Airborne Marriage proposal 2005

With the advent of exactly 10 years ago today since the proposal event I share with you the experience and the video of it going public for the first time.
The below report was composed back in 2005 and kept for my records.

Athens, Saturday 10th December 2005

An airborne marriage proposal to Daphne

The idea
It all started with an idea to do it in “a different way”. I had heard of similar past events from fellow pilots abroad but never one in Greece and usually of events like aerial commercial toe signs containing the big question and flying past the girlfriend’s location.

The decision on how to be done was made a month earlier. The objective was to propose while airborne with the phrase in question formed on ground level. We would fly overhead with the aircraft (TB-20 Trinidad) I co-own with a friend and I would simply surprise her by pointing her sight towards the “big question”.

One of the reasons was to secure the passion for my aviation hobby for the future towards my spouse for life!
I can only hope now that she will have nothing to say about it since it all started while “on board”.
[Dec.2015 Note: It never happened ]

Contributing factors on decision
First part involved was choosing which beach to use. We needed:

1. a place where we would have the minimum bystanders wandering about
2. an area away from controlled airspace affecting low flying jet traffic. We would never get permission to fly over any of the two Athens’ coasts southwest and northeast
3. an area near Megara LGMG airport (our base) so as to avoid long driving distance for meeting my girlfriend right after the setting would be ready
4. winter time to provide an empty beach
5. Relatively good weather hard to find in winter (well, in Greece, not so hard!)
6. a material for the letters, big enough to read, light enough to carry for the install and uninstall, heavy enough not to be carried away by wind, in the correct colour to provide contrast with the beach
7. few good friends to help who could keep it confidential
8. a method to design the letter set beforehand with drawing in scale
9. a way to quickly set the axes to follow on the ground and ideally a straight & long structure to follow as axis of symmetry
10. to find out how much material we had and if that was enough for the phrase
11. a combination of all the above not excessively expensive

The decision

1. The northwest coast proved to be the best since it’s a summer resort scarcely populated in winter
2. Attica district’s northwest proved to be the best since its away from the major airports and close to the aircraft base (Megara LGMG)
3. It was winter anyway so there would not be much people around
4. we were on a standby checking forecasts and the day was chosen 48 hrs earlier
5. after a few ideas the deck chair proved to be the best choice; all that remained was to find the local summer bar owner who had them stored nearby
6. By counting the deck chairs we found we had just the quantity we needed (actually just short of the question mark in the end!)
7. I am an Architect and AutoCad software helped expedite the design
8. I am an Architect and have the basic knowledge on how to set axes on site. The pavement behind helped as reference.
9. The design in scale helped to implement it later on site
10. The choice of the parked deck chairs in winter and the airport nearby helped

My good friend Greg E., experienced in yachting in Greece, was the main contributor in deciding to use Psatha beach just north of Alepochori in northwest Attica district, just an hours drive from Athens and half an hour from Megara airport our aircraft’s home base.

Finding the deck chairs
After the beach was chosen I drove there to find any local coastal installation (bars etc.) owner who may operate deck chairs on the beach during the summer. [In Greece many such owners are allowed to gain income from rented beach chairs and umbrellas as long as they clean the beach daily]. It was very easy to find the right bar owner and on a sunny Saturday winter morning with a coffee at his installation on the beach we agreed on the operation. He said he wants no money, just the chairs stacked back as we would find them at his backyard store.

With the above complete I went out to survey the chairs in question. Sizes and quantity were noted down as well as the beach width and the pavement just next to it to be used as an indication of the scale for the sizes of the letters. The fact that the pavement run straight & parallel just behind the beach helped a lot in the setting of the axes of symmetry on the day of installation.

Trial flight
Next week I flew over the site to take some pictures and plan the overflight of the area in question. It was not easy since I immediately found out that the westerly faced beach was enclosed between three mountains in a U like shape. It would involve a flight above the beach on a constant 180 turn to enter and exit the U as tight as reasonably possible.

The other factor to consider was the wind turbulence since such land formations produce strong bumps when you fly low, something handled easily by pilots but not by most of passengers (she’s one of them!). The last thing I wanted from this flight was to end up handing out sick bags. Tight turns and bumpy air can be the worst combination.

The design
Next came the design board. I used the AutoCad which is a professional design tool that I know well since I’m an Architect. After I formed the phrase in MS Word I imported it in AutoCad. I prepared a standard modular deck chair block. I positioned some 140 such rectangles in scale to overlay above the imported text. The outcome was satisfactory and the drawing was complete with detailed dimensions from chair to chair so as to facilitate on site positioning.

I then counted the chairs needed towards chairs available and they were just enough. During installation it proved I was wrong and we found some other (ordinary) chairs to fill the missing deck chairs which were actually the question mark in the end.

The phrase, as freely translated from Greek, was “Daphne (should) we get married ?” and it proved to be some 120 meters long. In the same drawing I inserted the nearby pavement and checked it against the size of the letters. It was OK (for reading from FL240 as Greg insisted!)

The big day
The weather forecast for December 10th was not what we wanted but good enough to go ahead. Rain was forecast for that morning but it would clear by late morning.

I arrived on site at 7:00am still dark and rainy hoping that it will go as forecast. By 9:00, still raining, all the axes were set on ground by steel rods hammered on the beach, string and high visibility tape. By then my friends Greg & Elias were there to help. We also found two local building site workmen to give us a hand in carrying the deck chairs for a reasonable day’s payment.

By 12:30 we were almost complete, the rain had stopped, and it was time to call my girlfriend for the first part of the unexpected surprise. With some pressure I persuaded her to drive to the airport for “something” I wanted to show her. I promised her it was not about aviation and it had to do with work. I organized the packing & transport of the deck chairs back to their storage and left my friends there for the airport. I remembered to leave them the flares they would light just as we would approach above with the aircraft.

The flight
It all went according to plan and as I appeared off the bay my friends were in position. As I approached at an offset angle towards the beach I started the video camera (see video below) and I asked her what was happening down there as the flares started lighting left and right of the inscription. By the time I flew right past it and initiating the U turn, she had almost read it all but not realized the whole phrase. Few seconds later in the half of the turn looking at it from the back she figured it all out and she screamed! (…as you can hear in the video)

The rest of the in cockpit story is private but all I can say publicly is that I am happy that within few seconds in a low flying 180 turn between three mountains nearby, I managed to keep flying the plane!, keep the camera in the right position, get hugged, hand out the ring and manage my emotions which hit the roof when she burst in all sorts of ways right after!

After that I flew over again at a higher altitude to take some pictures of this one off chance to capture the inscription on the ground and by the 5th turn she started feeling uncomfortable (first signs of airsickness!). By then I had taken the shots needed and we headed back to base for a 10 minute flight till we landed.

The ground operation
By the time we were leaving the airport, the deck chairs were almost all removed and back to storage by the local two workmen. Local community, including the mayor and deputy, had rushed driving to the beach asking my friends what’s going on since they had never seen such activity there during winter. Some of the locals thought we were staging a race/contest of some sort and some others some TV commercial. We fooled them all with oblique answers since you could hardly figure out the letters from ground level. The exception was a pair of two sympathetic ladies walking by who my friends could not resist telling the truth. They burst out of happiness.

Later Findings
Post-factum I understood that the letters were so big that I could have easily just flown some 1.000ft. above the site where it was perfectly visible as a whole as seen in the picture in the video.
Flying at the low altitude I did (by thinking it would be read more easily) it actually had the opposite effect ! She “decrypted” the phrase by the time we were actually behind it during the 180 turn as you can see the video.

The multimedia
You can view a series of multimedia from December 10th 2005 in Psatha beach in my on-line album I have uploaded here:
http://hellasga.com/gallery/kyp/psatha
The VIDEO first time in public today can be seen here:

I would like to thank my close friends Greg & Elias who without their ground support it would have been impossible to plan and execute this project.