AJ Wiechmann

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145 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2024 last heard Aug 2024

AJ Wiechmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Farm4Profit Podcast · F4F - AJ Wiechmann Trucker and Pilot - after we try some wine! · 22 Aug 2024 podcast

You just go out to the surrounding, you know, outskirts of town and land there. It's a lot more relaxed atmosphere for guys, you know, planes like this or guys like me. Yeah. So is it like dodgeball? If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball. Is it the same thing? If you can fly a plane like this, you can fly any plane? I wouldn't say that. All the basics are the same. Let's put it that way.

All the basics are the same. It's the amount of training you've got to do to get into something like flying the big jets. It takes a lot of training. I mean, you've got to put a lot of hours in the seat and dedicate a lot of time to it. Therefore, it probably needs to be your full-time career. Yep. So...

Something like, you know, what we discussed earlier, maybe we went into a bigger plane, a twin or something like that. I would have to do some training to fly it, but not as nearly as extensive as flying a jet or flying a commercial airline jet, you know. How long do you think you'd have to spend on that? Oh, probably another 50 hours would be my guess. 50 to 60 hours, I suppose.

So you'd have to buy it, and then basically have an instructor with you in that plane? Yep, you hire an instructor. They go out and they just show you, and then once they feel that you are worthy or safe to fly that plane, then they'll sign you off. And is that only good for that specific plane, or then you can fly any twin prop? A lot of them are specific...

model or make specific a lot of different planes have different features and how they operate like especially for like in the in the cabin throttles and flaps and all that stuff they want they want you to ride with an instructor that has a lot had a lot of time in that plane so you understand how everything works in it or the characteristics of a lot of them are different weights there's different horsepowers you know so you just gotta you gotta understand you gotta go through all the weight and balance of all the different planes so you understand how to load it you know how to not put too much weight or

Is that 1,000 acres? It's got to be almost a full section there, 640 worth, because there's a huge substation right there too. Right, and you can tell that there's more in the process of being put. Yeah, those are becoming more of a thing up here. I mean, you see that a lot more. I don't really like seeing it.

I had a couple of guys say that they would rent their ground out and they were getting $1,100 an acre rent on that. Yeah, that makes it sound like a 20-year contract, don't they? Yeah, and it goes up every year. That's hard to turn down, especially what we're looking at for corn prices right now. Obviously, it's a good investment, but...

It's a matter of are you going to feed into, will you feed into that trend, you know? Right. No different than the windmills, you know, they're kind of the same thing. Yep. So when Dave sells farms with windmills on them, they always sell better. Do they? Well, it's just they got income. Yeah. It helps the cash flow.

A lot of what we're doing is production agriculture, and those guys want to make money just like all of us. So it's just a cap rate. It's a capitalization rate. You know, if you're making, what, 12% in a Edward Jones account or something like that, most rentals, houses in town, you know, what are we, 8%, 10%?

Get to a T-bond, you're probably 5%, and then you get to farm ground, and we're down to 2.5%. So if it's got any extra with cell phone towers or wind turbines or solar farms, well, then you still get the cool asset you want of farmland. Right. So as you think about all the places you've flown into, AJ, where are some of the shittiest places you've flown into? Oh, boy. Probably in Oklahoma.

That was fast. Yeah. I figured you were going to say Nebraska. No. Actually, Nebraska's got a lot of nice airports. I've been to a lot of nice places there. And that's mostly been, I mean, I use that for what I would call business use. Like, we'll go out there and look at trucks.

You know, if we've got a driver that's looking at a truck or I'm looking at a truck, we'll fly out there and look at a truck. It saves a lot of time. Or, you know, I had an owner-operator buy a truck out there in Nebraska last year. We went out and looked at it on one Sunday, and he'd come home and think about it. And then, yep, next Sunday, hey, let's go buy it.

So he'd give them a ride out there, and he drove the thing home. So yeah, Nebraska's got a lot of nice airports. Oklahoma, on the other hand, it's pretty desolate out there. There's not a lot of people and they just don't care as much. There's certain things that they have to do to keep, the city has to do to keep the airport open, which makes it safe for us to fly in there.

But like, the facilities, man. That one I stopped in Oklahoma last week. Had to go to the bathroom, and the FBO, which is what we would call the gas station, you know, you walk in the office, and, well, this place, I mean, I'm serious, all there was was a desk in there with a map laying on top of it, and a restroom in the back. That's it.

And there was no air conditioning, and I'm telling you, it was hot. What do you need for a runway to land this or take off? Can you put it down on grass? Yes, yes. I have a grass strip six miles from my house and it is a 2400 foot runway. And that's probably about the minimum I would want to do for a grass runway. Grass runways, there's a lot of resistance, you know, on your wheels and stuff.

More so than concrete. So you're on turf, you're on dirt, grass. Well... It's more resistance. You need more length to get off the ground. Yes. To answer your question, grass runways are... I like grass runways. They're fun. Are they pretty rough? Some of them are. Some of them are. You got to watch out for holes, you know. Go for holes. Yep. Yep.

Have you ever had a close call in-air emergency or anything? Um, well, I mean, I don't know if I would call it an emergency. I didn't think it was. We went out to Nebraska to look at a truck one day and come back, and so this airplane, you've got to manually switch the right and left tank right down here on the floor. See that, Corey? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so I'll watch the gauges here, and every 30 minutes, you know, I'll switch it back and forth. Okay. I was with a couple guys. We were on our way back, and, you know, we were up 5,500 feet coming back across there and just chatting away, you know, talking. I'd forgotten to change the tanks. And a guy riding right seat with me was a pilot. He'd been a pilot longer than I had.

This thing sputtered and died. Oh. It ran out of gas on the one side. Not a big deal. Yeah. I mean, I knew exactly what was happening. Not a big deal. No, no, no. Hear me out. It's not a big deal. We're trained for that. I mean, we're trained to adapt to situations like that. In fact, our instructor will purposely shut the gas off on us just to see how we react. Yeah. This guy freaked out.

He'd been flying longer than I had. I just, just relax, man. I just told him relax. All you got to do is you flip the tank quick and the propeller's up there still spinning because it's got air on it, you know? The colors up there are still spinning, so all you can do is throw the gas back at it and throttle forward, and it fired right back up, and away we went. It was no big deal.

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