On an August night over North Dakota, a four-engine transport aircraft crosses the city of Minot at about the height of a tall office block, in the dark, with two steel booms poking out of the doors where paratroopers normally jump. It is not delivering anything. It is not going anywhere. It flies a slow back-and-forth pattern, like someone mowing a very large lawn, and behind it a fog of insecticide settles onto the streets and the swampy ground at the edge of town.

The crew belongs to the 910th Airlift Wing, an Air Force Reserve unit at Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Ohio. Nobody outside the trade has heard of them. They are also, on paper and in practice, the only people in the entire United States military who can do this job at scale.

On 10 September 2026, Air & Space Forces Magazine reported that the wing had just come through its busiest stretch of the year, peaking in August, flying nighttime low-level sorties against mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus. It also reported that the equipment doing the spraying is about 30 years old, that the replacement is late, and that the man who ran the Air Force Reserve until this spring told Congress he is worried the whole capability could end up hanging on a single aircraft.

The squadron that kills mosquitoes for a living

The Air Force fact sheet puts it in the flat, careful language of a document written by lawyers: the Department of Defense tasks the 910th Airlift Wing to maintain the DoD’s only large-area — 5,000 acres or more — fixed-wing aerial spray capability, to control disease-carrying insects, pest insects and undesirable vegetation, and to disperse oil spills in large bodies of water.

Read that again slowly, because every clause is doing work. Large-area means the wing is not there to fog a car park; the threshold is 5,000 acres. Fixed-wing leaves room for helicopters and for contract crop-dusters, which exist and are used. What is left, once you subtract all of that, is one squadron. The flying is done by the 757th Airlift Squadron, whose crews also do the wing’s ordinary day job of hauling cargo and dropping paratroops from the C-130 Hércules.

The wing has held the mission alone since 1992, when it moved to Youngstown from Rickenbacker. Before that the lineage runs back through the Air Force Reserve, which took the job over from active duty in 1973, and before that to 1947, when the Air Force stood up a Special Aerial Spray Flight to stop troops dying of insect-borne disease. The real beginning is 1943, when the Army Air Forces and the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine worked out how to spray DDT over the Pacific theatre from an aeroplane.

A word about that lineage, because it invites an unfair comparison. The C-123s of Operation Ranch Hand that sprayed Agent Orange over Vietnam came out of the same technical family of aerial dispersal, but they were a weapon of war aimed at an enemy’s cover and crops; the 910th’s work is EPA-regulated public health and pest control over American bases and American towns, flown at the request of civil authorities. Shared plumbing, entirely different purpose.

Van Dootingh was one of the pilots who flew over downtown New Orleans in 2005, between the skyscrapers, in the weeks when linemen trying to put the power back on were being eaten alive. That is the shape of the job: not glamorous, extremely specific, and the people on the ground notice within a day.

A 910th C-130H flies a low-altitude spray pass during the Department of Defense aerial spray course.

What the Modular Aerial Spray System actually is

The thing that makes a C-130 into a spray aircraft is not built into the aircraft. It is a pallet of tanks and pumps called the Modular Aerial Spray System, and it lives in a maintenance building at Youngstown until somebody needs it.

A standard MASS is four interconnected 500-gallon tanks with a 250-gallon flush tank, giving roughly 2,000 gallons of usable capacity. It is loaded with a 60K Tunner K-loader, rolled slowly into the cargo bay on hundreds of rollers by spray maintainers and loadmasters, and the whole business takes about an hour. Booms run from the system out through small holes cut in the aft paratrooper doors on each side and stick out about six feet into the slipstream. Depending on what is being sprayed, each boom carries anywhere from two large bell nozzles to 30 fine-mist ones.

The two configurations do very different things. The ultra-low-volume setup, used for mosquitoes, meters out a fine mist at a rate the Air Force describes as no more than one ounce of product per acre — a single gallon of the insecticide Dibrom covers somewhere between 128 and 256 acres. The normal system, used for herbicide over bombing ranges and for oil dispersant over water, can push up to 300 gallons a minute through two big bell nozzles.

Height matters as much as chemistry. Insecticide and herbicide go on at roughly 150 feet above the ground, low enough that the droplets land where the entomologist wants them and do not drift somewhere they are not welcome. Oil dispersant is flown higher, 300 to 500 feet. Most mosquito work happens at dusk or in the dark, on night vision goggles, because that is when the target is flying.

The wing has been flying MASS since it was developed for C-130 operations in 1988. Air & Space Forces Magazine describes the legacy system as now 30 years old; a 2024 report called it 1980s-era kit where the valves have to be closed by hand. Most of the spare parts are out of production.

The call-outs

Most of the wing’s flying is routine: up to 25 recurring missions a year across 12 military installations in nine states. Halogeton and cheatgrass on the Utah Test and Training Range, killed with a blue-dyed herbicide so the crews can see where they have already been, opening fire breaks and exposing unexploded ordnance. Biting midges at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island — the sand fleas of recruit legend — a mission the unit pioneered in 1983. Mosquitoes around the missile fields in North Dakota.

Then there are the emergencies. In its 53 years with the Reserve, the spray mission has been sent out on ten non-military emergency deployments and treated more than seven million acres. Hurricane Hugo in 1989: over 855,000 acres in South Carolina. Hurricane Andrew in 1992: more than 288,000 acres in Florida. Hurricane Floyd in 1999: around 1.7 million acres across Virginia and North Carolina. Hurricane Gustav in 2008: more than 771,000 acres in Louisiana.

The biggest was 2005. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the 910th treated 2,880,662 acres across Louisiana and Texas for mosquitoes and filth flies — the largest aerial spray mission ever flown by Air Force Reserve Command. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 came close: 28 sorties, more than 2.7 million acres of Texas, and the first emergency mosquito-control mission the wing ever flew on night vision goggles. In October 2020 the crews went back to Louisiana after Hurricanes Laura and Delta and had treated close to half a million acres within a week.

And then there is the one that has nothing to do with insects at all. A 1995 memorandum of agreement between the US Coast Guard and the Air Force Reserve put the wing on standby to spray dispersant on catastrophic oil spills. The bill came due in the spring of 2010.

Between May and June 2010, the 757th Airlift Squadron flew 93 sorties over the Gulf of Mexico for Operation Deep Water Horizon, applying dispersant over more than 30,000 acres of contaminated water. It was the first time the wing had ever used oil dispersant for real rather than in an exercise. Whether dispersants were the right call at all remains genuinely contested science: they measurably improved air quality for responders working the slick, but the National Academies concluded in 2019 that the question of whether Corexit is more toxic to marine life than the oil itself is still open.

The people who wait for the aeroplane

The 910th does not decide where to spray. People like Lester Nicholas do.

Nicholas is 55, a retired master sergeant, and he has worked the pest control mission at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota both in uniform and as a civilian. He and two Airmen are responsible for every pest across a base whose missile complex covers 8,500 square miles and 150 intercontinental ballistic missile launch facilities. He did not choose the career. “I came into the Air Force, and that’s the job they assigned me,” he told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “That was a long time ago.”

His three-person crew drives trucks with foggers around the parts of the base they can reach. The swampy ground where mosquitoes actually breed is not one of those parts.

Twenty-odd miles away, in the city of Minot itself, Bryan Banfill runs public works operations. He spent 21 years in the Air Force as an electronic warfare technician, a Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile programme manager and an ROTC instructor, retired in 2024, and now spends his summers thinking about larvae.

Banfill’s team starts counting in June. They check standing water for larvae — the pre-hatch, as he puts it — and use the count to guess at what August will look like. This year they were seeing about 120 mosquitoes a week in July, and then spikes of more than 2,000 at sites across the city. The aerial spray is adulticide only: it kills what has already hatched. So the trick is timing, and the timing is dictated by when the aeroplane from Ohio can come.

The wing’s own data on what a good pass achieves is blunt: bite counts falling from as many as 200 a minute to fewer than one. Van Dootingh said the same thing about New Orleans two decades ago. It is the rare military capability whose effect you can measure by standing outside afterwards.

The squeeze

Here is the problem with being the only unit that does something. There is no second unit.

The 910th had 16 aircraft as recently as 2009. Between 2009 and 2014 it lost eight of them as the Air Force retired H models. Today, according to Air & Space Forces Magazine, it is down to three C-130Js and four C-130Hs built between 1989 and 1992, and it is shedding H models as the new Js arrive.

The recapitalisation has been coming since at least the fiscal 2020 budget, when Congress put $730 million towards eight C-130Js split between the Guard and the Reserve, with deliveries then expected in 2023. Youngstown was named the preferred location for eight aircraft in late 2022. The first J arrived in July 2024, the second in December 2024 — and then Lockheed Martin stopped delivering while it worked through a new communications suite made necessary by obsolete components. Lockheed spokesman Christopher Karns says certification of the new design is finished and deliveries resumed earlier in 2026; the 910th got its third J in May. The fourth was expected over the summer and has slipped to September.

The aircraft are only half of it. The spray system has to be replaced too, and the new one does not fit the old aeroplane. In 2025 the Air Force awarded Battelle Memorial Institute, in Ohio, a $98.4 million contract to build five Electronic Modular Aerial Spray Systems for the J fleet. EMASS is a palletised roll-on, roll-off kit that plugs straight into the J’s electrical system, carries up to 3,500 gallons against the old system’s 2,000, and uses GPS-driven precision application to put chemistry exactly where the entomologist asked for it and nowhere else. It cannot be used on a C-130H at all.

So the wing is caught in the overlap: old aircraft that can only fly the old system, new aircraft that can only fly the new one, and a delivery schedule that keeps moving. Reserve spokesman Sean Houlihan says the wing hopes to receive four more C-130Js in the coming months and that the last H models will stay until 2027. Even so, crew training and EMASS certification mean the new Js will not be able to spray for months yet.

Converting a crew from the H to the J takes six months to a year at Little Rock Air Force Base. Spray qualification sits on top of that, and pilots typically need 500 flight hours before they even start. There is no simulator for any of it.

A light bar on a car dashboard, driven around an airfield, to teach a pilot how to hold a spray line. Then local sorties without spraying, working down to 300 feet at night and 100 feet in daylight. Then the real thing.

An Air Force Reserve look at the 910th’s aerial spray operation and the people who fly it.

Why it matters that nobody has heard of them

Aerial spray is not a mission anyone lobbies for. It does not deter anybody, it does not show up in a force-structure briefing, and it is very hard to make look impressive. It is also the thing that stands between a flooded American city and an outbreak, and between a recovery workforce and being unable to work outdoors.

Healy’s warning was not about a fighter programme or a bomber. It was about whether, at some point in 2027, the United States might have exactly one usable spray aircraft for a dozen installations across nine states, plus whatever hurricane season delivers. That is a thin margin for a capability that exists precisely because the alternative is people getting sick.

Somewhere over Minot next August, if all of this goes to plan, a different Hercules will fly the same slow lawn-mowing pattern at 150 feet with a computer deciding when the nozzles open. If it does not go to plan, the aeroplane doing it will be older than most of the crew.

Sources: Air & Space Forces Magazine (Todd South, 10 September 2026; David Roza, 3 April 2024); 910th Airlift Wing Aerial Spray Mission fact sheet, Youngstown Air Reserve Station; Air Force Reserve Command; DVIDS; AgAir Update; Air Command and Staff College research by Maj. Scott J. Julian; Tribune Chronicle; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.