Making the connection is the difficult part—a long, vertical line of smoke and then twisting off into a new direction and across the atmosphere.
That’s how you draw letters in the sky with an airplane, and there are only five people on the planet skilled enough to make it their full-time job.
Greg Stinis learned how to pilot one of those planes before he learned how to drive a car. Not surprising for the son of a man who invented a new way to write sentences in the sky, whose plane hangs in a national museum.
“My dad would take my mom when she was pregnant with me, and that’s how it started,” he said. “I’ve always been in the air.”
Today, the 75-year-old still makes his living flying those curves and angles, leaving billowy white smoke trails that spell messages to people far below. Each letter is an optical illusion obstacle course. An ‘S’ looks like a straight line from the cockpit of his plane, and if the letters aren’t drawn at different altitudes—like on a staircase—his wingtips risk brushing against freshly placed smoke.
“I’ve been doing it for years and years and years, and still there’s a learning curve,” Stinis said. “You can’t see what you’re writing in the sky, everything is upside down and backwards.”
It’s his craft—a calling and his birthright. He was taught by his father, Andy. In turn, Greg is passing the skill down to his own son, Stephen.
Andy fundamentally changed the business in 1964, when he patented a new form of skywriting that allowed the family business to grow exponentially. It takes more than two minutes and a great deal of skill to draw a single letter with a single aircraft, so Andy invented skytyping, which involves five planes flying in steady formation, and a computer system programmed to belch smoke puffs, to create letters in under four seconds.
Each letter stands as tall as the Empire State Building and each message stretches five miles across. In 1979, the family started Skytypers Inc. Today, Greg and Stephen, 41, own and run the business.
The family now finds itself staring down another moment of change, this one ushered by new technologies that promise to reshape the next generation of skytyping—potentially at the cost of the art of single-plane skywriting. That will be a weighty decision for the youngest Stinis.
by Erik Olsen, Quartz | Read more:
That’s how you draw letters in the sky with an airplane, and there are only five people on the planet skilled enough to make it their full-time job.
Greg Stinis learned how to pilot one of those planes before he learned how to drive a car. Not surprising for the son of a man who invented a new way to write sentences in the sky, whose plane hangs in a national museum.“My dad would take my mom when she was pregnant with me, and that’s how it started,” he said. “I’ve always been in the air.”
Today, the 75-year-old still makes his living flying those curves and angles, leaving billowy white smoke trails that spell messages to people far below. Each letter is an optical illusion obstacle course. An ‘S’ looks like a straight line from the cockpit of his plane, and if the letters aren’t drawn at different altitudes—like on a staircase—his wingtips risk brushing against freshly placed smoke.
“I’ve been doing it for years and years and years, and still there’s a learning curve,” Stinis said. “You can’t see what you’re writing in the sky, everything is upside down and backwards.”
It’s his craft—a calling and his birthright. He was taught by his father, Andy. In turn, Greg is passing the skill down to his own son, Stephen.
Andy fundamentally changed the business in 1964, when he patented a new form of skywriting that allowed the family business to grow exponentially. It takes more than two minutes and a great deal of skill to draw a single letter with a single aircraft, so Andy invented skytyping, which involves five planes flying in steady formation, and a computer system programmed to belch smoke puffs, to create letters in under four seconds.
Each letter stands as tall as the Empire State Building and each message stretches five miles across. In 1979, the family started Skytypers Inc. Today, Greg and Stephen, 41, own and run the business.
The family now finds itself staring down another moment of change, this one ushered by new technologies that promise to reshape the next generation of skytyping—potentially at the cost of the art of single-plane skywriting. That will be a weighty decision for the youngest Stinis.
by Erik Olsen, Quartz | Read more:
Image: Skytypers Inc.
