A New Twist On Skywriting

Nugget writes "The advent of Internet-based flight tracking technology enables an entirely new kind of skywriting. Gulfstream Aerospace sent up one of their $50M business jets today on an 8.5-hour test flight spanning 11 states for the sole purpose of leaving their mark on the Net in the form of a flight track that spells out 'GV' (the nickname of the Gulfstream V aircraft being flown) when viewed online."

Someone

Someone give these guys something to do, STAT! :D

Re:Someone

How about "Aliens Attack Here -->" across a hemisphere you don't like?

What a disgusting waste of fuel

At a time when global warming is ruining our climate, this is obscene.

Re:What a disgusting waste of fuel

You seem to forget that the private jets of $500,000+ salaried business executives use special Toorichtogiveashit patented non-global warming fuel unlike the economy class "Two or three times a year" passenger planes we prolls fly on.

Re:What a disgusting waste of fuel

What's worse than that is I actually did a google search on this magic fuel you mentioned and then it dawned on me.

Re:What a disgusting waste of fuel

It's not as bad as you make it out to be - if you imagine the average SUV-driving commuter has a 20-mile one-way commute, 20 days per month, that's 800 miles. On a "pounds CO2 per passenger per mile"** basis, commercial jet travel is quite efficient. In other words, that same SUV would produce twice as much CO2 if it were driven from NYC to Denver.

In today's age, a better question is whether it's really necessary to go to Denver. There's still a lot of unneeded business travel going on, when voice- or video-conference would work just as well.

(** quite possibly the worst, non-SI unit of measure I've ever used)

Re:What a disgusting waste of fuel

Can we assume that you never do anything like drive your car to the movies. If you do, you are spewing C02 when you could just wait for a Netflix DVD to come to your door. Everyone who NEVER uses any kind of fossil-fuel provided energy to do ANYTHING not absolutely life-or-death, please go track down the Gulfstream owner and do your CO2 rant. The rest of you shut the fuck up.

They were probably going to fly anyway.

Maybe you missed the part of the article where they said this was a test flight. As in, they were testing the plane. The choice of route was a stunt, granted, but if they hadn't flown a great big "GV," they probably would still have done the test flight, and just flown around in a circle, or some other arbitrarily-defined pattern. It's just that flying in this particular pattern got them some extra press, so why not?

Calm down a little before you flip out, next time.

So...

... are we looking at a new type of spam?

Can't wait to read "Enlarge your peanus" right above some skyscraper...

I didn't notice

Until I read it online.

what to sell...

ok lets see, with the target demographic of someone likely to be going through flight paths... you are likely to advertise internet dating sites or burkahs.

-Sj53

Hmmmmmm

You've got to wonder why in the hell the FAA approved that flight plan...

Re:Hmmmmmm

I don't remember ever seeing any FAA regulation that you can only fly direct lines between airports.

Re:Hmmmmmm

Indeed the only regulations that interfer with your flight are the no-fly zones, the rest is up to you.

Re:Hmmmmmm

Except for all of the regulations on exactly which flight levels you're allowed to fly at, depending on your direction of flight.
Oh, and the equipment that you've got on your aircraft.
And the time of day (in some circumstances)
And the day of the week(in other circumstances)
And the fact that Air traffic control needs to know where you're planning on flying.
Europe is even more difficult to fly in based on all of the restrictions that they put against the flight paths attempting to adjust the air traffic flow.

Oh, or were you basing the comment on the tiny non-jets(piston/turboprop) that can't fly very high.
(speaking as someone who's attempting to manage this data for commercial flight planning purposes)

Re:Hmmmmmm

You might wanna check the altitude again.

While your point in general is correct about VFR flight, this guy was cruising at FL400 - Class A airspace [fiu.edu].

He would definitely had to have an IFR plan on file, otherwise he'd get a message from the tower to call a phone number when he landed... and that would be the end of his days as a pilot. That's assuming he didn't have a fighter come along to say hello beforehand.

I would have liked to hear DEN Center asking wtf they were up to when it came time for that little loopy bit and back-track for the bottom of the "G"

Re:Hmmmmmm

As long as your not in restricted airspce you can fly in what ever circle you want. the sky is like the water, while there are "lanes" they are loosely defiend and fill a fraction of the total area in which one can fly.

and I thought...

...the super bowl was an incredibly stupid waste of advertising money for a dot.com

I guess they found a way to trump stupid

Re:and I thought...

Its a test flight, its not as if the entire purpose of the flight was to do some skywriting, if they hadnt done this then they would have gone round and round in a figure of eight for exactly the same period of time. There were other reasons for this flight, which would have been the basis for the expenditure, this is jsut a little fun.

They missed a V

GVV for global vvarming.

The first thing I thought of

was a plane doing a night flight with a huge array of big leds as in air writing [discovery.com]
Now THAT would be cool

My only thoughts are

It looks a bit wobbly and crap, also couldn't they have spelt out more than 2 letters? I mean they had the entier US air space!

Howlong befor a wealthy geek writes All You Base Are Belong to Us?

Re:My only thoughts are

Or with vista, just stand by the cockpit and shout stop stop stop or eject eject eject ;)

Etch-a-sketch

Doesn't it remind you of the drawings that you used to do with an etch-a-sketch ?

one way to make money out of testing...

Well if you've got to send up a plane empty to do some flight testing, I guess it's a pretty good result if you can sucker the world's media into giving you global coverage about your company on the side!

Horizon to horizon

memories written on the wind...

It would have looked better

if they would have used Cursive Writing. I'm assuming that they remember cursive writing.

Cool but expensive

It's been very cool. But quite expensive.
Leaving a comment on /. with those two letters would have been cheaper by far.
And with more visibility becasuse /. is more visited than Flightware.Com.

Me

Hey folks,

I was the pilot for this flight, and it was a shakedown flight.

But.

The GV displayed in the flight path is purely coincidental.

Truth is, I was lost.

Failed marketing

GV? Looks like the ice cream fell off the cone to me.

Surely

We have some tech which could enable a plane with a computer controlled thingy and coloured smoke make pretty pictures in the sky?

Ugly font

With a size of 3 billion points, breaking an earlier record [gpsdrawing.com], couldn't they have afforded a slightly more sophisticated typeface, such as Courier?

My browser (Firefox) doesn't go beyond 72 points. Is there a skywriting plugin available somewhere?

I don't get it...

...what on earth is the point of skywriting in a scale so large the only way to see it is on a crummy flightplan?

Ob Futurama

Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no sir."

11 states?

I count 12 on the map...

1. Wisconsin
2. Iowa
3. Minnesota
4. South Dakota
5. Wyoming
6. Montana
7. Idaho
8. Utah
9. Colorado
10. New Mexico
11. Nebraska
12. Kansas

Reminds me of this guy

Suspect planned smiley face bomb pattern ... Accused mailbox bomber Lucas Helder told authorities he was planting pipe bombs in a pattern to show a happy face during his five-state weekend spree - cnn [cnn.com]

If you ever feel the urge to imitate any of these people, try signing your name by pissing in the snow instead.
That is more impressive and demonstrates more skill.

Now that is just silly

The only people that would be attracted to this are the people who are already planning on buying a GV. It's not that people on the ground would be able to say "Oh, that is really cool, let's go buy one."

Airvertising?

Just wait until we have flying cars and every Joe spam-pack can airvertise tothe masses. We'll need symantec anti-airvertising goggles to filter it out!

How about google earth adverts!

Now that would be a cool way to get come attention. Much like when Google did some fly overs in Australia there were people out in athletic fields trying to get noticed with big temporary signage.

Very Ms GVUS

Nothing else to say on this very funny expensive pollution BizPrank.

Lookup in the Sky

That flight was a stupid waste of fuel and time. The point of skywriting is to push a message to vast numbers of people in the sky we all have in common, "just look up". That version requries people to search to pull a flightpath in an obscure webpage that they "look up" with a great deal of effort for a tiny reward.

But who cares about the stupid skywriting stunt? That flightpath page is supercool. How do I find the specific flight number of a commercial flight I took, to look at my actual flightpath, without poring through all the flight activity from its originating airport?

STUPID HUMAN TRICKS

Now that is just plain DUMB!

Hey, aviation has geeks too!

Aviation geeks have web sites they like to or have to look at every day. This advertisement is meant to target those people, and then creep out and get a few eyes outside of the aviation community. Someone looking at flight plans for aircraft in the Midwest would probably get a kick out of it.

It's kind of the same situation if you had someone outside of the tech community look at a review for a bright and shiny $5,000 PC. We all know it's excessive, expensive, and something a non-tech will hardly understand. However, it gets us thinking about the components, and the capabilities of some of the hardware in that PC. We then want to either pony up and buy it if we're well funded. Or we buy the components and try to build something similar. If we can't do that, we can buy a budget model from the same manufacturer.

Gulfstream was saying, "Hey look at our technology, the avionics, and the pilots that fly our aircraft." We can fly out of an airport and using our Garmin G1000 suite to carve a precise course and get to our destination relatively quickly. Compare that to, "Dual core processors make your database server retrieve data more quickly".

The $5,000 PC and the $50,000,000 both use up an obscene amount of resources... no doubt about that. But people flying these aircraft need practice too... They're not just the people flying billionaires around. Some of them fly commercial aircraft too. They have to get up there and learn how to use the systems and conduct long cross country flights before they're trusted with many human lives. If they throw in an advertising ploy in between... Hey... they're killing two birds with one stone. You wouldn't like it if someone came in and unplugged your PC while you were playing a game or reading Slashdot because you were, "Using up energy that was contributing to global warming", would you?

Is this one for Carly?

Perhaps this is one of the jets HP ordered for Ms. Fiorina, before she got the boot.

I didn't realize Gulfstream took so long to build their products. Maybe they can sell it to the King of Spain instead.

They should have let this guy do it

Etch a Sketch king: http://www.gvetchedintime.com/set.html [gvetchedintime.com]

Somebody there...

... is playing WAY too much Fligh Simulator... Well, anyway, it's better than if they're playing some FPS...

--- Sorry my bad English... I'll have him tarred and feathered. ---

NOT skywriting

The title of this post is misleading. Who said Gulfstream did ANY skywriting during this test flight? They had no smoke machine, they drew no message in the sky. Usually, aircraft are stripped down during test flights to make room for instrumentation, data acquisition equipment, and flight test engineers. A smoke machine would have been pointless. The path you see is their ACTUAL flightpath, not some smoke trail. If you were on the ground, you never would have seen anything other than another business jet flying over you.