Writing High : Sky Messaging Reaches New Levels, Though It Remains on the Same Planes

When Newport Beach pilot Doug Stavoe decided to take up skywriting a couple of years back, he thought he’d start with something simple: a “Hi” for anyone who might be looking up from the beach on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

But when Stavoe circled under the message to check out his handiwork, he realized that confused ground-level viewers saw something that looked more like “H!”

Stavoe had learned his first lesson in the arcane art of skywriting, a quick primer in spatial relationships.

To be legible from the ground, messages have to be backward and upside-down from the pilot’s perspective. But that’s not the kind of information available in books or from a school. For anyone starting today, learning to skywrite is a matter of trial and error--lots of error.

To call skywriting a dying art is to imply that once it thrived.

But in truth, there never was more than a handful of fliers who made a living out of scribbling airborne messages in plumes of trailing smoke. These early skywriters crisscrossed the country constantly, performing at air shows or scrawling advertising slogans above state fairs and other outdoor events on barnstorming promotional tours.

Today, Greg Stinis, who makes Los Alamitos his business base (though he flies out of Long Beach), is the undisputed skywriting king of the United States and probably the world. He has plied his trade all over the country and as far away as Japan. When he and his fliers soared above the opening day crowd at the 1984 Olympics and created a vaporous version of the familiar interlocking rings, it was seen by an estimated 2.5 billion people on TV.

Stinis is carrying on the legacy of his father. Andy Stinis, who was still actively flying until about two years ago, was bitten by the flying bug when he watched Lindbergh take off from Roosevelt Field in New York on the historic 1927 flight across the Atlantic. He began skywriting in the ‘30s, and for 10 years he had one of the most visible skywriting accounts, Pepsi-Cola.

In 1949, he developed a new, more efficient skywriting technique that he dubbed “skytyping.” Instead of a single plane laboriously sketching letters one at a time, the elder Stinis started using several planes, flying a straight line in formation and putting out pre-programmed puffs of smoke that spell out messages that resemble a dot-matrix computer printout.

The advantages were clear. A single plane takes about two minutes to do one letter, and because the letters stay legible for an average of three to seven minutes (depending on wind conditions), the length of the message is automatically limited. With skytyping, a letter takes about four seconds to create and an entire message of 20 characters can be finished in two minutes.

While Greg Stinis still does a bit of the “old-fashioned” single-plane skywriting, by far the bulk of his business is in skytyping. Sometimes he mixes the two techniques, as he did for the Olympics opening. Stinis and his four fellow pilots typed out a welcoming message, then broke from formation to create the rings. A difficult job was made even harder when the pilots had to watch out for thousands of balloons released from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum below.

In the beginning, skytyping was done with nine planes, which was later cut to seven and then to the present-day five. As always, the pilots simply fly in formation and the smoke comes out automatically in predetermined patterns, but planning the messages is much easier now. In the old days, programming required a complex wiring job that took about a week, and last-minute changes were out of the question. Now, with a system designed by the younger Stinis, messages can be programmed on the fly with the aid of an on-board computer.

But the planes are still the same ones used by Greg’s dad--the AT-6, a military training plane designed in the ‘40s specially modified to put out smoke. Stinis’ vintage planes have been used often by Hollywood, as for the TV miniseries “The Winds of War” and the Goldie Hawn film “Swing Shift.”

The mechanics of putting out smoke are fairly straightforward. A fine spray of mineral-based oil is sprayed onto the plane’s muffler, which is hot enough to vaporize the oil instantly and produce a plume of rich smoke. Stinis says the smoke is biodegradable and non-polluting, but he declines to give the exact formula (it’s a trade secret, he says). Stavoe uses a Chevron product called Corvis 13, which the Blue Angels also use to create smoke.

There is no such thing as a “skywriting plane.” Stinis’ planes are modified with a long exhaust tube along one side to channel the smoke. Stavoe’s modification of his single-engine plane, used primarily to tow advertising banners (his main business), is of a simpler type. The smoke pours directly out of the bottom of his engine compartment, and when Stavoe skywrites he has to keep his windows open because smoke builds up in the cabin.

In single-plane skywriting, the message is meticulously planned beforehand to determine the most efficient approach and to avoid mistakes. When the lines of a letter or symbol intersect, the pilot must cross his old trail at a higher elevation to avoid dispersing it with his prop.

In both skywriting and skytyping, the messages are spelled out on a horizontal plane. From the pilot’s perspective, the message is a mirror image. Also, the top of the letters must be nearest the planned viewpoint, so they look right-side-up from the ground. The theory is easy enough to test. Scrawl a few letters on a piece of glass with a felt pen. Hold it above your head--that’s the ground-eye view. Then, keeping it level, drop it below your eyes--that’s the perspective of the pilot.

Stinis flies high, about 15,000 feet, to clear the airspace reserved for passenger jets. In skytyping, his five planes fly 300 feet from wingtip to wingtip, making each letter about 1,200 feet high--taller than the Empire State Building, as Stinis is fond of pointing out. A 20-character message is about 5 miles long and visible about 30 miles away, so a message typed out over Huntington Beach can be seen clearly from Fullerton.

On a single skytyping flight, Stinis and his pilots type out a minimum of 10 messages, on a flight plan that can take in all of Los Angeles and Orange counties. Now, he’s planning a way to bring skytyping into the ‘90s by using jet planes.

The messages would be larger, visible up to 100 miles away. Much more ground could be covered more quickly (if the planes were based in Texas, they could be anywhere in the country in three hours).

Southern California’s climate and especially its beaches make it a magnet for airborne advertising. Stavoe is the owner of Newport Beach-based Pacific Drifters, one of several Southland companies that tow advertising banners along the beaches, exposing a message to millions of potential customers out of the reach of more conventional forms of advertising.

Stavoe, who flies out of both Long Beach and John Wayne airports, said he saw a plane modified for skywriting at an air show and decided that he wanted to try it himself. “I just started thinking about it, and by the end of the night I had to do it,” he says.

The modifications were extensive, necessitating a blizzard of FAA paperwork. A tank was installed behind the plane’s rear seat; an electric pump activated by the pilot that carries the oil forward to the engine.

Stavoe charges about $1,000 for a five-character skywritten message. Skytyping runs $800 for a single message of up to 20 characters, but Stinis must sell at least 10 messages to go up on a flight (many advertisers have their message printed multiple times).

Skywriting remains less than 10% of Stavoe’s business. He does it mainly to satisfy a personal interest in the craft, which he says has a nostalgic pull, and as a way of drawing attention to his bread and butter, the banner-tow business. And, he says, skywriting is just plain fun.

“S” is his favorite letter, he says. “You know how you do S-turns in a car? This is much better than that, and when you’re done you can see it laid out behind you.”

Without a teacher, Stavoe has been learning the finer points of skywriting through trial and error. Stinis had his own instructor and inspiration in the family.

“He of course inspired me to fly,” Stinis says of his father. The business was based in New York when Greg began flying at age 5, “as soon as I was old enough to hold the stick.” Stinis, now 50, began learning his skywriting ABCs when he was old enough to fly alone legally, at age 16. At 18, he began to fly commercially in the family business.

In 1965, Stinis Air Service (as the business was called then) moved West to Los Alamitos for what was supposed to be a three-month promotion. “At the end, we asked, ‘Why are we going back?’ ” Stinis says.

While the company, now called Skytypers Inc., has called Orange County its home base ever since, Stinis did move the planes to the Far East a few years ago, shipping them to Taiwan, where they were reassembled. The planes, with the help of Stinis’ computer, were programmed to puff out Japanese characters.

It was a hit in Japan. A planned six-week promotion stretched to three months, and then “they wanted us to stay on indefinitely,” Stinis says. Finally, he trained some Japanese pilots on the system and decided to come back to the United States after a stay that had stretched to almost two years.

He’s only now coming back up to full speed after his prolonged absence from the area. “It’s like starting a business all over again,” he says, but Stinis has been seen all over Southern California lately: doing advertising runs for Daihatsu and other customers, typing out “Welcome Home” messages at celebrations marking the return of troops from the Persian Gulf.

Stinis is first and foremost a businessman, and skytyping remains far and away the biggest part of his business. But single-plane skywriting is more challenging, he admits. “It’s a tremendous challenge to do anything that looks decent,” Stinis says. “Even after doing this for 34 years, I’m still learning new tricks.”

The pilot insists skywriting and skytyping are viable advertising media and not just anachronistic throwbacks. Stinis says skytyping is a cheap way to reach people when they’re at their most receptive--when they’re outside, having a good time.

“It’s pretty impressive wherever we go. We dominate the sky,” Stinis says. And human curiosity almost guarantees that people will get the message.

“They don’t know what it’s going to say. Their curiosity compels them to stay with it. They participate,” Stinis says. “It’s not another offensive ad bombarding you.”