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."

Comments

What a disgusting waste of fuel

[jimmoores]

At a time when global warming is ruining our climate, this is obscene.

Re:What a disgusting waste of fuel

[deadweight]

Can we assume that you never do anything like drive your car to the movies. If you do, you are spewing C02 when you could just wait for a Netflix DVD to come to your door. Everyone who NEVER uses any kind of fossil-fuel provided energy to do ANYTHING not absolutely life-or-death, please go track down the Gulfstream owner and do your CO2 rant. The rest of you shut the fuck up.

Re:Someone

[AxminsterLeuven]

How about "Aliens Attack Here -->" across a hemisphere you don't like?

Ugly font

[Anders Andersson]

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?

They were probably going to fly anyway.

[Kadin2048]

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.