A heart-shaped flight for Valentine’s Day
The airline Virgin Atlantic celebrated Lovers’ Day by having one of its planes fly through a giant heart-shaped course off the UK.
The Airbus A330 took off from Gatwick Airport near London at around 11:00 am local time for a mandatory flight test for all new aircraft. When it reached the Cornish peninsula, west of Britain, the plane branched off a more usual route to draw a heart over the ocean.
The aircraft returned to its starting point approximately two hours after flying.
The Flightradar24 site, which tracks real-time commercial aircraft around the world, has posted an image on Twitter showing the plane’s route and the huge heart it has drawn.
When you conduct a training flight in your recently delivered A330 on #ValentinesDay you draw a heart. That's the rule, right?
See playback of @VirginAtlantic’s ❤️at https://t.co/em1gPzhr22 pic.twitter.com/yJSZtrsRxv
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) February 14, 2018
“[Flight tests] are part of a normal certification process when we add new aircraft to our fleet,” says an airline blog post. We had a two-hour flight scheduled for February 14th. It was the perfect opportunity to do something different. ”
The company had to have its flight plan approved by the Royal Air Force. The British Air Force controls the airspace over this portion of the North Sea, which served as the canvas for the Airbus A330 pilot.
Happy Valentine's day! In case you missed it, here's our Airbus on it's heart-shaped training flight earlier today! #LoveisintheAirbus #ValentinesDay 📽️: https://t.co/2aXGiKF7Dm pic.twitter.com/GwIKehh2OS
— virginatlantic (@VirginAtlantic) February 14, 2018
This is not the first time an airline has enjoyed a holiday to make a publicity stunt. A few days before Christmas, last year, Emirates had made an even more impressive work, the course of one of his planes drawing a tree decorated with balls over Germany .
