Skycraft

 

Skycraft

 

Look…up in the sky…It’s a bird…It’s a plane…It’s a…

Yes, it’s a plane….a Skywriter.

 

Skywriting can be traced back to the beginning of World War I, when Royal Flying Corps Major John “Jack” Savage perfected a way to spew oily smoke out of his airplane’s exhaust  to help hide war ships at sea. Later, Savage’s war buddy and airman Cyril Turner modified a S.E.5a biplane  to make use of Savage’s concept to generate arial smoke signals – essentially brief messages on cloudless days. He called it skywriting - 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 March 1922 when Savage used it to write "Daily Mail" over Epsom Downs in England.

 

A few months later, to attract attention, Turner flew over Manhattan and wrote HELLO USA into the sky. The next day, he puffed CALL VANDERBILT 7200 out of the rear of his biplane—the phone number of his hotel. A bunch of folks phoned. The stunt worked and one major company already familiar with smoke signed on as a corporate sponsor: American Tobacco, maker of America’s then favorite brand of cigarettes, Lucky Strike. The company’s sales of Luckys went sky high  after Turner’s skywriting demo in Philadelphia. Turner wrote Lucky’s dumb catchphrase IT’S TOASTED into the cerulean skies over Philly. The  brand’s sky born meaningless slogan boosted sales 60%. Go figure.

 

Skywriting eventually became a  widespread and  important commercial advertising medium, although it was also used to broadcast personal messages, political rants, birthday wishes and marriage proposals,  and even simply to post goofy phrases and greetings—like today’s “tweets.” In the mid-1920s, city folks , sometimes by the tens of thousands were stretching their necks to catch a glimpse of the skywriting plane in the sky.

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.

Skywriter Louis Meyer, 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 . He promptly flew a “do over.”

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 are limited in length by oil tank size, usually running from 15 to 80 gallons. One of a skywriter’s most embarrassing situations is to run out of oil before a message is 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 around the mid-1950s when a more effective form 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. (See my Future post: Smoke If You Got Them.)

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 t 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.” That canvas is so enormous that there will always be a painter-pilot or two waiting to apply arial brushstrokes.  The  classic appeal of skywriting is the  lazy  unpredictability of a barely visible airplane, its message slowly billowing  each letter and scrolling in the sky. It’s  like Wheel of Fortune. You want to buy a vowel and guess the entire ephemeral message, the plane seemingly  a “mouse” in God’s hand.

 

This might bring back memories if you were a kid in the 50's.