Tag Archives: Eloy

Crop Duster Conflicting Arrival

The traffic at Eloy was mainly light aircraft on training flights or jump ships for the sky diving operation.  As one of the Twin Otters was lining up to depart, we saw a crop-dusting aircraft approaching the field.  He seemed intent on landing from the opposite direction to that which the Twotter was going to use.  We wondered how this would play out but they clearly had done this before.  The jump ship got swiftly airborne and then turned left and directly towards us.  This gave it separation from the inbound plane which then landed quite happily on the now vacated runway.  It also meant we got some different angles on the departing plane which was welcome.

Twotter Jump Ship

One of the sky diving airfields in Arizona is at Eloy.  A small field in a very small town, Eloy has a lot of customers for the jump ships and the vertical wind tunnel.  During our trip, I had seen some Skyvans operating as jump ships, and I was quite looking forward to the chance to shoot some Skyvan ops from close range.  When we got to Eloy, it turned out that things were different on the day.  The Skyvans were nowhere to be seen.  Instead, it was Twin Otters providing the lift and, once we were there, only one of them.  However, there were a couple of locations around the field that gave us options to photograph the Twotter with it taking off to the north and recovering in a southerly direction.  There was even one departure when it turned right over us but the reason for that will show up in a future post.