Evergreen International Aviation
aviation services company
Evergreen International Aviation, Inc. was a global aviation services company based in McMinnville, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1960, Evergreen was primarily known publicly for commercial helicopter operations in agricultural and forestry applications.
The airline division, Evergreen International Airlines, operated worldwide, in 168 countries, and by the end had been reduced to a fleet of all-cargo Boeing 747 freighters. The company also operated a helicopter division, Evergreen Helicopters which was sold to Erickson Air-Crane, an Oregon-based helicopter operator, for $250 million in 2013. Faced with bankruptcy and tax investigations, Evergreen ceased all aviation-related operations in 2013 and shut down in 2014.
History
Delford M. Smith founded the company as Evergreen Helicopters in 1960. Smith was involved in the development of the commercial use of helicopters, and his company was one of the first to use helicopters for spraying fertilizer and herbicides, spreading seeds and fighting forest fires. Smith helped develop a helicopter spray system called the "PaceSpreader" which permitted accurate, fast delivery of granular agents over large areas. The PaceSpreader allowed the helicopter to operate at relatively high speeds while still delivering the product evenly and with measured precision.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Evergreen International Aviation” is aviation services company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Evergreen, International and Aviation, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “aviation services company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3061479. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960, 2013 and 2014.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Evergreen International Aviation”, its source revision and the description used here.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Evergreen International Aviation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.