About the data

Days with a dated sighting

We count each brand once per day, even when several people post about it. We use the date of the sighting when a source specifies one, rather than the date of a later post. These counts describe this archive; they do not measure how often a company flies.

We keep 5 reports with unconfirmed flight dates separate. Reports outside SF, uncertain locations and low-confidence references stay in the source CSV but do not enter these counts. Direct reader reports carry a label when no public link is available.

How we handle a report

1. Keep the source link and the wording the person reported. A quoted slogan is not a transcript we independently verified.
2. Separate the flight date from the post date. “Yesterday” can establish a date; “last week” cannot establish a single day.
3. Check the location. A banner at SaaStr in San Mateo does not establish a sighting over San Francisco.
4. Keep unconfirmed dates visible as undated reports. Corrections can change the counts.

You can inspect the source CSV, contribution notes, or flag an error.

What the flight map shows

The map contains 82 candidate tracks from the adsb.lol archive. The detector looks for tracked aircraft spending at least 45 minutes inside an SF bounding box, with median speed below 85 knots and median altitude below 3,500 feet.

That pattern suggests banner towing. It does not prove that a plane carried a banner. A brand seen on the same date is a lead, so we list it as a possible match without assigning the flight to that advertiser.

The archive covers selected aircraft and dates. Missing tracks do not establish that a flight never happened. Older duration values came from a detector that could include gaps and ground time; we have removed those durations from the public estimates until the raw traces can be reprocessed.

What a day might cost

Monaco CEO Sam Blond reported about $6,000 for six flight hours, including up to two hours of transit. That is one campaign's price. We do not apply it to every company in the calendar. Read his account.

Aerial Messages currently lists $1,275 per hour for a two-hour booking and $935 per hour at 100 hours. Ask an operator about transit, banner production and weather cancellations before comparing quotes. Published rates · Booking guide.

Fuel and carbon: an example, not a tally

For a hypothetical four-hour flight burning eight gallons an hour, 32 gallons of aviation gasoline would produce about 266 kg of CO₂. The EPA lists 8.31 kg CO₂ per gallon. This example covers combustion only.

We do not know the fuel consumption or total flight hours of each campaign, so we do not publish per-brand emissions or spending totals. EPA emission factors.

Image credits

Social previews use “Adversiting banner airplane” by Lee Cannon, CC BY-SA 2.0. The booking guide credits its photo below the image.