How Skywriting Works

written in the sky. It is we're in the stars. Uh. Yeah, well, now you can't do that at night, No, but you could. They tried to make it so yeah glow in the dark. Yeah you saw that too, spoiler. Yeah. So we're talking about skywriting, right. Uh. And I was trying to think back, Chuck, if I have ever seen something written in the sky. I'm like, surely I have. You've never seen the scar writing message I have like in in I've seen pictures of them are plenty, Like you weren't, Like, what is this.

I'm trying to remember back towards childhood, which is you know when I probably would have seen uh, and I just can't quite place it. But I have a vague recollection, um and nothing. It's me standing and there's grass. But then I'm like, look up, dummy, look up, what's in the sky. I just walk off and need a dandelion. This was this was actually my idea as an article, like we're flooding the website with new material now, which

is great. Man. And uh, I pitched this like five weeks ago, not even bam, and here it is, whoomp, here it is. I thought you knew, Uh, this is a good idea, Chuck, thank you. I found this fascinating. Did you know much about it when you pitched it? Or had you seen a sky written message recently? Um? I think I got the idea from the great comedian Kurt Brauno or um did a Kickstarter in may you do a skywriting message? And I think his quote was,

it's so stupid and I love doing stupid things. And thank god the Internet loves stupid too, because they funded it. And he let people vote on what to do, and they chose how do I land? And he had that written above the skies of Los Angeles and got some attention for it, and it was a funny little gag and Kurt's a great guy and a friend of the show. So, um, that's where I got the idea because I started wondering,

how in the world do they do that? Like I've seen him before, but I thought, you know, when you're up there in the plane, it's got to be pretty tough spell something out to like massage the clouds over into to beat them into letters. Right, that's how they do it. Correct, that's not how they do it. No, that isn't how they do it. They use a certain type of oil and some high horsepowered planes and it takes a tremendous amount of skill, which is why it's

not much of a surprise, um that it finds. It's uh, it's origins among War One flying asis. Apparently the Royal Air Force. There was a guy named John Clifford Savage, who, um, I guess invented skywriting for military purposes. Yeah, and back then I think there were several things they did with it in the military. One was to give messages when you know you're out of like radio control, because I think you can you can see messages for like hundred

square miles. Yeah, there's a little tricky math to it, but there. They say that on a clear day, if you're standing on say the Great Planes or something, okay, you could you can see a skywritten message for something like thirty miles. And if you take into account all the thirty miles and multiplian, it's what did you say, like square miles, that's a that's a lot of exposure. Yeah, and if you're in World War One, your walkie talkie

back then might not have gone that far. So they would send messages and apparently they would also use it to um cloak ships, I guess, fly around and just close them in cloudy smoke because detection, because what you're doing when you're writing is a sky message is basically, um, I guess you're you're basically just flying parallel to the ground, right, Well, I mean it's aerial acrobatics. You're you're spelling with your plane. So um, you're loopti loop and you're doing all sorts

of crazy stuff. So after John Clifford Savage invented this, like within a couple of years after inventing skywriting, somebody's like, you know, who would love this company's And companies have money, that's right, so let's charge the money to advertise their stuff in the sky. And a dude named Captain Cyril Turner was the first person, and I think to write

a skywritten advertisement. Yeah, and I think he was. I don't know if it was his original idea, but he seemed to be doing this as a proof of concept, like let me let me write daily Mail the British newspaper, let me right that in the air, uh, and see

how that works. And then later he went to the United States later that same year and said hello USA over time square and then Carl Vanderbilt, which is the hotel phone number where he was staying, and apparently the next two and a half hours he got, uh the switchboard lit up literally you can say that because it was the nineties and it was. They got forty seven thousand phone calls in just a couple of hours. And UM, I think that was his way of saying, this is

gonna work. Yeah exactly, this is advertising. And it got the attention to some people, some companies pretty quickly. UM Lucky Strikes very famously got into uh skywriting for advertising. UM Snocco basically anybody who is anybody with the company back then was doing skywriting because the other stuff you had was the side of a barn, maybe some radio advertising, right, but skywriting, for the amount of money it costs, you could get a lot of exposure in ways you you

just normally couldn't. And Pepsi was starting out at this time and they bought into skywriting so enormously that the company and skywriting are kind of, um, they go hand in hand in a lot of people's minds. Yeah, in the nineteen thirties they started putting they didn't have as much money to advertise on the radio. So uh, from the nineteen fifties, I'm sorry, from the thirties. Of the nineteen fifties, they like went all over the US, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada.

Just that was their main form of advertising. And uh, the New York Times at the time was they thought the skies were going to be littered, like polluted with with ads and they called it celestial vandalism, and uh they predicted uh, intricate pictures and colors and glow in the dark, like we said, But none of that really came to fruition, No, it didn't. Um, And I mean, there's pretty good reason to kind of worry about this, Uh,

in alone. Pepsi alone commissioned two thousand skywriting projects and um for kind of more in the history of it, there's this good article called what Happened to Skywriting that was in The Atlantic. That's worth ning too, by the way, But um, the thing that undid skywriting. The answer to that question is television period. Television advertising came in and thanks to our friends at the Nielsen Company, you could uh really kind of target and taylor your ad in

ways that you couldn't before with radio. And it was for the amount of exposure you got. It was definitely worthwhile to save your money for television advertising and funnel away money from your skywriting budget. You know, well it seems silly now, but it was like a legit form back then of advertising. Um. And like it points out in this article, uh, you have to have ideal conditions as well. It's got to be a clear sky, can't be cloudy, can't be rainy, um, can't be too windy.

So there was a lot of things that that radio and television offered, like it doesn't matter what the weather is like basically, I mean, your reception is still gonna suck. People can still probably hear what you're trying to say that's a that's a good point. And actually Pepsi um as I guess it's fiftieth anniversary or something like that. They commissioned one of their their former skywriting pilots to go find some plane the type of plane that was

used for skywriting. And this guy found like the plane, one of the main planes that Pepsi used for its skywriting campaigns because it was so deep into it it maintained its own aerial fleet, and this guy found it and they started another skywriting campaign for another like twenty something years, I believe. Yeah, it started in the seventies with the Marry Me Sue commercial? Did you happen to watch that? No? I didn't get a chance, did you? Like? Yeah, I mean I remembered it when I saw it, which

was from nine. So that was the first startling thing that happened to me today. And you know how a commercial spectator just so like cam fisted, Like it's this cowboy at a barn trying to proposed to sue his wife, of course, and she's you know, you know, it's all acted out, but it's got music over it, so she's like, what are you doing? And he's like, oh, just wait, and she sees the word mary and she's like hmmm. And then she sees marry me and she's like whoa.

And then she sees her name Sue, and she's like what yes, of course, and then they kiss and the barn catches fire. Now they're outside the barn. The barn, oh, I think he said bar. I'm a little stuffed up, gotcha. But uh, it's great seventies commercial fun. I recommend watching it on the YouTube. It would have been great had the Wicked Witch of the West flown in and written surrender Dorothy over marry me, Sue, because that showed up. Remember she sky wrote with her room. Really yeah, I

don't remember that it was in uh. I guess it was shortly after which was about the gold standard um, but it was I think shortly after she discovered her sister had been smushed by Dorothy and that Dorothy was in oz and she jumps on her broom and flies up and surrender Dorothy with it and black smoke. Well, she like farting that out. She's squeezing flying monkeys. That that broom exhaust that we all know about. So let's

talk about how to sky right, all right after the chuck. Um, they say in this article, but I probably they in general that skywriting is a lost art. It takes a tremendous amount of skill, and it's been so underfunded over the last few decades that like, there's literally a handful of people, maybe four or five. How many people fit into a hand Well, it says in here four people.

I found that hard to believe. But uh. The article also points out that it's a lost art because it's you can't learn it unless you learn from someone who does it, and so few people do it these days. It's just a closely guarded secret. And back in the day they wouldn't tell anyone because competition among pilots. They would keep their little secrets to themselves. So there's really you can't get on the internet and learn how to skywrite. Yeah, there's not a handbook or anything like that. Um, and

we should say we're talking skywriting. There's something separate called sky typing, which more people are involved with, but for for free hand skywriting, there's seriously possibly four to six people in the world that know how to do it. Yeah, well these days too. Um. I looked at a couple of the skywriding websites. I think there's probably only two, and it's it's sky riding in banner towing, which is the big things. So you got skywriting dot com and

skywriting dot net. That would have made and that's what you see more of these days. If you want an ad or marry me, Josh, you're gonna you're gonna attach it to a banner and pull it behind your plane. Yeah, instead of that stupid smoke stunt. And actually, one of the people interviewed one of the very few people who know how to freehand skywrite, which is kind of redundant. It's skywriting is freehand. Um. She met her husband who was a banner tower and taught him how to skywrite.

She was a pepsi smoke writer. Um and uh. When she got ahold of her husband, he was just some backwards banner tower. She's like, I'm gonna teach you a skill. Friend. He's like, but all you do is hook it up here and fly right, And she said, oh my, just wait, oh you're talking about the Yeah, he thought banner towing was like the different cult. Yeah, because he was crop dusting before that. But Suzanne Asbury Oliver and her husband,

Steve Oliver. I believe um are two of there, possibly half of the total number of people who know how to sky right, is that crazy? And they're married. It's all in the family. Yeah, the secrets in the family. So these planes are going about a hundred and fifty miles an hour. It's pretty fast. And in order to if you've ever seen a skywritten message, it's it looks a little like a child has drawn it because they're riding it with a plane, And it's just very difficult

to do. Um. And in fact, the word pepsi itself apparently takes seventeen different maneuvers and I think like fourteen smoke releases just to make those five letters. Yeah, that's just pretty tricky, right. Um. Even before that, though, you have to have perfect conditions, Like you were saying, the whole thing starts at about ten thousand feet up because up there it's cold enough sometimes it's human enough, um that the smoke will stay together, so it'll last as

long as like twenty minutes under ideal conditions. Plus it can't be cloudy or else. Your stuff just kind of blends in with everything else, right exactly, So you you have to have ideal conditions first, and then after that you have to get in your little uh air acrobatic plane. So they used to use UM. I think the Pepsi plane was a Traveler, that's what it was called. That was the company that made it. UM and it's now in the National Air and Space Museum by Dullus, which

is well worth the visit. Yeah, there's a space shuttle there, there's a s R. Seventy one Blackbird. There's a lot of really great stuff there, and apparently there's the Pepsi plane too, but UM. Suzanne Asbury Oliver says that she uses a Chipmunk now, which is a small light, very highly maneuverable plane with a high horsepower. That's another key, sure, because with high horse power you can generate a lot

of heat. And you're gonna have to generate a lot of heat up there because you need to burn off your oil. Yeah, it's a paraffin oil UM liquid paraffin basically, and it needs to in order to reach that smoke point, needs to hit the engine at fift degrees and then it is just spit out through the exhaust. And I think the letters themselves always wonder from the ground like how big they are. Apparently the letters are about a mile high and once the smoke expands about seventy five

ft wide, which is bigger than I thought. Yeah, I had no idea they were mile high letters. And pepsi can be the word pepsi. It can be up to about five miles across. Yeah, and um, so when you're doing this you have no frame of reference. Um, like, you can't see what you're doing, is the author of this article points out. Julia Layton says, it's basically like drawing a picture in the dark. Yeah, Um, backwards and backwards.

It's a very good point, which I didn't understand why they had to do it that way, because the way you're flying, the ground is below you, but the people looking up at the message, this guy is above them. Oh yeah, sure, I guess that makes sense. So when you're writing pepsi like this, if you were beneath it would be backwards to you. So since you were doing it for the benefit of the people on the ground, you the skywriter, has to write the whole thing backwards.

They probably learned that the hard way a couple of times. Yeah, I would guess. So they're like, hello USA, backwards. What does that say? Yeah, apparently there was one guy I read in the Atlantic story in New York in the early days that did such a bad job. He landed and went back up and put a drew a line through his message and started over. Yeah. I like that though, Yeah, I mean it makes sense. I was wondering if there was a technique for like flying through your old letter

or whatever to break them up and start over. But the line will do it too, because I never thought about that. It's a good idea. But um, so to to make these letters, you're using, um, the ground. Any anything you can on the ground is like a frame of reference, like streets um in some cities, or form a grid like pattern. So in an article I read,

they basically said that's kind of like using lined paper. Um. You also can use the shadow on the ground that's reflected by the clouds to kind of show yourself like, Okay, that that letter looks good, I can move on to the next one. But you're also using timing too, so like, for example, to make the upright in a ffort a P or an L or something like that, you're gonna hold your smoke trigger for like a fifteen count or something like that, right, and you'll know what that's gonna

look like. I mean a lot of practice goes into this too, for sure, because that's just one streak when you have to go make the rest of the P or an R or something that's very difficult. And Suzanne Hasbury Oliver points out writing Chinese extraordinarily difficult, like in the sky. I wasn't sure what she meant by that. I think she met in this guy really yeah, man, I thought you were just equating it with writing Chinese on paper or something. I don't know. She's the best around,

all right. So once you have written this message, if it is on a good day and it's not super windy, you might get twenty minutes out of it. Um usually less than that. I've seen anywhere from like eight to ten before it starts to dissipate, and you can see it, you know, for a while too once it dissipates. But on a on a good day, what you're paying for is not a lot of time, exposure time. So that's why back in the day they used to do over things like Times Square or sporting events. Of course, is

where they do the banners now. The same idea back then. Um, And like we said, Chuck, they use a paraffin based oil and they have a reservoir tank that usually holds something like thirty gallons. This is a hundred and fourteen leaders for our friends outside of the US and Liberia. And um, that's enough typically to to write about twelve letters.

Not much no, so these messages are are typically fairly short, although there was one that's way more than twelve letters and I couldn't find out, but it seems to me from what I've seen, it's got to be the longest skywriting message ever, the one that John Lennon and Yoko oh No commissioned. Uh oh, is it over Toronto? Over Toronto? War is over? If you want it, Happy Xmas. They've

saved a few bucks there from John and Yoko. Um. The only thing I can figure is they might have had a couple of planes at work, maybe because that's way more than twelve letters. Yeah, I mean, if the thing sticks around for twenty minutes, they could be Yeah, I would guess they'd have to use more than one. And then uh over Austin in March of this year. That had to be for south By Southwest or the first several hundred digits of pie. So they must have had a couple of planes over that too. Pie in

the sky. Um, it's gonna cost you some money. Uh. In the article it says five thousand, but I saw the other website. Maybe they're undercutting. Um said that they started about fift bucks for the most basic message, which is just an I I guess so, and it goes up from there. Um, I know Kurt Brownell are raised. Um, Like I said about sixty eight hundred bucks. Uh, that's not bad for a lengthy message like that. Yeah, how

do I land? Yeah? And the Kickstarter apparently the founder of Kickstarter heard about it and was in town and like delayed his trip an extra day because Kurt had a big party on a rooftop and um, he stayed and went to the party just to I guess say, like this is what my company has become. Or I had something to do with this too, Yeah, probably so. Um. And if you're worried about what is being used for smoke, like we said, it's paraffine oil. Um, And it's actually

non toxic, biodegradable, the good stuff. And if you're like, hey, skywriting is polluting, but I'm cool with air shows. Well, I have an eye opener for you, pal. They used the same stuff at air shows. That's right. And if you are a pilot, like let's say you're a crop duster and you've got a little tavil and chipmunk and you want to get into this because it seems like a good time to be getting into skywriting. Um, it's also the worst time to be getting in the skywriting.

But um, it'll cost you anywhere from three to six grand to outfit your plane to be able to do this, which I mean you can make that back in a couple of messages, maybe one. Yeah, that's not bad. Yeah, if John Lennon hires you, yeah, I don't know if that's gonna happen anytime soon. No, but Yoko still could. She's still around and kicking. That's true. We saw her in New York in person. Yeah, no way, what just like walking No at a restaurant. Oh, that's a big one.

It was a huge one. Yeah, they're neat or if you're shy a La bouff. Oh yeah, yeah, you know that guy, that jerk. He's not famous anymore. It bags says though he uh he did that you know, he was in the ad that played Jars in Scandal earlier this year. I didn't know what that was about. He did some h I think, I'm not sure exactly what he did, but he supposedly played giarized Daniel Clothes, a graphic novel like pretty heavily and he was just killed

for it. For what did he have a graphic knowledge? Now? I think he did a maybe it was a play or something. I can't remember exactly, but he was called out and nobody likes that guy anyway, so people are ready to pounce on him anyway, So he did. He spent grand two higher skywriters, one that said I'm sorry, Daniel Clothes or clouds, I'm not sure I was pronounced, and then another one that said stop creating because if

you're a creator, they're gonna come after you. I guess grand Um and I believe though, were digital skywriting, which is whoa, whoa. We're gonna get into that right after this. So digital skywriting the Wave of the future, Yeah, the Wave of the Future that originally originated in the nineteen forties. Yeah, I was really surprised to see that. So remember how we said there was like skywriting which is freehand. There's also sky typing, which is basically like dot matrix printing,

but in the sky. And in the forties, the guy named Andy Stennis whose family is still involved in sky typing. They run a UM, one of the bigger sky typing companies. As you can imagine, UM he invented this process where you would use multiple planes and they basically just fly across the path to sky information. So kind of like you remember that chalk holder that you you would make like the the music stripe with ye, yeah, I think

they used it to UM. When your first learning cursive like lined paper, or if you got in trouble and you have to write something all over the chalkboard, you can just use that thing and knock out like five at once. I totally forgot about this. This is like that but with planes. And in the fourties, Andy Stintness was like, I'm just gonna put five planes in the

service together. We'll fly in formation uh in one direction, we'll all go back and fly above that in the opposite direction, and then above that back in the original direction, and then UM you print out basically a message that way. So you're building it from the bottom up or the top down, going from side to side, just like a dot mate like exactly like that. Yeah. The thing is, though, is it's not um. It's gonna look neater than your hand drawn when it's not gonna look like a five

year old druid. Well, especially since in the sixties they introduced computer programs that control it too well exactly, and it's um. It's little puffs of smoke like the dot matrix, So the computer can trolls it. The pilot just flies the plane. It's got the message all loaded into the little program and it knows when to to burp out those little puffs of smoke UM, five at a time, and then back and forth and back and forth until you've got you know whatever, you're silly messages shila boof.

So if you're if you're making a mile high UM message and the five planes are flying in like a half a mile wide formation, then they're gonna one passes. They're gonna make the bottom half of like pie yeah or stop creating or something. Then the next pass will be the top half of it from one side to the other, and then you've got a perfect, very very nice, like you said, very clean sky typed message. Yeah, and you can still see the dots. I mean it puffs out,

but it never quite connects like a skywritten message. And I guess that another think about grand that's five planes at five grand apiece, which is a minimum price, so I guess that makes sense. Yeah, that's that's one of the main reasons sky typing is so much more expensive. You can get way more letters out of it. Like when they did Pie in the Sky in Austin, they did um, I think a couple hundred of the of the places after the decimal Like that's a tremendous sky

type message to Don't wonder who paid for that. I'm sure it was like a Google or somebody. Huh. Probably they got deep pockets. But that's one of the reasons why it's so expensive, because you have to hire five or more planes, Like it's a minimum of five planes. Yeah, you might need more than that. Yeah, and um, I think who wrote this one? Julia Layton. Julia Layton says that the digital skywriting requires less piloting finesse. I guess that's a one way of saying it, because you're not

doing loop de loops. But if you're flying five at a time in formation. That's some piloting finesse. That is, it is piloting finesse. But they're not like they're not doing like you say, a loop de loop to make the part of a are Yeah, you know, like they're just basically flying in formation and then some computer is measuring exactly like their altitude and their distance in relation to the ground and spitting out a puff of smoke to form these letters. Like they're not doing any of

the writing. Yeah, but it's still it's better than I can do. I'll give you that. Um. Yeah. And there's predictions that, uh, skywriting is making a big comeback. Um, so much so. And I found this interesting. Microsoft, did you see this where they got a virtual skywriting patent.

There's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. They got a patent where you can send in a picture of a blue sky and tell them the mess, tell them the message you want, and they will insert a fake skywriting message into your photo and you can show people like, hey, I got a photo of a skywriting message. That's not real.

That's cheating. That's gonna ruin the industry maybe. But um, apparently the patent the picture that they used to get the patent ordered was of a real skywritten message that was actually copy written, so they I think it's still went through even though they had infringed on a copyright to get the patent, And I don't think they've done anything with it yet. There's not an app yet. But um no, I would know about it if there were look out for it in the future. My friend, you

might be able to fake you me out. Yeah, let's say, look at this photo. And she's like, that's weird. What Usually people just walk you outside and show you the thing. I would say, no time for that. Just look at the photo. We're a busy couple. Yeah, um, and they're Actually. It does sound like there is something of a future for skywriting thanks to social media, because there's the the novelty of a skywritten message like a real one, not

then Microsoft fake out like how do I land? And you've got things like Instagram and Twitter, so people are like, oh, check this out what somebody did over the sky of Austin, And all of a sudden, something that was visible to everybody at south By Southwest is visible to the entire world.

Well that's how Kurt brown Ewers blew up. It was on Reddit and like weeks after he had done it, he got a little bit of pressed, and then it popped up on Reddit weeks later and he got a whole new round of press and did interviews about it, and it became a nice little comics stunt for role Kurt. Now he has a car, that's right. Uh, you got

anything else? I have nothing else, sir. Okay, Well, if you want to know more about skywriting, this article commissioned by Chuck, you can type skywriting one word into the search bar at how stuff works dot com and it will bring it up. Since I said sewarch bar, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this another

vulture vomit revisiting. That's the gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, we did a podcast a while ago on vultures and how their defense is to vomit on you, and uh, it happened to this guy, which is kind of neat. Hey everyone, I'm a bit of an amateur speed lunker. A few summers ago I made precarious climb up a cliff to explore a cave overlooking a river. I had a friend with me, as you always should for such adventures.

But the narrow ledge only allowed for one of us at a time to get to the mouth of the cave, so I went first. I got into the cave, and the droppings in foul stench let me know that it was a vulture nest, but nobody seemed to be home, so I ventured a little deeper and found, in my surprise, a nest of hissing, angry little vulture lngs. I bet they are. Uh. They were as aggressive as they were fuzzy, and the biggest one tried to challenge me and chase

me away, which I thought was really cute. That's the big brother, until I heard a thump behind me in a much louder hiss. I turned around to see that Mama had returned, and her bulk blocked almost the entire entrance of the small cave. I decided to make a fake rush and yell to scare her away, and when I did, she reared her head back and projectile vomited, kidding me in the side of the face. Oh man, I have to tell you, guys, no other chemical current

in nature compares to vulture vomit. I was shocked for a moment, and when I caught the whiff of the disgusting mess running down my neck and into my shirt. I basically went mildly insane. I pushed past the vulture, leapt from the cave and slid down a tree growing next to the cliff, tore off my shirt and jumped into the river in a mad dash to get away from that smell. Despite a good washing in the river, I still stank and I had to ride home in

the bed of the truck. That, my friends, is why you should never scare a vulture, And that is from James Ashford in Springfield. Missoo nice. Thanks a lot, James. It's funny how vulture vomit will focus the mind. Yeah, I bet it's um. Have you ever been skunked or been super close to something that's been driven on the highway through its skunk? Not the sane. I've never been anywhere near now. Yeah. Our dog Lucy got skunked when

we lived in l A and I woke up. I might have told this before I woke up in the middle of the night. And this was during this post nine eleven. I thought that someone had set off a dirty bomb. It was unlike it doesn't smell like it does on the road. It smelled like the harshest, most bitter like acrid chemical. It was just in the air and I was tasting at my mouth, and I was like,

we've been attacked. We've been attacked. I I yeah, because there's something almost like vaguely pleasant about like skunk smell far away. Oh yeah, I love it. But actually see how it would just like make you lose your mind and it is not the same thing close up and burn your skin or anything. No, it didn't. It was really gross. So, I mean she smelled for We gave her the tomato juice bath, which is supposed to help.

Did it work. I mean it's sort of massed a little bit, but it basically just has to wear off over of course some days and days and days. Yeah, it was really rancid. Did you like shaver her fur anything? Like? No, I thought about it. It was so gross. It is very gross. Yeah, I didn't know there's skunks in l A. That might be the fact of this podcast. They're all over the place, skunks, coyotes, mountain lions, and smelly dogs

a wild place tomato sauce dogs. Uh. If you want to tell us a story that has to do with one of our old episodes. We love hearing about that, especially if it brings up a counter story by Chuck. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff Works dot com. We have

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