Closure Puts Banner-Towing Sky Ad Firm Into a Tailspin

The closure of Meadowlark Airport, on the eve of one of summer’s biggest beach weekends, could spell the end of the Sky Ad Co., the only Orange County-based firm that flies promotional banners over crowded beaches.

Sky Ad has been pulling banners advertising everything from weight-loss clinics to frozen yogurt above the beaches for the past 20 summers, and had hoped to do the same this weekend. But the closing of Meadowlark and legal problems with the Federal Aviation Administration have jeopardized the company’s future.

“Essentially, the word gets out that you can’t tow the banners across all the coastline and your business is wiped out,” company attorney Scott Raphael said.

Company officials say they plan, under an agreement with owners of the Huntington Beach airport and the FAA, to swoop over the airfield this weekend and, without touching down, pick up their banners while taking off and landing at Long Beach Airport.

However, the city of Huntington Beach says that the airport’s owners would be breaching an agreement that they have with the city and the developers of a retail complex planned for a portion of the site. In addition, the airport owners, Dick and Art Nerio, plan to build a condominium complex on the site, although plans for the development haven’t been completed.

The contract calls for no more flights as of today. Art Folger, deputy city attorney, said that even picking up the banners without landing and taking off would be a normal airport activity.

“If they do that, then I think they will be in breach of the agreement,” Folger said. “That’s an airport function.”

On Monday, the Sky Ad Co., along with an association of private pilots and homeowners, attempted to obtain a temporary restraining order to keep the airport open until construction on the projects begin, but a judge denied the motion. Sky Ad has about $20,000 worth of business at stake this weekend, according to Raphael, the attorney for company owner Bob Cannon.

“That was a last-ditch effort to salvage what he can,” Raphael said.

This weekend, Sky Ad plans not only to fly banners but also to display a Day-Glo color promotion by KNX Radio requiring them to fly four planes in formation. They are also scheduled to fly the Coors Light Silver Bullet beer can, perhaps their most recognizeable promotion.

The planes can’t take off with the banners because of their weight. So to pick up them up, the single-engine planes must swoop down at near-stall speed, allowing hooks attached to the planes to catch cables tied to the banners.

Cannon, the owner of the company since 1977, said that the plan was to pick up the banners at Meadowlark only this weekend.

It would be difficult to perform the pickup operation this week at Long Beach Airport because of heavy air traffic there, Tanya Reis, a company official, said.

“You have one little thing that goes wrong and that throws them off,” she said. “It’s ideally situated here at (Meadowlark). It was just a perfect setup for our business”

Sky Ad, with five single-engine planes, is among the largest of about 10 banner-towing companies in Southern California, Cannon said. The firms are most active during summer weekends, when they advertise, among other things, concerts, new movies, restaurants, running shoes and suntan lotion. Personalized banners, such as marriage proposals, also are common.

But several coastal cities have complained about the planes on grounds of noise, view obstruction and safety. Newport Beach earlier this summer considered taking action but found that regulating such flights was within the FAA’s jurisdiction, City Manager Robert L. Wynn said.

The closing of Meadowlark appears to be just one more setback faced by Sky Ad in the past two years. In 1987, the FAA banned such companies from flying at low levels along the shore near Los Angeles International Airport. The planes, Cannon said, had flown at about 150 to 200 feet.

The ban forced the planes to instead fly at 4,500 feet, out of the view of beachgoers, Cannon said, adding that the light planes, carrying the heavy banners, were unable to gain that much altitude. The result was a loss of business, because 75% of the company’s clients wished to have their products advertised up and down the coast from Malibu to Dana Point.

Sky Ad’s business, according to Cannon, hasn’t fully returned to what it was before 1987.

On Aug. 1, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco invalidated the ban, but Sky Ad still was required to obtain permission to fly near the Los Angeles airport. Cannon said that since the court struck down the ban, the company has been denied permission to fly through that airspace 11 out of 12 times. Before 1987, permission was rarely denied, he said.