Over the weekend, a pilot in the United Kingdom gained a lot of attention after he used plane tracking software to leave a message in the skies for anyone looking at the data. “I’m bored” wrote the pilot, who was apparently testing a plane after a repair.
As spotted by The Guardian and TikTok creator Aaron Rheins, on Saturday morning a pilot took off from Liverpool, England, and flew for around two hours. This flight, like almost all other flights, was tracked, monitored, and recorded via the website Flightradar24. And it was this site and its data that Rheins used to discover the hidden message left behind by the pilot testing out a new part that had been recently installed in the Piper Tomahawk he was flying.
“I’ve never seen a pilot saying he’s bored by writing it in the sky,” said Rheins in a now viral video on TikTok all about the message in the air.
According to the data, the pilot spent around 20 minutes at about 11,000 feet in the air carefully maneuvering his plane in a tight series of loops and swoops to spell out “I’m Bored.”
The airline that owns the plane, and which the pilot works for, won’t punish the guy for being bored. The airline’s operations manager told the BBC that the pilot won’t face any repercussions for his silly little message. ““I think the pilot was literally a bit bored, as it was just a test flight. Mind you, it was pretty skilful flying,” said the manager. “He’s not in trouble, but we have had a lot of attention from it. The plane is now safely back in the hangar, and the pilot is on his day off.”
Ironically, as pointed out by the manager, while the pilot was bored on the test flight, he must have been very concentrated on creating that message using his plane’s path in the air.
“He was a bit bored, but he probably had to concentrate a lot in the end to spell out the words, so he was probably anything but,” said the manager.
Here at Kotaku, I just hide my messages and emotions in the first letter of each paragraph. Go ahead, click on them and take a look.