Bill Crawford’s Flightlab Blog

Greetings from Wichita, where it rained pigs and cows yesterday (April 13, a Friday) and snowed last night. This morning’s forecast was for continued muck, but the sky keeps improving—in the sly, devious way that skies often do.

It took me six days to get the Zlin out here from Plymouth, Massachusetts. That included two nights spent snowed under in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and three nights in St. Louis, where local thunderstorms, alternating with Kansas boomers, kept the VFR Zlin in the hangar. The prize in Wichita is three weeks teaching aerobatics to test pilots at Cessna and Lear, and to corporate pilots at Koch Industries.

I wasn’t expecting to stop in Altoona, but that was just hubris clouding the mind. I can’t remember ever having an easy job crossing the Allegheny Mountains in winter conditions, under VFR—at least not when the lake effect snows are pushing south. Picking the way around isolated snow showers is a game at first, but as the snow clouds build ahead of you, and the ridgelines begin to fade into them, you start checking the lines of retreat. Going west, I made it past Altoona-Blair, and then around the southern edge of the Johnstown-Cambria control zone. At that point, if you can get over the next set of ridges you’re usually home free. Radio towers aside, it’s comfortably flat from then on, well beyond Wichita. But just past Johnstown I lost confidence in the space between ridgeline and cloud. The flanks were closing, too. Marginal VFR in the mountains is not a jolly adventure. So I turned around, aimed the nose for Johnstown, and again checked the ASOS. Visibility there had been better than six miles a few minutes before. Now it was down to a mile as the edge of a snow squall bullied in from the north. Back eastward to Altoona we scampered, in a slightly more urgent and soul-searching frame of mind. After landing, I looked behind and saw what was about to come through. Yikes!

As I tied down the Zlin, I got an odd feeling. The place seemed familiar. Of course, it looked exactly like any one of several thousand other small airports, but it rang a bell. Then I remembered that years ago I’d been there for an airshow. That was back when I had my ratty green Citabria rigged up with a smoke system, and hired myself out to airshows to write the sponsors’ names. (I liked it when a sponsor was a radio station, since that meant only four letters.) Sometimes I wrote the word “AIRSHOW” in the morning, to remind people to cut the lawn early and come out to the airport. Sometimes the organizers would give a sky-written message away in a raffle. I once got raffled off to a guy who had me write “TOM LOVES DEB” over the Cincinnati Class B. He rang me up in my hotel room at five in the morning to make sure I got to the airport on time. I spoke to Deb on the phone afterwards. She sounded a bit shaken. I can’t remember if I wrote out the word “LOVES” or drew a heart. My hearts, I remember, weren’t that good. By the way, note that skywriting is done in capital letters, and at a constant altitude.

It came back to me that I wrote “AIRSHOW” twice in Altoona that weekend. The first time was on Saturday morning. In the normal course of things it could get pretty smoky in the Citabria’s cockpit, but this time there was something unusually unpleasant about the smoke. When I landed, the airshow manager didn’t seem particularly interested in my suggestion that whatever oil he had ordered seemed a lot more carcinogenic than even the usual stuff, but he lent me his car to go to the local hardware store, where I bought a chemical face mask, the kind with the canisters. I decided I would put the mask on only after takeoff, so that no one on the ground thought I was planning a phosgene attack.

The weather was calm and blue-sky perfect for skywriting on Sunday morning. I usually worked at 7,000 feet, starting out upwind of the audience so that the letters would drift toward them. If I remember correctly, the technique was to get the Citabria settled down at 90 knots, then run a line of smoke for ten seconds to establish the proper letter height for “AIRSHOW.” After ten seconds I’d make a 180 to the left (with the smoke still on) and draw a line parallel to the first. After this I’d forget about timing and do everything by eye. When I came abeam my starting point I’d shut off the smoke, then do a climbing 270-degree turn to the right and set up for the horizontal line that changes an upside down “U” into an acceptable-looking “A”. I’d turn the smoke on as I entered the first vertical line of the “A”, and then shut it off when I reached the second.

Ok, I’ll give away a secret. Obviously, the bigger the letters the more smoke you use, so you want to keep them small if you intend any sort of serious essay. The letter “S,” which consists of two opposite turns, dictates the smallest letter size. If you try to make the turns in an “S” too tight, you’re likely to stall the aircraft and ruin things. Remember the line about the SR-71 pilot who said that you’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3? Well, you’ve never really stalled and fallen out of a turn until you’ve done it smoke-on with the full critical attention of Blair County, Pennsylvania. So you practice the letter “S” until you feel comfortable with it, and then time the interval as you fly a straight line, at 90 knots, from the top of the “S” to the bottom. That becomes the timing for the first leg of the “A” in “AIRSHOW.” There’re plenty of other secrets, but forget about it.

One thing I discovered at Altoona was that your average chemical-grade facemask is not 2-g tolerant, which is roughly the maximum you pull while skywriting. As soon as I hit the turn at the top of the “A” I knew I was in trouble. I have a vague recollection of flying with one hand on the stick while keeping the mask on with the other. Nevertheless, the conditions were good and I was then at the peak of my skywriting skills. I did a perfect “AIRSHOW.”

That emboldened me. I had more smoke oil, but probably not enough to write an entire “ALTOONA.” So I made a quick sketch of the turns necessary and wrote “TUNA” instead. Unless there’s an obscure sushi festival with skywriting we don’t know about, I’ll bet I’m the only pilot ever to skywrite the name of that much-admired fish, rich-in-mercury though it may be. Anyway, when I returned to the airport they treated me like a hero. The people of Altoona are not so petty as to grade for spelling. They know what you mean, and appreciate your effort.

Now, years later, walking into the Altoona FBO after this most recent battle with mountain and snow, I almost asked the woman behind the counter if she’d ever seen the word “TUNA” in the sky. But I thought better of it. If she hadn’t seen it, why sadden her with the thought of what she’d missed? And you never know. Perhaps someday “TUNA” will return.