I can’t believe they do that! I understand not dragging the banner along a runway but there’s no way to carry the thing rolled up inside the cabin, and then hook it onto the side of the plane while in flight?
I haven’t seen skywriting in decades. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen skytyping.
I do see banners now and then. They have a huge advantage over skywriting/typing i that they last for as long as the plane can circle over the area. Puffs of wind or the like can disintegrate a written/typed message pretty quickly.
Imagine paying some big bucks to have skytypers put up a message reading “Linda, will you marry me?” If Linda leaves the ballpark at the wrong moment to use the women’s room, she may come back to a message that says “ry me?” Yes, the prospective groom can explain it, but it’s really lost its romantic impact.
Decades ago I heard a radio story about those banner pilots. They were novice flyers exploited by the ad companies. They flew for free and often covered their own fuel costs just to accrue flight time. You could get fired if your ground speed exceeded something ridiculous like 25 mph (I may be misremembering, but, damn those planes were slow.)
I think the outfit that does this (possibly a one-man operation) goes by the name “Holy Smoke”.
I used to see skywriting at Jones Beach on Long Island in the 1960s. Later they switched to sky-typing, but this is the first time I have heard that term.
Yes they do! I’ve seen it done. And at the end of the flight, they don’t land with the banner either. The pilot makes a low pass over the landing place (more specifically, alongside the runway, not right over it) and drops the banner, then circles around to land. There will be an assistant on the ground to retrieve the banner.
I remember seeing that video (or some doc on TV) and was more confused about why they grabbed it backwards. And then impressed at such a simple solution to not tearing the banner apart by jerking the entire thing at once.
I would WAG that it’s either too big to fit in that tiny little plane or too much of a risk of it getting tangled up while deploying. Maybe even a safety issue if there’s a chance of it getting wrapped up in a wing/control surface.
I have to imagine if this was invented today, the sign would be rolled up (like a roll of paper towel) into a machine that would deploy it once in flight and roll it back up before landing, and probably have the ability to drop the entire rig off the plane if the pilot through it might get them into danger.
On the Shrewsbury River there is a little sandbar island that they use for this purpose. It was extremely cool to watch.
It took me a couple of moments to make sense of this, because I was taking it too much for granted. They also have bumper stickers, in the format of “abbreviation inside of an oval” that you often see for vacation destinations (except in the company colors of pink and green). The sky banners are the same design as the bumper stickers (except bigger, of course).
In SoCal when I was a kid in the 60’s skywriting was common. Then when skytyping was invented that became much more common & skywriting became real rare. Towed Banners along the beach were commonplace.
Nowadays in SoFL, banners along the beach are seen almost every weekend. I see skytypers 2 or 3 times a year. And I was amazed to see an actual skywriter a couple years ago. First (and last) one I’d seen since the 60s.
Back in the late 80s/early 90s my brother towed banners for a couple of summers along Long Island & the Jersey shore. He was a pilot with a desk job with the Navy at Grumman on LI at the time. Not much money, but lots of fun.
There’s a bunch of decent YouTube vids about the flying & equipment used all three techniques.
Can you give us a TL;DR on how sky typing works? How do the pilots all coordinate with one another? That would be obviously trivial these days (entirely computer controlled), but back in the 1960s? Microprocessors were still 15-20 years in the future. What we would now call “pocket calculators” were still rather primitive and the size of IBM Electric typewriters, and fairly heavy.
Talking about price–
As to the pilots, they are a formation where 5 airplanes fly line abreast together in a straight line or a gentle curve.
I have no idea how the original skytyping system worked. I could easily imagine a punched paper tape reader and something akin to DTMF, where each aircraft was listening to a different audio frequency within a single continuous radio frequency transmission. All those things were bog standard 1960s data comm tech.
There’s a bunch of YouTubes on the general topic of skytyping; I’d be no better at searching up which one has definitive details than you’d be.
Here’s a patent form 1923 (filing date) describing a paper tape system and seemingly coining the term “sky typing”:
1498418499085263869-01716794 (storage.googleapis.com)
It describes a single-plane system using smoke emitters on a dangling cable. I’m not sure why that method was never popular but I suppose it limits the size of the letters. The same system would of course be fine for a single emitter per plane.
In any case, simply synchronizing the emitters on each plane would do the trick. At these scales, even a verbal 3-2-1-go would probably be good enough.
If they did that, then I can imagine the paper tape punches were literally in the form of the letters, like this:
I wrote a program myself to punch tape like that (because of course I did), in SNOBOL!
Agree w your probably encoding. It’s more like a player piano roll than ASCII or the like.
I loved SNOBOL! So unlike almost any other language.
And so deliciously unstructured!
< aside>
If you want to see a programming language unlike any other, take a look at INTERCAL (short for “Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym”), which includes bizarre operators like MINGLE and unary AND, and statements like COME FROM, IGNORE and ABSTAIN.
< /aside>
Probably the Geico Skytypers who are based in Farmingdale & presumably need to practice sometimes. I saw (what I assume to be) them overhead some random day last summer. They perform at airshows all over the country; assuming these events happen this year, this is their schedule for the year.