Flying the Blue Jays logo
How pilot Dmitri Neonakis flew his Blue Jays logo flightpath
FlightAware
Dimitri Neonakis is a private pilot. He’s also a big Blue Jays fan, as you might be able to tell from his Cirrus SR-22’s flight path last Tuesday from Halifax International Airport. A flight from Halifax to Debert is quite simple – if you’re flying in a straight line, but with Neonakis’ flight path, it took him two and a half hours to take what is normally a ten minute flight.
Neonakis has been flying in illustrative paths since 2020, when he flew a heart as a memorial after the deadly Portapique attacks. To plan his illustrated flights, Neonakis first sketches his image. He then inputs his sketch into a navigation program to map out his flightpath. It took him about three hours to plan his Blue Jays flight. When flying, he follows his set flightpath on his GPS and just follows the line. “If I fly it properly, then it’s going to look like what I drew,” he says.
“It takes some good planning. Two and a half hours of constant calculating, wind speed, how you’re going to take each turn. It requires some good flying, and it’s some good practice as a pilot,” he shares. The most complicated flights he’s made so far have been illustrating the Blue Jays logo, a Halifax Mooseheads logo, and a drawing of a graduate to celebrate the graduates who were not able to have a graduation ceremony due to the COVID pandemic.
As for his baseball fandom, Neonakis has been a Blue Jays fan since the early 90s, what he labels “the Joe Carter era.” As for why he’s a Blue Jays fan? Neonakis says, “I’m a Canadian. I gotta support a Canadian team.”
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