Flight Training - June 2019 - 47

ADVANCED PILOT CAREER SPOTLIGHT

TOW TRUCK

BY JOHN CARROLL

Banner pilot Chip Gnau (see "High Times,"
p. 48) tows a banner for AOPA's eightieth
anniversary.

SO YOU THINK YOU WANT TO FLY BANNERS?

CHRIS ROSE

IF YOU GO TO THE AIRPORT and see an airplane doing a mod-

erately steep pull-up after hooking what looks like somebody's
outdoor clothesline, you've just witnessed your first banner
pickup. What you see next depends on whether Sam is proposing
to Suzy, or one of the local restaurants is offering a lobster and
steak special for under twenty bucks.
Do you recoil at the sight of that kind of maneuvering? Then
a banner towing career may not be for you. If, on the other hand,
this all looks like great sport, you may have the spirit of a banner
tow pilot. Your mission is advertising, but the work is pure stickand-rudder flying. You'll go bravely about the business of making
sure the local dealership sells its yearly quota of new vehicles.
That means long days of flying over beaches, stadiums, and other
places where the people are and advertising dollars are best
spent. All this happens at the kind of slow speeds that won't rip
apart cloth letters or tear a full-size banner.
The letters in a single-line banner are held in place between
thin metal rods having parallel straps that are attached by clips to
keep the script from collapsing in the wind. Pilots may be called
upon occasionally to help make or repair a banner, but a large and
busy outfit will hire a ground crew to take care of that-and the
task of laying out banners for pickup. Knowing that they were
going to execute a quick and dramatic pull-up near the ground,
sane pilots would want to carry extra speed to help prevent the
possibility of a stall when all that extra weight and drag tries to
yank their airplane back to the ground. But high speeds risk the
added stress of suddenly ripping all that equipment off the ground.
Tow pilots pit their skill against the forces of darkness. Their
lives depend primarily upon having a good "feel" for an aircraft
and squeezing every last inch of lift out of a wing. A good banner
tow pilot is more in tune with his airplane than the first violinist

for the Boston Pops Orchestra is with a Stradivarius. Flying has to
be second nature because a lot of things happen simultaneously.
The saying that flying is 90 percent boredom and 10 percent
sheer terror comes up a lot.
In addition to flying the traffic pattern, a banner pilot has to
manage one and possibly more grappling hooks, or lower a reusable capturing boom that extends far below the aircraft landing
gear. Both pick-up systems can present a hazard to people on the
ground, and even the aircraft itself. Ropes from banners or the
grapples have become entangled in control surfaces and gotten
hung up or buried in various parts of the fuselage. Pilots have to
judge the position of things that they often can't see and arrange
themselves safely in the flow of normal airport traffic while executing difficult maneuvers low to the ground.
Sometimes all this occurs in gusty and windy conditions
that would challenge any aviator-but banner tow pilots
need to perform all the normal things and then some, such as
navigating at just the correct height while flying through two
closely spaced poles that string a rope needing to be captured.
Fly too low, and the banner rope gets caught in the landing
gear. Fly too high, and valuable minutes are wasted while you
sequence yourself back into the flow. A banner drop has its
own challenges-banners have been known to drape themselves over trees, hangars, and waiting aircraft.
All this might make banner towing sound like a risky business,
but there is a huge difference between risky and dangerous. Banner towing isn't dangerous if you correctly manage the risks and
are aware of your environment. All it takes is common sense and
some uncommon ability. The work is hard and the hours are long,
but the rewards are many. After a season of that much hand-flying, great flying becomes commonplace and your logbook is left
WWW.AOPA.ORG/FT 47

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Flight Training - June 2019

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