UM Ath. Dept Paid for Skywriting on Saturday

How anyone could defend this is beyond me. This is beyond childish.

Leaders and Best. It's time we acted like it.

Anything that trolls Spartans and MGoIdiots simultaneously is fine with me.

Kudos to MSU for turning it around and making something positive for them.  I thought it was really dumb at first too, but that was operating on the assumption someone paid to have the skywriting within sight of Spartan Stadium. Now we know two things: it was paid for by the AD and the sky writer was just given general directions, not specifically told to do something near E. Lansing. Not a big deal really.

If they could do a Troll Face or even U MAD BRO?, now that would have been worth it.

Drew Lane just interviewed the owner of the skywriting company live on the radio. Apparently the Michigan Athletic Department gave them a list of phrases and a list of cities with no specific instructions as to which phrases would be written where. The cities included Ann Arbor, Detroit, Lansing, Kalamazoo, among others. He said they wrote 40 phrases over 3 days, which is what they do as an advertising company. No specific instructions were given to write anything over spartan stadium, and the writing wasn't even directly over spartan stadium, even though it was visible from the stadium. He said the phrase "Go Blue" is 7 miles across from the "G" to the "E", and it can be seen for 20 miles. He said the word "stadium" never came up in their conversations with the atheltic department aside from specific instructions to write someting that would be visible from Michigan Stadium. So there you have it, folks. Mystery solved. This was nothing more than an ad campaign by the athletic departmet, but MSU's little brother mentality got the best of him and he felt like he was being singled out and picked on. But I suppose the positive here is that they totally overreacted and ended up donating a bunch of money to cancer research they would not have otherwise donated, which was somehow supposed to "show Michigan".

While I nolonger get behind the yokes, I am a private pilot with an instrument and multi-engine rating, with 600 hours. Most of which was acquired flying from the northeast to the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Generally west bound flights were between 7000 and 9000 feet, and east bound was at 15000 feet. My point is that I have a modest amount of experience about what a pilot at those altitudes can see on the ground. Further one of my CFIIs held ratings up through an ATP. Though he never flew an air transport, he did tow banners, haul caskets, dust crops, teach flying at all levels, and did a stint in skywriting. In other words he touched many aspects of commercial flying. I never was a skywriter, but I was the beneficiary of his knowledge in that and other areas of flying. 

When one writes in the sky, you are fully aware of the winds. You want to choose a location so that what you write will drift across areas where there are a large number of people on the ground. Ever notice that often when you see skywriting you are on a major interstate many times approaching an intersection with another large interstate? Skywriting is very common over summer beaches when the weather is clear and hot, not so often over winter beaches. A skywriter's goal is maximum exposure. Period.

A football stadium is an awesomely easy landmark to find from the air. Further at 10,000 feet you can see it and the full parking lots miles and miles away. If I am writing in the sky and there is a football stadium with full parking lots that means that there are 10s of thousands of people who are not going anywhere for quite a while. I'm going to write my nessage so that ideally they watch me write it and watch it drift over them for many minutes. 

Now I doubt that anyone in the Michigan Ath. Dept. knows anything about the decision process of where a pilot will write a message in the sky. They probably did just give them a list of cities and leave it up to the professionals. I also have no doubt that the pilot in the plane looked down and saw a stadium with  tens of thousands of eyes who would see his message and made sure they did. 

The folks who booked the work had no insight, and the guy flying the plane was maximizing his results.