What were some Super Constellations used for in North American forests in the 1970s?

When Super Constellations left the passenger routes, several found a second life far from airports. In the 1970s some were used to spray large stretches of forest in North America with pesticides to control the spruce budworm, an insect whose larvae devour conifer needles and can damage entire forest stands. The payload capacity and range of these four-engine aircraft made them well suited to covering very large areas on each sortie.

That work was not without risk. On June 9, 1973, the L-1049H registered N173W, engaged in spraying against the spruce budworm, crashed shortly after takeoff. All 3 crew members died. The investigation concluded that the flaps had been raised too soon, an error attributed to crew fatigue. The case illustrates the toughness of campaigns that strung together low-altitude flights over long workdays.

The L-1049H belonged to the Super Constellation family, the stretched-fuselage version of the original Constellation. The list of accidents and incidents of the Constellation family records numerous episodes in this final stage of its operational life, when the aircraft, already veterans, passed to smaller operators and specialized missions very different from the luxury flights for which they had been built. For these former airliners, those forestry campaigns were often the last chapter of a career that had begun on the international routes of major airlines.