Products: Works of Art in the Sky

Brian Danza is an instrument-rated private pilot who likes to dabble in graphic design. So when he received an email inviting him to compete in the Wild Blue Doodle contest, a joint promotion of headset manufacturer Lightspeed Aviation and flight-debriefing technology producer CloudAhoy, the temptation was impossible to resist.

The challenge posed to the competitors was this: Use the flight-tracking visualization features of CloudAhoy’s flight-debriefing technology product “to create incredible works of art in the sky.”

For Danza, there was an added incentive: a chance to replace his 1998-vintage headset with the first prize of a Lightspeed Zulu 3 headset, and a complimentary annual subscription to CloudAhoy. For his entry, he chose the theme, “DA40 in a DA40,” and devised a flight path to trace the likeness of a Diamond Aircraft DA40 airplane above the countryside between Virginia’s Winchester Regional Airport and Eastern West Virginia Regional/Shepherd Field Airport in Martinsburg, West Virginia, from a Garmin G1000-equipped DA40 rented at Virginia’s .

Danza took a photo of a DA40 and charted the image’s outline in Google Earth, using the program’s path-tracing feature to create waypoints. He used a text editor to shorten the waypoints’ standard KML file names and then exported the waypoints, saved to an SD card, to the aircraft’s navigation system as a flyable sequence.

The aircraft’s navigation system accepted all the user-generated waypoints, but would only allow 100 of them in a flight plan, so Danza had to add the missing waypoints—about 130 in all—as he flew the route. Danza flew his mission on September 16, departing Leesburg and flying west beneath the Washington, D.C., Class B airspace until he could climb to 3,500 feet to produce his aviation art beneath scattered-to-broken clouds. In mid-October Danza was notified that he had won the contest, the 167 votes he received for his “Diamond in the Sky” creation topping runner-up Chad Davis’s “Let’s Play!” by 29 votes.

Davis, who flies a Cessna 172B, also won third place for his additional entry, “Running Cheetah.” “I track every one of my flights with CloudAhoy and with the competition in mind I contemplated how I could draw something in the sky,” Davis said. “The free Avare app allows me to write notes on the screen. I played with it and realized if I could draw a picture on the screen, I could just follow my artwork on the screen with my flight path.”

He flew the path for “Let’s Play” at night. “The steep turns in the shoelace section were fairly challenging. I had never performed steep turns at night so that was a learning experience,” he said. “My flight wasn’t being tracked visibly on my tablet screen so I didn’t know what the final result looked like until after the flight. While pulling up the result on CloudAhoy, the anticipation was like opening up a Christmas present!”

Because he won both second and third place, Davis also won a Lightspeed headset. “The competition was super fun,” he said. “In addition, I learned a lot. I improved my piloting skills, practiced risk management, and learned more about the electronic tools in my cockpit. I am a better pilot because of it.”

What is CloudAhoy?

CloudAhoy is a product for postflight debriefing. It is cloud-based and the debrief is via a web service on a desktop or laptop computer and in any browser on any device. It is suitable for pilots at all levels and a variety of scenarios. For flight training, CloudAhoy provides an objective look at what happened in the cockpit in a calm environment after the flight. Its sharing feature makes it easy to share a flight.

Cost: $65 per year
Contact: http://cloudahoy.com