Love is in the air—can you feel it? Saint Valentine’s day of love is just around the corner and the unconfirmable sources that I deal with suggest that 6 million people in the United States (no one keeps this sort of record in Canada) will get engaged to their main squeeze this coming February 14th. (Does that mean 3 million couples or 12 million couples? The available info wasn’t written for questioning minds like ours.) Valentine’s Day is a second choice to Christmas Day for proposals of marriage.
While some will be elaborately planned stunt-proposals, there will also be plenty of tables booked at ignorantly priced restaurants and the question of marriage will be broached as the loved one tumbles the ring around in their mouth after unexpectedly coming across it in a forkful of dessert or perhaps after it has been fished out of the bottom of a glass of champagne.
Often, proposals are accompanied by a stranger who suddenly jumps out of the shadows to video the special moment since proving one’s proposal through images has become an important part of many engagement attempts, with their production getting more extensive proportionate to the stunt.
For those who are facing their own dilemma of how to approach the person of their dreams with the suggestion that they spend their lives income-sharing on their tax forms, a good old-fashioned skywriter could be an answer.
Messages might well have been written by pilots before 1922, but the art of spelling out words in the sky for advertising purposes (the only ones that seem to get recorded), began in 1922 when former British Royal Air Force pilot, Cyril Turner, took on the job of flying over the Derby being held at Epsom Downs Racecourse near Surrey in England, to spell out “Daily Mail” in smoke trails for the racing crowds to ponder and then wildly applaud. The caper must have worked because the Daily Mail, begun in 1896, continues to be one of the premier rags of choice by the British tabloid-buying public.
Skywriting messages went on to get much more creative than this early type of concise messaging and has a long history of spelling out advertising slogans, political statements, and marriage proposals, as the years have unfolded.
Which is why I have brought it up for you, my little ‘thinking-about-asking’ Friend. This just might be that novel approach you’ve been struggling to come up with on your own for Valentine’s Day.
Skywriting is not quite as easy as it sounds. The best skywriting is done on a cool day (cool air holds the smoke together for longer) with the wind being almost non-existent so that the letters aren’t swept away as soon as they’ve been crafted. A windless day could allow your Beloved a good 20 minutes to weigh the question or statement, while trying to concoct an answer. On a windy day, you’d be lucky to get a letter fully formed before it blurs or twists, effectively obliterating the whole point of the exercise.
These messages written in the air using a traditional one-plane method, are usually done at an elevation of 3000m. The letters can reach 1.5km in height, which allows the message to be seen up to 50 kilometres away, but it takes a minute to 90 seconds to spit out a single letter. Each letter is written at a slightly different elevation so that the plane itself doesn’t cause a letter to be blown away as the next one is being formed. This is all done as the small airplane is flown at a steady speed of about 250kph.
All skywriting pilots have their own way of figuring out how to make the letters in their message end up about the same size, for readability, and several have noted that they count out their maneuvers in the same way that dancers count their way through a dance. With no way of checking on how they’re doing as they spell out their messages, these amazing pilots need to be thorough in their planning and stay completely focused during their routine.
Oh, and they have to draw their letters backwards so that earthlings can actually read them.
There is another form of skywriting called skytyping. For this discipline, 5 or 6 planes fly in a side-by-side formation, and each is computer programmed to emit puffs of smoke at certain timed points to create letters, in the style of an old dot-matrix printer. A letter done in this manner takes 2.5 seconds to make, therefore messages can be much longer in length and will stay visible for more time than ones made using a traditional single skywriter. But be warned, skytyping takes a pretty big chunk of your change to accomplish.
While you dreamily envision how your proposal would look, printed letter by letter in the sky for the whole world to see (WILL YOU MARRY ME SUE/CLIVE/BARBARA/JERRY/POOKIE), also try to predetermine whether your Beloved feels the same way about you. It will help immensely with the outcome.
And for those still unconvinced that a skywritten proposal is the way to go for February 14th, don’t discount the romance of taking a walk together in a quiet little town on a chilly day and stopping in at a cozy café to pop the question over hot tea and chocolate something. I can confirm that that works like a charm and can be done regardless of the wind conditions, and on any day of the year.
But I can see where skywriting would be fun too.
