Plane Speak

 

 As a kid growing up in the 1950s, 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 Goodyear Blimp, military aircraft, or watch a Sikorsky helicopter place HVAC units on the roof of a nearby factory.

 

But you got a crick in your neck when a skywriter was overhead writing “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 the smokes.

 

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 dispersed 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. Oops.  

 

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 (yeah, that was bad) around the mid-1950s when 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 Tobacco were anxious to buy advertising closer to the 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 you’ve 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 a while, 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.”