Since the 1930s
The Dynamic Aviation Story
Scroll to move through eight decades — from a single crop-duster to a global fleet.
Since the 1930s
Eighty Years Aloft
It started with one biplane, a tank of dust, and a family that never stopped flying. Scroll to travel the story of Dynamic Aviation — drawn straight from the company archive.
1935
It began with a runway
On an August weekend in 1935, Lancaster County dedicated its new municipal airport. In that same stretch of Pennsylvania farm country, a young Chris Stoltzfus was learning that an airplane could be more than a machine — it could be a living.
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1940s
A flier's first ledger
The earliest records aren't glamorous — fuel invoices, billing letters, a statement from Wiggins Airways. But they mark the moment flying stopped being a hobby and became a business, one gallon of avgas at a time.
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1950
The Coatesville duster
By 1950, Chris Stoltzfus was crop-dusting the valleys out of Coatesville, Pennsylvania — his name and phone number, 9877, painted right on the fuselage. Low, loud, and precise, the Stearman fleet worked field after field across the Northeast.
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1951
From cornfields to continents
The reputation traveled. In 1951, Stearmans were crated up and shipped clear to Iran to fight a locust plague — the first sign that this small Pennsylvania outfit would one day fly the whole world.
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1953
Aboard the Columbine
The archive guards a remarkable artifact: the guest register of the Columbine, the presidential aircraft that carried Dwight Eisenhower from 1953 to 1961. Decades later, Dynamic Aviation would help preserve the very first Air Force One — a thread that runs from this leather-bound book to the company's restoration work today.
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1955
The Gypsy Moth campaign
Massachusetts, 1955: a full-scale aerial war on the gypsy moth. Daily spray reports, unit rosters, colors and registrations by squadron — the paperwork of an operation that had outgrown a single duster and become a fleet with a chain of command.
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1956
War on the Med Fly
When the Mediterranean fruit fly threatened Florida's citrus, Aero Crop Service won the contract for Area No. 3 and put its aircraft in the air with tanks of malathion. The work was relentless — and dangerous. When a pilot was lost near Boca, the spraying continued the next morning.
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1956
Surplus wings
To fly bigger jobs, you need bigger airplanes. Stoltzfus wrote to senators, bid at government surplus sales, and brought home military castoffs like the Chase YC-122 Avitruc — converting warbirds into workhorses long before it was fashionable.
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1960
Chris D. Stoltzfus & Associates
The company took its formal name in 1960 and kept scaling. Surplus DC-3s and C-47s joined the fleet — the Douglas twins that hauled freight in every corner of the world now rigged for spray work over American fields and forests.
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1962
The Flying Fortress
In July 1962 the company bought a Boeing B-17G — tail number N5017N. A four-engine heavy bomber, retired from war and pressed back into service. Few crop operators in America could say they flew a Flying Fortress.
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1965
Built to drop a load
Spraying and fire work demanded custom engineering. The company designed and installed its own dispersal systems — booms, tanks, valves — certifying aircraft in the restricted category to carry and release exactly what the mission required.
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1969
Trial by fire
1969 tested everything. Fire tore through the Coatesville airport office and warehouse in January, and in October the airplane plant itself was razed. The company notified its customers, cleared the ash, and kept flying.
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1970s–80s
The warbirds endure
The fleet changed hands and changed missions, but the airplanes lived on. Stearmans were restored, C-47s found new buyers, and the old Chase Avitruc became a magazine's “mystery plane.” The aircraft that once dusted crops were becoming history worth keeping.
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2017
A legacy, preserved
The family kept the receipts — literally. Karl and Ken Stoltzfus spent years cataloging photographs, logbooks, and letters, and the fleet's warbirds earned features in the aviation press. The history you're scrolling through is theirs, carefully saved.
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Today
The mission continues
From one crop-duster over the Pennsylvania hills to a global fleet of more than 150 special-mission aircraft, the throughline never changed: fly the hard jobs, do them right, and keep your word. That's still how Dynamic Aviation flies.
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