In October, NAAA’s Facebook post about the Dusty Crophopper ag plane being placed in its permanent home at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s newly renovated Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center quickly became the association’s most viewed social media post ever, reaching nearly 500,000 people. That’s almost 10 times higher than any of NAAA’s previous highest-performing Facebook posts. Tagging the Smithsonian at the end of the post helped it go viral by entering the feeds of many of the Smithsonian’s 686,000 Facebook followers.
Here are some of the astonishing metrics for NAAA’s Oct. 19 Dusty Crophopper post:
- Reach: The post reached 495,310 people.
- Engagements: The post garnered 16,400 engagements, which includes the number of comments, shares, clicks and reactions recorded by clicking one of the buttons to register users’ reaction (Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry).
- Reactions, Comments and Shares: The post generated 4,773 reactions, including a whole lot of Likes, 258 comments and 426 shares.
To give you some perspective on just how viral NAAA’s Smithsonian-aided Dusty Crophopper post went, another one of NAAA’s most widely circulated posts reached 33,400 Facebook users when NAAA marked the end of the agricultural aviation industry’s 100th anniversary and the beginning of its 101st anniversary in an Aug. 3, 2022, post. An Aug. 3, 2021, post on the day of the aerial application industry’s centennial reached 26,318 Facebook users.
Another one of NAAA’s biggest Facebook posts also involved Dusty Crophopper. A July 31, 2021, announcement that the Air Tractor AT-400A Dusty Crophopper aircraft was about to head east for Dusty’s “final hangar parking spot at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space Museum on the 100th anniversary of the first aerial application, August 3, 2021,” reached 51,567 Facebook users.
The combined reach of all three of those higher-performing posts pales in comparison to the 495,000 people reached by last month’s post about Dusty Crophopper’s new digs at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center!
The lesson? To help turbocharge NAAA’s Facebook posts, share them on your own Facebook page and other social media platforms.
Dusty’s Road to the Smithsonian
Of course, Dusty Crophopper is the star of the popular animated Disney films Planes and Planes: Fire & Rescue. The road to getting the Dusty Crophopper-adorned Air Tractor AT-400A that Rusty and Lea Lindeman of Rusty’s Flying Service in Texas owned into the National Air and Space Museum was by no means a straight one. After months of discussion, NAAA successfully mediated an agreement with Rusty Lindeman, The Disney Corporation and the Smithsonian Institution that Dusty Crophopper would be donated to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. NAAA received the official confirmation from the National Air and Space Museum’s general aviation curator in January 2021.
The real-life replica of Dusty was on display at NAAA’s 100th anniversary celebration in Leesburg, Virginia, on Aug. 3, 2021. At that event, Dorothy Cochrane, the Smithsonian’s general aviation curator (pictured above), accepted the full-sized, fully flight-capable replica of Dusty Crophopper from the Lindemans on behalf of the National Air and Space Museum.
Dusty Crophopper made his Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum debut at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center’s annual “Innovations in Flight Family Day,” an outdoor event on Aug. 21, 2021.
Construction at the Udvar-Hazy Center delayed the public unveiling until this fall of Dusty Crophopper’s permanent home, which is now under the tail of the Lockheed 1049F Super Constellation and next to a Grumman G-164 Ag-Cat. Ralph Holsclaw of Growers Air Service in California donated the Grumman G-164 Ag-Cat to the Smithsonian in 2009.
