Leland Snow Manufacturers Farm
Machinery That Happens To Fly

By Colleen Schreiber

OLNEY, Texas – For the last 40 years, Leland Snow has been designing and building agricultural machinery. Snow’s products are not tractors, plows, balers or hauling equipment, however. They are working airplanes — agricultural airplanes used for crop dusting, seeding, fertilizing and firefighting.

Olney, a small North Texas community of fewer than 5000 people, has been the hub of his operation for most of those 40 years. More than 2000 of Snow’s distinctive yellow and blue-accented airplanes have rolled off the assembly line, one every two working days, at the Olney Plant.

Parked wingtip to wingtip with a 10 foot spacing between the wings, those 2000 planes would stretch for a total of 23 miles.

Snow’s Air Tractor planes are sold all over the U.S. and in many other areas of the world. Approximately 85 aircraft are at work abroad in Australia, South Korea, South Africa, Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Greece, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and New Zealand.

They also have 18 planes engaged in fulltime firefighting work: three in Australia, four in the U.S., two in Canada, eight in Spain and one in Croatia.

This year 172 Air Tractor Inc. employees will roll out 111 planes; last year they manufactured and sold 107. About six weeks goes by from the time the plane leaves the welding shop until it goes out the front door.

"What we build here is really farm machinery," Snow insists. "It happens to fly, but basically it’s farm machinery. Before we start thinking about designing a real exotic, fancy machine, we have to remember that it’s just farm machinery. It’s going to get chemicals or fertilizer all over it."

Snow, who was born in 1930, likes to tell people that aeronautics was his fate. His mother saved a copy of the Chicago Tribune from the day he was born, and on the front page were news stories about several aeronautical events.

By the time he was six, Snow’s goal was to become a pilot. He started building model airplanes at that age, but he says he never really succeeded until he was about nine years old.

"It was a great inspiration when I actually finished one, wound the propeller and it flew," he says.

He dwelled on model airplanes until the age of 14. At 15 he started working at the airport in exchange for flying lessons. He soloed on his 16th birthday and got his private pilot’s certificate at the minimum age of 17.

While he was still in high school, Snow went in with two other pilots, each chipping in $233 to buy a 1936 Piper Cub.

"Instead of a hotrod, I had an airplane my senior year in high school," Snow says.

When he graduated he bought a wrecked airplane for $200 and rebuilt it. He says his experience with model airplanes made him approach the wrecked airplane in much the same fashion.

Snow entered Texas A&M University to study aeronautical engineering. The summer before his senior year he got a job flying a crop duster for a local company. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he needed something better than the converted trainer he was flying. In 1951, during this first year as a duster pilot, Snow decided to design and build his own agricultural airplane.

He borrowed $1200 from the local bank using his mother’s car as collateral. He finished that first S-1 in 1953 and used it to spray in the Valley where he lived during the summers.

In 1954 he took his airplane to Nicaragua. The dusting season there ran from October through December. Snow had already started designing an all-metal production version of his agricultural aircraft, and several of the pilots in South America placed orders with him.

He flew the first S-2 in August 1956. The all-metal production version was more durable and more cost-effective than the wooden structure of the S-1.

Snow says his technology wasn’t new but he was the only one at the time building agricultural airplanes.

He completed the various tests required for FAA certification of the S-2. By October 1957 he had one flight test remaining, the structural flight test on the wings.

Snow knew that this test could possibly endanger his life, so he had worked out in his head all the details of what to do if the test failed.

When the day came to do the test, he put on his parachute, flew his plane over an isolated area, put the airplane into a steep nosedive and then did a hard pull up with the control stick. At that point the wings snapped and separated from the aircraft, sending the plane into a violent spin.

Snow says he was semi-conscious. When he managed to get his faculties back, he undid his safety belt and exited the plane. Luckily, his well planned escape route saved him.

A miscalculation in the form of a misplaced decimal point, Snow says, nearly cost him his life.

"From that experience I learned to check my work. I did all the calculations by slide rule back then," he explains. "If you move it one way, you add a decimal place and the other way you take away the decimal. I had underdesigned a key fitting on the wing by a factor of 10."

As 1958 rolled around, the young Snow was just about at the end of his financial savings. He had a long list of customers in Nicaguara waiting on planes, so he began searching for alternative methods of financing.

Snow heard about a progressive little community in North Texas that was interested in bringing in a manufacturing business. He checked out the town’s credentials, excellent airport and people willing to take a gamble, and town leaders in turn checked his credentials.

Both agreed to gamble on the other. For Olney, the gamble consisted of putting up six more months of financing needed to finish the two prototypes that Snow had begun. Both were about 90 percent complete, and he estimated that he needed another $18,000 to complete the job and do the necessary testing for certification. He needed an additional $50,000 to buy materials, tune up and inventory, and hire the labor required to set up the production line.

That $50,000 would give him the necessary cash flow to build his first airplane and get it out the door. Finally, he needed a 120-by-120-foot factory building.

The community raised the $50,000 for the factory building by public donation, and some 67 Olney businessmen signed notes at the bank to guarantee amounts of anywhere from $500 to $2000.

Snow finalized the deal with Olney and arrived there in

in January 1958. Five cattle trailers were sent to the Valley to haul the aircraft and equipment to North Texas.

The first S-2 with a little bigger engine and a little bigger cockpit than the earlier S-1 version rolled off the factory assembly line that February. The plane was FAA-certified in late July 1958, just one month past the estimated deadline time of six months and about $3000 over the anticipated $18,000 budget. The community made good on the extra $3000.

The following year Snow and eight to 10 employees built 30 airplanes, and another 45 the year after that. Unfortunately, after some 150 planes had rolled off the production line in Olney, Snow’s company suffered a major setback. His company was sued as a result of a crash. His financing was slashed, and as a result Snow was forced to take on two partners to keep his company afloat. The partnership which began in August 1962 was short-lived, however. In 1965, they sold out to Rockwell-Standard, which later became Rockwell International.

Snow stayed on as vice president of the Aero Commander Division and continued managing the Olney division. By this time, 526 airplanes from the Olney division were flying the skies all over the country.

In January 1970 the company decided to close the Olney plant and move all production to their plant in Albany, Georgia. Snow was offered a position in Georgia but declined the offer. Instead, he moved to a little office in Wichita Falls, set up his drawing table and for the next two years he worked almost nonstop designing a new agricultural aircraft, which was later named the Air Tractor.

Once the design was complete, Snow returned to Olney. The city agreed to lease him the armory building downtown. At 50 by 90 feet, he says, it was just the right size to build the prototype.

Along with a former employee and a couple of other hands, Snow finished the first Air Tractor prototype in 15 months. Test flights were conducted the following September, 1973, a few bugs worked out, and the first plane was delivered in March of 1974.

Since then, Snow’s company has continually expanded, save during a period in the 1980s when farmers were beset with all kinds of problems, including grain embargoes, grain surpluses, high interest rates, and a drop in land values.

Some of Snow’s first planes, built in the early 1960s, are still in operation. Air Tractor Inc., has continually refined the older models while developing new and better models. The first turboprop planes flew in 1977, and major production was underway by 1980.

Snow believes one of the reasons for Air Tractor’s success is that it offers a product line that meets a wide variety of customers’ needs and wants. Today the family-owned and operated company manufactures nine different models of the Air Tractor. Their low-cost model, a 400 gallon piston powered plane, starts out around $220,000. The largest plane, an 800-gallon firefighting aircraft, sells for right at $1 million. There are several models in between in terms of size and price. Their best-selling plane is a 500-gallon turbine plane.

The Air Tractor models, Snow says, are more streamlined than any of the previous designs, which means they can carry more and carry it faster.

Snow is not done designing agricultural airplanes, but he’s not currently working on a new design. When asked if he lives to design or lives to fly, Snow says, "some of both, but my area of expertise is in the design of the airplane and the management of the company."

The aeronautical engineer says it’s tricky running a profitable aircraft company.

"Frankly, there are very few people who can do it."

The hardest thing, he says, is staying focused and completing a task without looking sideways, "going straight from A to B."

The second key to success, Snow believes, comes in realizing where you are in terms of your resources.

"I didn’t have a lady answer the phone until we built the first 55 airplanes," Snow remarks.

Daughters Kristin and Kara have been working alongside their father for a couple of years. Kristin, a detail person much like her father, tends to advertising and marketing. Kara, who has the disposition and personality to deal with people, looks after the production line and personnel.

Snow says he never once worried that he wouldn’t accomplish his goals. There were discouraging times, but those, he says, never lasted long.

"I’m not sure what kept me going. I just knew I had to do it and I wanted to do it."