Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Best shotgun for shooting from a plane?

My brother has been going on coyote hunts in a plane around his small MT town.
He says that once airborne, there is a coyote in every section.
His health provider warns him that coyote hunting by plane is the most dangerous lifestyle.

the times I hunted hogs out of a plane or chopper I use a AR with midway brass catcher that attaches to the pic rail

In Herters Professional Guide Manual it showed how to attach a semi auto auto to the wings

Have some on Amazon now.
Lots of fine advice

Jump out on top of em

I used to work on the shotguns that the Govt. hunters used . Benelli's were the last ones they used. I had the job of changing the safeties so the shooters could shoot the left handed ejection shotguns and use the right handed safeties which they were more familiar with. Their reason for using the left handed guns was so the empties didn't eject into the pilots gauges and crack the glass!
My friend (Govt. hunter) told me he liked shooting out of the planes more than the little Hughes 500 chopper. They could get in closer and faster with the airplane.
Some of what I am saying may be wrong as it has been more than several years since my hunter friend passed away. His boss , the guy that had me doing the work, has also passed away.
There is a gov hunter also from Montana that worked out of Glasgow I think named Scenar Shooter. If he is still on the forum, he could tell us more. It's been a long time since I have seen his pics of the hunting around the Hi-line and Missouri Breaks. Hopefully, he is okay!
My friends name is Richard (Trapper) Martin. His boss's name is Jim Hoover .Both were good guys and had some good stories.

Learn to shoot behind the animal.

You can "slip" a Cub.

There were two older gentleman who were good at that with a fixed wing in the 90’s down by Gillette WY. As good as they were they found a major electrical transmission line one day, their last day.

I was shooting out of a rotary one time and the target wheeled up into a ranch yard and under a shed there.
Clever buggar we didn’t bother landing.
Darn expensive shooting from a helicopter when you consider the short hour time frame between factory maintenance visits. The guy who owned that flyer told me it had to go back every 200hrs.

Osky

A pilot with a plane said MT was paying the helicopter a lot more per hour than they were paying him.
When shooting coyotes around the antelope herd crossing the frozen Missouri, he wished they both could be paid by the coyote.

I'm surprised to see this shotgun has a 50 y range at best and from a moving plane , can you even fly that low sounds like a fun way to spend a day but I doubt you'll hit anything

Scenarshooter has killed hundreds from the air.
He's one of the very few that can answer this question with experience.
But he's an incompetent twit according to Mike Werner...🤣

Have been gunning many years. Always used a Beretta in the early days, then a Benelli. All with modified choke and 00 Buck. Headsets to the pilot help greatly. Gun barrel always down and forward, and further down when banking into the shot. Wait for the shot, follow, once and DRT… Much easier in the fall or winter for visual. Once flew with an Army gunship pilot - that day was a wild chopper ride! Some of the comments he made were priceless when we rolled one up in the STX brush!

Probably the best pilot in this area clipped a power line while arial reseeding in a copter, he was the only one with balls big enough to come get a client who was bucked off her horse in a bad spot. He was mentioned in the movie "A Big Year" about bird watchers.

RIP Ted McBride

I've done quite a bit of gunning coyotes from an R22 chopper, but not an airplane. I used an AR15 with a shell deflector so the brass didn't get to the rotors. That shell deflector was great for having the brass fall straight down when shooting as well. No chasing empties.

One guy I knew was gunning from an airplane and the seat belt failed. He hit the ground from 40-50ft up, and doing about 30mph. Fugged him up pretty good. He wasn't "right" after that. He showed me a photo of the shotgun he was shooting stuck barrel first into the ground.

He died last year. Delayed, but it was that accident that killed him.


If I was going to gun from a plane, I'd want the pilot to have LOTS of hours doing just that. And an airplane made to fly slow and low with some power to pull out.

You don’t want a hot case going down the pilot’s shirt, especially at 100’. 😳

I talked to a USDA trapper about this. They were shooting massive numbers of hogs out of helicopters. He said they shot hundreds of rounds of 3" mag buckshot every day for several days. They were using left-handed Benellis. The guns were left-handed to throw empties away from the pilot. Not sure why they used Benelli.

He said the shooters would put duct tape around their trigger fingers because it would bleed from so much shooting. He said it wasn't much fun.

Yeah, pilots don't want brass flying around.


Switch, aerial gunning is extremely effective. Sometimes it's even cost effective.

I flew one area 3 times, and we killed 127 coyotes. That put a dent in them in that area.

Scenarshooter must not be checking the forum anymore. I hope he is okay!

Saiga 12