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A New Twist On Skywriting
Nugget writes "The advent of Internet-based flight tracking technology enables an entirely new kind of skywriting. Gulfstream Aerospace sent up one of their $50M business jets today on an 8.5-hour test flight spanning 11 states for the sole purpose of leaving their mark on the Net in the form of a flight track that spells out 'GV' (the nickname of the Gulfstream V aircraft being flown) when viewed online."
Someone give these guys something to do, STAT! :D
Global warming is a cube.
At a time when global warming is ruining our climate, this is obscene.
... are we looking at a new type of spam?
Can't wait to read "Enlarge your peanus" right above some skyscraper...
Ignore this signature. By order.
Until I read it online.
ok lets see, with the target demographic of someone likely to be going through flight paths... you are likely to advertise internet dating sites or burkahs.
-Sj53
You've got to wonder why in the hell the FAA approved that flight plan...
appleguru.org
...the super bowl was an incredibly stupid waste of advertising money for a dot.com
I guess they found a way to trump stupid
- Nobody would know what RTFA meant if it didn't need to be said all the time
GVV for global vvarming.
The latest Slashdot meme.
was a plane doing a night flight with a huge array of big leds as in air writing
Now THAT would be cool
It looks a bit wobbly and crap, also couldn't they have spelt out more than 2 letters? I mean they had the entier US air space!
Howlong befor a wealthy geek writes All You Base Are Belong to Us?
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Doesn't it remind you of the drawings that you used to do with an etch-a-sketch ?
Well if you've got to send up a plane empty to do some flight testing, I guess it's a pretty good result if you can sucker the world's media into giving you global coverage about your company on the side!
memories written on the wind...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
if they would have used Cursive Writing. I'm assuming that they remember cursive writing.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
It's been very cool. But quite expensive. /. with those two letters would have been cheaper by far. /. is more visited than Flightware.Com.
Leaving a comment on
And with more visibility becasuse
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Hey folks,
I was the pilot for this flight, and it was a shakedown flight.
But.
The GV displayed in the flight path is purely coincidental.
Truth is, I was lost.
GV? Looks like the ice cream fell off the cone to me.
Snakes on a plane
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
We have some tech which could enable a plane with a computer controlled thingy and coloured smoke make pretty pictures in the sky?
Task Mangler
With a size of 3 billion points, breaking an earlier record, couldn't they have afforded a slightly more sophisticated typeface, such as Courier?
My browser (Firefox) doesn't go beyond 72 points. Is there a skywriting plugin available somewhere?
...what on earth is the point of skywriting in a scale so large the only way to see it is on a crummy flightplan?
Machine9dotNet
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no sir."
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
here is a quote from the net.. Can you figure out without hitting the link who it's referring to?For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)
: underthenews.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html+ snopes+ecology+irony+author+private+jet&hl=en&ct=c lnk&cd=1&gl=us
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:HB_qxPVZ4AsJ
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
That is more impressive and demonstrates more skill.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
The only people that would be attracted to this are the people who are already planning on buying a GV. It's not that people on the ground would be able to say "Oh, that is really cool, let's go buy one."
Just wait until we have flying cars and every Joe spam-pack can airvertise tothe masses. We'll need symantec anti-airvertising goggles to filter it out!
Now that would be a cool way to get come attention. Much like when Google did some fly overs in Australia there were people out in athletic fields trying to get noticed with big temporary signage.
Nothing else to say on this very funny expensive pollution BizPrank.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Maybe you missed the part of the article where they said this was a test flight. As in, they were testing the plane. The choice of route was a stunt, granted, but if they hadn't flown a great big "GV," they probably would still have done the test flight, and just flown around in a circle, or some other arbitrarily-defined pattern. It's just that flying in this particular pattern got them some extra press, so why not?
Calm down a little before you flip out, next time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That flight was a stupid waste of fuel and time. The point of skywriting is to push a message to vast numbers of people in the sky we all have in common, "just look up". That version requries people to search to pull a flightpath in an obscure webpage that they "look up" with a great deal of effort for a tiny reward.
But who cares about the stupid skywriting stunt? That flightpath page is supercool. How do I find the specific flight number of a commercial flight I took, to look at my actual flightpath, without poring through all the flight activity from its originating airport?
--
make install -not war
Now that is just plain DUMB!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Aviation geeks have web sites they like to or have to look at every day. This advertisement is meant to target those people, and then creep out and get a few eyes outside of the aviation community. Someone looking at flight plans for aircraft in the Midwest would probably get a kick out of it.
It's kind of the same situation if you had someone outside of the tech community look at a review for a bright and shiny $5,000 PC. We all know it's excessive, expensive, and something a non-tech will hardly understand. However, it gets us thinking about the components, and the capabilities of some of the hardware in that PC. We then want to either pony up and buy it if we're well funded. Or we buy the components and try to build something similar. If we can't do that, we can buy a budget model from the same manufacturer.
Gulfstream was saying, "Hey look at our technology, the avionics, and the pilots that fly our aircraft." We can fly out of an airport and using our Garmin G1000 suite to carve a precise course and get to our destination relatively quickly. Compare that to, "Dual core processors make your database server retrieve data more quickly".
The $5,000 PC and the $50,000,000 both use up an obscene amount of resources... no doubt about that. But people flying these aircraft need practice too... They're not just the people flying billionaires around. Some of them fly commercial aircraft too. They have to get up there and learn how to use the systems and conduct long cross country flights before they're trusted with many human lives. If they throw in an advertising ploy in between... Hey... they're killing two birds with one stone. You wouldn't like it if someone came in and unplugged your PC while you were playing a game or reading Slashdot because you were, "Using up energy that was contributing to global warming", would you?
Where X = anything remotely connected to large amounts of fuel/energy usage
Yup, it's official. You haven't lost your religion.
damaged by dogma
Perhaps this is one of the jets HP ordered for Ms. Fiorina, before she got the boot.
I didn't realize Gulfstream took so long to build their products. Maybe they can sell it to the King of Spain instead.
In some parts of the world, GV is a common abbreviation for GATVOL - or "fed up" (to the max).
9 294,2-7-1442_1987003,00.html/
http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,
Way to go, silly airline!
Etch a Sketch king: http://www.gvetchedintime.com/set.html
... is playing WAY too much Fligh Simulator... Well, anyway, it's better than if they're playing some FPS...
--- Sorry my bad English... I'll have him tarred and feathered. ---
-x- Sorry my bad English. I'll have him tarred and feathered. -x-
Look at FAR 61.1(b)(3)(vi)(B). If working towards an ATP (admittedly, these pilots probably were not) all you have to do is go 50+ nm and turn around.
Anal? Yes, but not as bad as the guys at your local FSDO...
The title of this post is misleading. Who said Gulfstream did ANY skywriting during this test flight? They had no smoke machine, they drew no message in the sky. Usually, aircraft are stripped down during test flights to make room for instrumentation, data acquisition equipment, and flight test engineers. A smoke machine would have been pointless. The path you see is their ACTUAL flightpath, not some smoke trail. If you were on the ground, you never would have seen anything other than another business jet flying over you.
what a load of crap, the carbon from 20 billion gallons of aviation fuel used in a year in the U.S. are small compared to gasoline (over 150 billion gallons) or diesel (over 70 billion) or natural gas.