"It's not just a
silly thing," she said. "It's especially exciting for the artists to work
in a different medium. It's a lot of visual fun for the people."
For Butler, it's a chance to show off his skills in what is a fast-dying form of
flying. And it's a lot of fun. "It's
like I've got a big white crayon and I'm writing on the big blue sky," said Butler,
45, who owns Aerial Sign Co. at North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines and has been
skywriting for 15 years. "I've got the biggest blackboard in the world to play
with."
Good weather willing, Butler will fill
his 1957, 260-horsepower, single-engine Rawdon with 90 gallons of lightweight
parafin-based oil, the stuff the plane's exhaust atomizes to create the stream of white
smoke that will serve as his paint. Then he'll climb two to three miles in the air
off the beach behind the center and run the mysterious maneuvers fewer and fewer pilots
can even fathom. Butler believes there are only about 20 active skywriters in the
United States.
To learn the trade, Butler said a pilot
would have to display advanced flying skills and be willing to take 12 to 15 hours of
ground training and three two-hour flights. "It's a total mystery now," he
said. "You could ask 100 pilots how to do it and they would have many, many
different opinions.
Butler soon plans to begin teaching other
pilots the tricks of the trade, just like an old Pepsi-Cola pilot did for him back in
1974. Pepsi's 15 or so skywriting planes toured the country and the Caribbean 40
years ago, but as an advertising form, skywriting has drifted away on the winds.
Butler hopes to revitalize the medium
this year and plans to send six or seven planes across the Midwest to advertise a product
he wouldn't reveal. That's part of the reason he'll teach his first two students,
including his son, James Jr., the secrets of the "S."
That's the letter that baffles most pilots, Butler said. It can only be written one
way, in a right-hand turn, and mastering it is the first step to becoming a skywriter |
