Look up - You Got a Message

 

 

The Signature Collection

As a kid growing up in the 50’s, you  spent as much time as possible outside together with your friends. One outdoor pastime we really liked was watching aircraft fly overhead and naming them if possible. I still remember what a TWA Super G Constellation looked like. If you were lucky you might spot the Goodyear Blimp, military aircraft or watch a Sikorsky helicopter place HVAC units on the roof or a nearby factory. But you got a crick in your neck when a skywriter was overhead. I still recall “It’s Toasted” in aircraft oil - exhaust floating in the air above me. The meaningless catchphrase promoted Lucky Strike cigarettes, and you can still find it on a pack of their smokes.

 

Skywriting was a way of advertising and communicating by writing messages in the sky with airplane exhaust smoke. The first documented use of skywriting for advertising purposes was in 1922 when Jack Savage used it to write "Daily Mail" over Epsom Downs in England. 

 

You might correctly guess skywriting to be a difficult skill to learn. The letters must be formed without the pilot having any perspective over what they’re doing. Though the letters look vertical from the ground, they are in fact horizontal, facing the ground, and a skywriting pilot can only see what he or she has done when the message is complete, if it hasn’t already been disbursed  by wind. Mistakes occurred.

One skywriter, working on a commission from a candy company wrote LOFT CANDIES  onto the blue in front of the company’s president, but backward. Out came SEIDNAC TFOL . Ooops.

It takes one to three gallons of smoke oil to skywrite a typical quarter mile-high letter, depending on the size of the skywriting airplane’s engine, so messages were limited in length by oil tank size, usually running from 15 to 80 gallons. Pilots never wanted to run out before the message was complete.

Now the Germans saw skywriting in another way - as  yet another means to further circumvent the Versailles Treaty, which forbade their country to develop any form of military aviation. So besides training its pilots through sport-gliding clubs and configuring future bombers as mere airliners, the Germans formed several Reklamestaffeln, or “publicity and advertising” squadrons. These specialized units did commercial skywriting work that screened what was in fact practice for target-marking and reconnaissance. Reklamestaffeln pilots actually became the first operational tactical units of the newly formed German Luftwaffe.

Skywriting started to fade into the wind ( Yea - that was bad ) around the mid-1950s when a more effective forms of advertising came of age and city dwellers no longer ran to the window in droves when a skywriter appeared overhead. Television had arrived and big companies like American Tabacco were anxious to buy advertising closer to earth.

Strangely, secrecy has always been an important element of skywriting. It has long been hinted that only those who have the talent within their DNA can become skywriters, and that like the Flying Wallendas, either your got it or you don’t. When Pepsi-Cola became the world’s best-known skywriting user, its contracts with company skywriters forbade them to reveal any details of how they flew their smoky patterns.

Skywriting is likely to be around awhile, even if only on a rare, occasional or amateur level. As my friend Rick, an air traffic controller once told me, “It’s a big sky out there.”