AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013 - 70

Typing in the sky

WORLD’S LARGEST DOT-MATRIX PRINTER

Airborne messaging was the origin of today’s
Geico Skytypers. Team owner Larry Arken’s
father was a military pilot and marketing person
who recognized the commercial potential of
skytyping, which had been invented in 1946 by
Andy Stinis—one of the original Pepsi Skywriters.
Stinis used seven North American SNJ advanced
training aircraft, flying in a line-abreast formation,
to “type” dots and dashes creating letters in the
sky—imagine a very large, airborne dot-matrix
printer. In 1964 Stinis received a U.S. patent for
computer-controlled skytyping between aircraft.
Greg Stinis, son of skytyping’s inventor, moved
a fleet of SNJ–2s to California in the mid-1960s
and launched a West Coast division, hiring Mort
Arken to run the East Coast operation. “My father
saw that there was a tremendous opportunity to
market this for other corporations to use,” Arken

are 250 feet apart, so each character is 1,000
feet high. A message is about five miles long,
and if winds are calm, it remains readable
for three to seven minutes. Most skytyping
flights are about three hours from engine
start to shutdown.
“Typically skytyping is a much more
relaxed operation than an airshow,” Arken
said; the weather is good, and the air is cool
at 9,500 feet. “It is harder for us to fly that
formation, which is why after three hours I
see the guys getting a little bit fatigued.”

The airplanes type a variety of messages—advertisements, corporate messages,
birthday greetings. “We did a lot of wedding
proposals last year,” Arken remarked. In the
Long Island, New York, area, where the East
Coast team is based, prices start at about
$1,800 per message, although the team can
travel anywhere. “We were over Chicago last
year, at the Ryder Cup. We do a lot in Florida
when we’re down there,” he said. The West
Coast skytyping squadron is based in Chino,
California, and Las Vegas.
—MPC

Up to 25 characters long

10,000 feet (almost 2 miles)

Five miles long

70 | AOPA PILOT February 2013

Eiffel Tower: 1,000 feet tall

Blimp: 190 feet

Towed banner: 150 feet

ILLUSTRATION BY BRYON THOMPSON

explained, and subsequently bought the East
Coast business. (Greg Stinis’ son Stephen manages the West Coast operation today, which now
flies Grumman AA-5B Tigers.)
When Arken’s father got involved, messages
were encoded on paper tape—similar to ticker
tape—and a reader on the lead airplane decoded
the characters, transmitting commands to the
smoke systems on each airplane in the formation.
Smoke oil is sprayed onto the hot engine exhaust
stack, and the positions and lengths of the resulting puffs of smoke spell letters that can be read
from as far as 15 miles away.
“We’ve moved to the datalink, and have gotten
very sophisticated,” Arken explained. Messages
can be entered in flight through a mini-laptop with
a touch screen. The Skytypers discovered that a
message typed by five aircraft, instead of seven,
was just as readable from the ground.
Flying line abreast, the five aircraft can type
twelve 25-character messages an hour. The SNJs

1,000 feet tall

Puff of vapor: 135 feet

AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2013