21 August 2018
+VIDEO Skytyping and other forms of sky writing are to become legal in the UK.
The Aviation Minister, Baroness Sugg CBE, has promised to update UK law following pressure to change outdated legislation, which currently bans writing anything in the sky.
Baroness Sugg confirmed in a letter to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on General Aviation that the Department for Transport will consult on amending secondary legislation to reverse the current ban.
Skytyping is a technique whereby an aircraft emits smoke in a series of precision bursts to form lettering and words in the sky. The smoke output is generated by an electronic master plan.
The practice has been allowed in countries such as the United States for decades but it has always been illegal in the UK.
The Yakovlevs is a UK team that specialises in skytyping, along with formation and display flying.
“We take five of our team aircraft to 10,000ft and assemble in line-abreast formation,” explains team leader Jez Hopkinson.
“Our leader puts the formation directly overhead the target audience and on command we activate our patented typing system and a signal is sent to each aircraft to emit a pulse of smoke. The pulses creates characters which in turn creates a unique Sky Billboard message.”
