A pilot in Adelaide, Australia is gaining worldwide attention after drawing a pair of peckers and tracing the words “I’m bored” in the sky over the coastal city this week. That’s right, it’s the return of the sky penis—and appropriately, this time it’s from the land down under.
Just before 9am local time on Tuesday, flight trackers picked up a single-engine Diamond DA40 as it took off from Parafield Airport, a small regional facility near Adelaide. The plane flew north from the city at around 3,000 feet before cutting west across the Yorke Peninsula and continuing northward along the edge of the Spencer Gulf, where it proceeded to trace two separate outlines of male genitalia. One big, one not so big.
Of course, none of this was visible to people on the ground. Pilots have learned their lesson since a U.S. Navy crew out of Whidbey Island caught hell for using their jet engine contrails to literally draw a floating penis in the sky in 2017. Since then, the tasteful art of painting privates among the clouds is done in invisible ink, showing up only on radar screens and flight tracking websites like FlightAware—which is exactly where people first noticed this pilot’s handiwork.
If anyone happened to catch the live show, and watch him put the finishing flourish on that second, bigger penis, they might have wondered: Why? The answer came during his return journey as he spelled out “I’M BORED” in large capital letters on the trip back to the airport. All in all, not a bad way to kill three hours.
Perth Now reports the unnamed pilot is actually a flight instructor with a local school, and that morning he’d been assigned to fly the plane for two hours with the throttle at a specific level as part of testing a new engine. Not satisfied with his particular station, he decided to have some fun and join the ranks of great sky penis painters.
“Young instructors, what can you do?” Pine Pienaar, the head of Flight Training Adelaide, told Perth Now.
For one, you can tell them to step up their game. Winging willies is a good laugh, but pilots have been known to make real artistic statements with their flight paths, especially in today’s age of public-facing tracking sites. Even companies get in on the act. In 2017, Boeing used an 18-hour test flight of the 787 Dreamliner to draw an immense outline of the plane across the middle of the United States, its wingtips nearly touching the northern and southern borders. Not to be outdone, later that year an Airbus A380 test flight traced a Germany-sized Christmas tree—ornaments and all—over Europe.
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