On a cloudless Friday morning in September, Benjamin McDaniel stepped into the cockpit of his Cessna and accelerated down a runway in Bentonville, Ark. Once airborne in the four-seat, single-engine propeller plane, he headed toward the Oklahoma border, then began to carve wide arcs, narrow bends as tight as 60 degrees and dizzying full-circle loops.
After four hours of these intricate aerobatics, he had sketched a version of the Mona Lisa instantly recognizable to anyone tracking his flight online. It had all of the distinctive features that Leonardo da Vinci gave her 500 years ago: the tender hand folded over the wrist, the center-parted hair, the elusive stare, and most importantly, the lightly mocking smile.
Altogether, Mr. McDaniel’s modern-day interpretation — accomplished in one unbroken flight — was composed on a canvas made of 40 miles of sky.
Mr. McDaniel, 28, and a handful of other pilots trace artistic patterns over airspace. Others have designed kangaroos, ballerinas and orcas. Over Oxford, the pilot Amal Larhlid glided out a silhouette of a crowned Queen Elizabeth II.
Called Sky Art, these compositions are invisible to the naked eye. The path that fliers take appears only on flight-tracking websites, allowing dedicated viewers to witness the drawing emerge in real time: a da Vinci! a Munch! a globe! Ghostbusters!
Mr. McDaniel has done them all.
In each instance, there was no room for error. “This is a one-time shot,” he said.
Once he begins “playing the game,” as he put it, he can’t deviate because “the plane continues on and it leaves a trail, like an Etch A Sketch, or like a snail.”
And that all happens at 100 knots (115 m.p.h.) at a height as high as 10,000 feet.
Mr. McDaniel’s journey last month to recreate the Mona Lisa received over 200,000 live views on FlightRadar24, a flight-tracking site.
Planning these elaborate paths takes months. Mr. McDaniel begins broadly, scouting the terrain, typically in Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma.
Then comes the sketch. He turns to flight software. Against a black screen overlaid with a simple map, the contours of his path, his art, take shape. This is the blueprint he traces while in flight.
He always flies solo. And he does not use autopilot.
“Every turn, every climb, every speed change, everything — that’s all done by me, hand-flown the whole time,” he said.
For any flight, including his artistic ones, safety is “No. 1,” he said. He flies at an altitude away from general aviation and commercial flights; he monitors transmissions from nearby airports; and he is careful when passing over residential areas.
“I want to be a good neighbor to those below,” he said.
Mr. McDaniel, a commercial pilot and flight instructor, began flying only six years ago. In 2020, his sister’s boyfriend (now husband), a flight instructor at Auburn University, took him flying. “As soon as those wheels left the ground, I fell in love with it,” he said. “You’re in the plane and you’re taking off and it feels like you’re going a million miles per hour.”
Sky Art began roughly in the 2010s. One early attempt, in Germany in 2016, was a simple “hello.” Pilots looking to clock in flight hours and practice tricky turns can have a bit of fun by tracing the shapes of animals, words, phrases, or in Mr. McDaniel’s case, world-class art. Mr. McDaniel’s Instagram moniker is Pilot Picasso.
(Mr. McDaniel, though, has not yet performed a Picasso. Would he do so soon? “Unsure at the time,” he answered with a pause and a sheepish grin. )
Some concerns emerged in 2020, when Britain proposed lifting a six-decade ban on the activity (the original ban was for safety and for preventing propaganda in the skies). Environmentalists protested the additional carbon emissions that would be produced from a purely aesthetic pastime.
A study by the British Department of Transportation found, however, “minimal” amounts of carbon dioxide from what it called skytyping — roughly three metric tons annually — especially when stacked against the 35 metric tons nationally. Over 900 metric tons were emitted from global aviation in 2024, according to the International Air Transport Association.
Many of these feats are also not purely aesthetic. They arise out of a necessity for pilots to accumulate practice hours and refine their skills.
To create Mona Lisa’s pupils, Mr. McDaniel had to employ “a steep turn,” he said. The maneuver requires rotating a full 360 degrees at a roughly 45 to 60 degree angle while maintaining consistent altitude and airspeed. It is required for passing licensing tests.
The more familiar, analog variety of Sky Art is the “sky writing” that first appeared in the early 1900s, where a pilot blasts white smoke from the engine to scrawl cloudy messages overhead.
There is some dispute as to who gets the title of first person to wield a plane as a pen. But Major John Clifford Savage, a British pilot with the Royal Air Force, often gets the credit for developing the techniques. And his compatriot, Captain Cyril Turner, became known for his public stunts. In 1922, with a military biplane, he scribbled “HELLO, USA” and then “CALL VANDERBILT 7200” above Times Square, resulting in a reported 47,000 phone calls to the Gilded Age hotel at 4 Park Avenue where he was staying.
Pepsi utilized sky writers in the 1930s to ’40s for advertisements. Then in December 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono hired a seasoned skywriter to proclaim over the Toronto skies: “War is over, if you want it. Happy Xmas from John and Yoko.”
Mr. McDaniel, too, likes to imbue some of his schemes with a reminder to pursue peace.
Ribboned beneath a world map of all the continents, except Antarctica, was the single word: unity.
“I think we’re all one in this world,” he said, adding that his hope for all of his creations is to have “an impact,” whether it’s a folded ribbon for breast cancer awareness or a “You Are Loved” for suicide prevention.
“I don’t think people get told that enough,” he said.
On Tuesday, he took to the skies again, carving out another intricate work: Edvard Munch’s “Scream,” undulating skies, steep vertiginous diagonals and all, centered by that skeletal wide-mouth figure clutching his face.
It was his longest trek yet: a six-hour test of endurance. It was also his birthday.
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