Smoke is generated by paraffin oil injected into the aircraft exhaust. [Courtesy: SkyTypers Inc.]
Key Takeaways:
SkyTypers Inc. is a bicoastal, family-owned company founded in the 1930s, offering two distinct services: "Skywriting" (single aircraft, handwritten style) and "SkyTyping" (six aircraft in formation, dot-matrix style, invented by the current CEO's father).
Messages are created using paraffin oil, are massive in scale (e.g., 5 miles long for 20 characters), can be seen 15-20 miles away, and remain visible for five to seven minutes.
Costs vary by location, with SkyTyping starting around $17,500-$20,000 for 10 messages and single-aircraft Skywriting at $3,500 per message; pilots require commercial certificates, extensive flight hours, and specialized formation flying expertise.
“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a message!”—and you can probably thank SkyTypers Inc., a bicoastal skywriting company for putting it there.
SkyTypers Inc. is a family owned company dating back to the 1930s. It began in New York, said Stephen Stinis, an accomplished pilot who has been the president and CEO of SkyTypers Inc. since 2004.
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Meg Godlewski has been an aviation journalist for more than 24 years and a CFI for more than 20 years. If she is not flying or teaching aviation, she is writing about it. Meg is a founding member of the Pilot Proficiency Center at EAA AirVenture and excels at the application of simulation technology to flatten the learning curve. Follow Meg on Twitter @2Lewski.
