Suzanne Asbury Oliver
taught her husband, Steve, to skywrite. So who’s the better of the
two?
"I should be the
best because I had her for a teacher," Steve says, laughing.
The two share more than a
familiar joke. They are the world’s only husband-and-wife professional
aerobatic and skywriting duo. And they’ve been doing this since 1980.
Steve will be performing today in the EAA AirVenture Oshkosh air show,
flying the Oregon Aero SkyDancer, a 1956 de Havilland Chipmunk. Weather
permitting, Suzanne will be skywriting above the EAA grounds throughout
the week.
Suzanne started
skywriting after seeing an ad about an opening with Pepsi. Although she
had never done it before, she was hired on a three-month apprenticeship
that lasted for decades.
Suzanne and Steve met
while on the job at the Kentucky Derby where she was skywriting for a
local Pepsi-Cola bottler and he was pulling advertising banners with his
1941 Stearman biplane. They were married in 1982.
Steve’s air show is an
old-style, get-in-front-of-the-crowd type of show. "I work in a
really tight area, with nice smoke and canned music and a story
line," he says. "Plus the Chipmunk is an aesthetically pretty
airplane."
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Two Best Friends.
Before each performance, aerobatic pilot Steve Oliver depends on
the two top "ladies" in his life – his souped-up de
Havilland Chipmonk, Sky Dancer, and his wife, Suzanne Asbury
Oliver. Photo by Dave Higdon |
Before air shows, Suzanne
generally skywrites a message about the air show, creating letters using
a vaporizing fluid in the plane’s exhaust system. Each letter is about
3/4 a mile on a side, but much of the work for skywriting is actually
done on the ground.
"Basically on the
ground you figure out the seconds and the types of curves to make,"
Suzanne says. "People always ask me what kid of autopilot we have.
The answer is none.
"It’s very
precise," Steve adds. "You’ve got to be dead on your
headings and rates of turn."
And while you can easily
see what they’re doing from the ground, often from the sky you can’t
see the smoke at all. That means if your count is off, you hope your
message will go away quickly.
The average writing lasts
about 20 minutes, but her record actually occurred in the Oshkosh area.
She wrote "Pepsi" over Appleton, and when they arrived in
Oshkosh, the message had drifted here. They watched it until it was over
Fond du Lac, still visible at two hours.
While Steve flies
aerobatics and does skywriting, Suzanne says she has no interest in
flying aerobatics. "It scares me."
It’s not that skywriting is the easiest
flying. "I pull 3-1/2g’s and do 60-degree banks, but I’m up at
10,000 to 12,000 feet; there’s a lot of room if you mess up."
