mem- bers scurrying in to pump gas into the plane, clean the windshield and quickly discuss the next flight with the boss.

Winger moved from La Grande, Ore., to the Touchet Valley in 1985 and bought the small crop dusting business from his boss in 1988.

But, the airport dates back many decades before the 1980s.

The land is currently owned and farmed by Dan Bickelhaupt who leases Winger the land for the airport.

Bickelhaupt's family purchased the land, about 1,900 acres, in 1932. He said his father Kenneth had taken flying lessons, unbeknownst to his wife, and he was interested in turning some of the farmland into an air- port. Bickelhaupt said his dad believed that everyone was going to have an airport and built it before World War II.

"I always enjoyed watching the airplanes growing up," Bickelhaupt recalls.

After the war, Kenneth taught former soldiers how to fly on their G.I. Bill.

"He trained a lot of oldtimers around here," Winger said of Kenneth.

After the flying lessons petered out in the 1950s, Kenneth decided to turn the airport into a crop dusting business, Touchet Valley Air Service, Bickelhaupt said. In 1962, the air service merged with the Wenatchee Air Ser- vice, and later the partner- ship dissolved and the busi- ness was sold to Winger's former boss.

For Winger, who was in- vited to work in the Touchet Valley by a friend, said the climate and the farmland were a perfect fit for him.

" The people are ex- tremely nice and everything clicked," Winger said. "I've never wanted to go back."

Winger learned to fly at age 21 after he had been working in a sawmill in La Grande for some time. Ob- taining his private license was the right thing to do and his 30 years in the business proves that.

"Back in the old days, the reason for being in it was for fun," he said.

The agriculture industry has changed tremendously and Winger said he has been keeping up with the new technology it requires.

He now has GPS- equipped planes and a lot of electronics to keep himself and his three part-time employees safe.

The pilots wear safety gear and helmets and have lunch boxes and water up in the air. The cockpits are hol- lowed out with lots of but- tons and the plane is stressed to handle 8Gs, a G being a unit measuring acceleration, and negative Gs.

Winger said the plane is built to disintegrate in an ac- cident, except for the cockpit and seat, to keep the pilot safe, just like a race car.

"You're vulnerable," he said. "It's a thinking-man's game."

Winger said he has a clean record and has never been in any big accidents while in the air. However, he did admit to hitting numer- ous objects and animals.

"I've hit everything you could hit except a barn," Winger said with a laugh. "No people, but trees and wires and birds."

And it's good for Winger to stay in the air because local farmers need his services as the wetter weather has given way to rust and aphids that can hurt crops.

"It's a thriving thing - everyone wants to produce the best they can," Winger said of the farmers. "It's pretty much a necessity now. And there's not a lot of people who know this kind of work."

Winger said he has cer- tainly made a fair living through his crop dusting business, especially with the recent weather.

"If the farmer doesn't have a problem, I don't have a job," he said.

And the playing field is narrowing. When he started the business, there were 25 aircraft within 25 miles of his airport. He owned six.

Now, there's about five or six aircraft in those 25 miles. He said most of the local crop dusters have scaled back the number of airplanes to obtain larger ones. He now owns three.

It cost Winger $25,000 for a plane in the 1980s and now it costs him about $1 million.

"It's survival of the fittest in agriculture," he said.

Winger's year goes from late February to the end of November. Spring is the busiest time.

He said in the summer he can fly 10 to 30 loads a day and that works out to about 1,000 take offs and landings per year.

In February, he begins to spray dry fertilizer on the wheat crops to make them perk up.

The weeds come up in March so he'll be hired to spray herbicide from March through April. In April, May and June he'll spray for weeds, fungus, rust and insects. In July, he'll continue to battle the rust and bugs as his business slows down before harvest.

After harvest, he's out spraying for weeds to conserve the moisture in the soil. He'll finish up his year in October and maybe even November continuing to spray for weeds. All of his paperwork is done in the wintertime - and there's a lot of it, Winger said.

"It's a lot of work," he said. "I never planned on this ever in my whole life. I never knew I was going to do this. It just happened."