It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! Toronto Blue Jays Logo Drawn in the Skies Over Nova Scotia
by Bruce Parkinson
A pilot sketched the Toronto Blue Jays logo with his flight path.
A Nova Scotia private pilot expressed his support for Major League Baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays by drawing the team’s logo in the skies over his home province.
“Oh, well, I love the Blue Jays. Been a fan since 1993, since the early 90s, the Joe Carter era,” Dimitri Neonakis, 63, told CTV News Toronto. “I’m not a fanatic fan, I love the Blue Jays, I’m a Canadian, and I support a Canadian team.”
The timing was right. The Blue Jays needed a pick-me-up after finding themselves down two games to none in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series. And it worked – the team from Toronto crushed the Seattle Mariners 13-4 last night.
Departing from Halifax Standard International Airport, Neonakis flew his Cirrus SR22 aircraft northeast to recreate the team’s icon. A pilot for nearly three decades, he said it was a challenge to draw the logo, sharing with CTV News how he sketched it first before inputting it onto an aviation app that helps plot his flight path.
“Then I get up in the air, and I have an iPad on my knee that is a moving app. On that iPad, I have my position, which is shown like a little blue airplane,” Neonakis explained. “So long as I keep that little airplane over the lines, then the drawing is going to come out like that.”
It took about 2.5 hours to complete the logo, and the results were very accurate, as seen in the image from flight-tracking company FlightAware.
Neonakis has sketched other drawings and messages in the past with his aircraft. He first started in 2020, following a mass shooting incident in Portapique, NS, where he flew around in the shape of a heart.
“Unable to help out, I thought I’d reach out from the air and drew a heart over Portapique, sort of to tell people that we’re all in this together,” Neonakis said.
