A crop-duster called Dusty

When Pixar’s animators needed a hero for their 2013 film Planes, they chose an unlikely one: a small-town crop-duster who dreams of air racing. The real aircraft behind Dusty Crophopper was an Air Tractor AT-400A, built in Olney, Texas, a town of about 3,100 people. It was a fitting choice. Air Tractor has spent half a century turning the humble agricultural aeroplane into a serious industrial product, and from 2011 to 2018 it delivered more turboprop aircraft than any other manufacturer in the world, ahead of names like Pilatus and Cessna.

The boy who built an aeroplane

Its founder, Leland Snow, began designing his first aircraft, the S-1, in 1951, when he was 21. He flew it on dusting and spraying jobs in the Rio Grande Valley and Nicaragua, then set up Snow Aeronautical at Olney and built the S-2 series there from 1958. By 1965 some 300 of his aircraft had been delivered, and that year he sold the company to Rockwell-Standard, becoming a vice-president of its Aero Commander division. His design lived on as the Thrush, still in production more than 60 years after it first flew.

Back to Olney

When Rockwell moved Thrush production to Georgia in 1970, Snow resigned. He spent two years on a new design, began building the prototype AT-300 in July 1972 and founded Air Tractor in Olney the same year, starting as a four-person operation. The AT-300 won its type certificate in 1973 and the first aircraft, an AT-301, was delivered in spring 1974. In 1977 Snow added a turbine, creating the PT6-powered AT-302, and the turbine has defined the company ever since; in 2024 it dropped piston engines altogether.

Fire bombers and a $3 billion warplane

The big one arrived in October 1990. The AT-802 was billed as the world’s largest agricultural aircraft, and it soon found a second career fighting fires, as a single-engine air tanker and, on Wipaire floats, as the Fire Boss that scoops water from lakes. A third career followed. Air Tractor armoured the cockpit and engine to create the AT-802U in 2008, and on 1 August 2022 US Special Operations Command picked it, with L3Harris, for its Armed Overwatch programme: up to 75 aircraft under a contract ceiling of $3 billion, designated OA-1K Skyraider II.

Owned by the people who build them

Snow kept running the company until his death on 20 February 2011, aged 80. Three years earlier he had sold it to its employees through a stock ownership plan, and many of the roughly 300 people who build Air Tractors today are second- and third-generation employee-owners. On 1 April 2021 they rolled out the 4,000th aircraft, an AT-502XP for a North Carolina spray operator, only eight years after the 3,000th. Air Tractors now work in more than 40 countries.

Factories

• Olney plant · Olney, Texas — Sole factory; Snow’s aircraft have been built in Olney since 1958

People

• Leland Snow · founder and designer — Designed the Snow S-2 (Thrush) and every early Air Tractor; died 20 February 2011
• Jim Hirsch · president — President at the 4,000th delivery in 2021

Records and firsts

• Delivered more turboprop aircraft than any other manufacturer every year from 2011 to 2018
• AT-802 described as the world’s largest ag plane on its launch in 1991