I had an idea. That idea was formed many years ago and has rattled around in my noggin for quite some time. The day came — November 19, 2019 — when all of my ideas, thoughts, planning and efforts came together with a nice day for flying along with the actual execution of my idea.
The idea of skywriting, using smoke, is quite old, having been done only 12 years after the invention of aviation. My take on it — using GPS — is by definition less than 20 years old. While the idea I came up with isn’t new, or original, I did initially come up with it long before it became popular…. I just didn’t get around to it until now.
I’m not sure if there is an actual name for tracing words on GPS screens. My kind of “skywriting” isn’t writing in the sky, it’s using an aircraft to fly around in the sky in order to trace words on a flight track. Maybe “trackwriting”? That doesn’t sound very elegant or cool, does it? Oh well.
Anyway, my brother Jim came along for the ride, wanting to try out a new, big lens that he had just purchased. Unfortunately, because it was a cold day and the doors were on, the giant telephoto lens would be difficult to wield in the small space of my cockpit. He ended up taking a smaller lens. He was a trooper, though, hanging in there while I executed my flight track. (My “canvas”, the area between Anahuac and Beaumont, has got to be one of the dullest landscapes from the air, especially at this time of year. Everything is almost monochrome. So he wasn’t too busy but I’ll be the first one to say it was a bit tedious for several of the legs. The result though, in my opinion, was well worth it.
So, here is what the initial flight plan looked like on my iFlyGPS planning software (the purple line; the white dots are my turn points):
And, after the 2 hour 46 minute flight time, this is what the track looked like:
For those of you who may not actually “see” what I wrote, it’s “I love Amy” and, below it, a big heart. (Amy is my wife.) The loop around the top wasn’t planned,: it was something that was spur of the moment.
Unlike true skywriting where one can turn the smoke on and off as needed, I couldn’t turn my GPS tracking on and off. So, the entire track had to be connected and that meant some kind of script, or long-hand. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it… I rounded off areas that should be rounded off, even though the flight plan showed more angular turns.
I was a little nervous about presenting it to my wife, but I had no reason to worry… she laughed and laughed when I showed her the result… she loved it!
I did take a few photos that day, unassociated with the flight plan:
The 2 hour 46 minute flight — the sky writing portion spent mostly at 2700 feet — covered 151.3 nm, was fun to fly and definitely made Amy very happy!
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