A pilot spent five hours writing “You are loved” in the sky over Arkansas

Benjamin McDaniel took off from Bentonville in a 1978 Cessna on Wednesday morning and flew a fingerprint about 28 miles tall, with the word “YOU” inside it and “are Loved” written underneath in joined-up letters, a picture that exists only in the plane’s tracking record. He posted it on Instagram with a request to call your family and tell them you love them, and the number of the suicide lifeline.

26 September 2026

A map of north-west Arkansas with Wednesday's flight drawn on it: a green dashed line from Bentonville airport south to a fingerprint with YOU inside it and the words are Loved underneath, drawn in black west of Fayetteville and Prairie Grove, and a dashed line back to Bentonville — Where the plane went on Wednesday. The black line is the drawing and the green dashes are the trip from Bentonville and back. The fingerprint is about 13 miles wide.
Map: sheets.works, from adsb.lol flight data and OpenStreetMap (ODbL)

A pilot who calls himself the Pilot Picasso spent Wednesday flying a small plane back and forth over Washington County, Arkansas, for more than four and a half hours, until the line his plane left on flight-tracking maps spelled out “you are loved” inside the shape of a giant fingerprint, CBS News and the Coastal Television stations reported on Thursday.

The pilot, Benjamin McDaniel, posted an animation of the flight on his Instagram account, @thepilotpicasso, with a line of his own and the number of the national suicide prevention lifeline, CBS reported, in the month the United States keeps as National Suicide Prevention Month.

“Call your family and friends to tell them you love them.”Benjamin McDaniel, on Instagram, as reported by CBS News

Wednesday

The plane is a 1978 Cessna R182 Skylane RG registered to McDaniel in Birmingham, Alabama, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s register, and its position reports, which anyone can download from the volunteer tracking network adsb.lol, show it leaving Bentonville Municipal Airport at 10:58 on Wednesday morning and heading south, to a stretch of countryside south-west of Fayetteville.

A white single-engine Cessna with red and blue stripes and the registration N341JC parked on grass, with its wing overhead and a hangar behind — A Cessna R182 Skylane RG of the same model as McDaniel’s, eight serial numbers after his, at the Sun ’n Fun fly-in in Lakeland, Florida, in April 2024. It is not his plane.
Photo: ZLEA, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

By a quarter past eleven he was at the top of the fingerprint, and for the next four hours he flew it ridge by ridge, most of the time at around 10,000 feet, working the capital letters of “YOU” into the middle of it as he went, before writing “are” underneath at about twenty past three and “Loved” by ten to four in the afternoon.

Five small copies of the drawing showing how much was done at noon, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm and 3:51pm: the fingerprint fills in from the top and are Loved is written last — How far he had got at noon, 1pm, 2pm and 3pm, and at 3:51pm, when he finished.
Map: sheets.works, from adsb.lol flight data and OpenStreetMap (ODbL)

He then turned north and landed back in Bentonville at 4:22, five hours and twenty-four minutes after he had taken off, having covered about 683 miles, nearly 600 of them on the drawing itself, which the flight-tracking company AirNav Radar then turned into the three-dimensional animation that the television stations ran.

An aerial photograph of a single runway running diagonally between fields, with hangars on the left and a pond at the southern end — Bentonville Municipal Airport from the air in May 2011, where Wednesday’s flight began and ended.
Photo: Civil Air Patrol, via the Arkansas Department of Aeronautics (public domain)

The week before

Five days earlier, on Friday 18 September, the same plane left Bentonville at about eight in the morning and spent nearly four hours drawing the Mona Lisa over the state line, mostly west of Siloam Springs, KOAM reported, and after AirNav Radar posted the picture it was picked up by Fox News and by outlets in India, Spain and Russia.

A map of the Arkansas and Oklahoma line with the Mona Lisa drawn in black across it, mostly on the Oklahoma side, west of Siloam Springs — The Mona Lisa, flown on 18 September across the state line west of Siloam Springs.
Map: sheets.works, from adsb.lol flight data and OpenStreetMap (ODbL)

The same records show another drawing earlier in the month: on 6 September, after taking off in Alabama, he flew the interlocking A and U of Auburn University over Lee County, where the university is, and the Cleveland station WJW reported that an earlier flight of his had been a tribute to Dolly Parton.

A map of Auburn and Opelika, Alabama, with the interlocking A and U of Auburn University drawn in black over both towns — Auburn University’s logo, flown on 6 September over Auburn and Opelika, Alabama.
Map: sheets.works, from adsb.lol flight data and OpenStreetMap (ODbL)

Pilots have been drawing pictures with their flight paths for years, and in July 2020 the New Zealand news site Stuff wrote it up as a new trend under the headline “Pilot Picassos”, which is close to the name McDaniel has taken for his account.

The lifeline he posted with Wednesday’s flight is now called the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and anyone in the United States can reach it by calling or texting 988, at any hour of the day.

Carry a story in five words

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Yesterday: Pen-pals since a 1984 school assignment, Mike Rafferty, a South Philadelphia boxer-turned-cop, and Christie Leonard of Orangevale, California, finally met face-to-face Monday at Dean’s Bar. The five: 1984 pen-pals finally met face-to-face.

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Written from CBS News’s report by Dillon Fuhrman of 24 September 2026, Ross Underwood’s for the Coastal Television Group of the same day, Ann Lipsett’s for WJW and Shannon Becker’s for KOAM of 20 September, and the FAA register for N1810R. Times, distances, heights and the map are our own reading of the plane’s position reports from adsb.lol, drawn over roads and towns from OpenStreetMap, both published under the Open Database Licence; the photographs are from Wikimedia Commons, by ZLEA (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the Civil Air Patrol (public domain), and neither shows Wednesday’s flight; times are local, Central Daylight Time. The animation the news stations ran is AirNav Radar’s and is not used here.