Greggor Hines took to the skies last week to express his feelings about the COVID-19 epidemic. Using his father’s Piper Cherokee, the 19-year-old plotted a course westbound from the Harford County Airport (0W3, about 35 miles northeast of Baltimore) used to spell out “F*** COVID 19.” Hines told the Washingtonian that “We’d just got a new compass in the airplane, and I just had to check it out somehow.” He said that while airborne, he noted the flight path on FlightAware and it occurred to him that he could make a statement.
The high schooler, whose academic year was interrupted by the pandemic, just wanted to “express how I felt.” According to the FlightAware track based on the Cherokee’s ADS-B Out data link, the 194-mile flight took just under two hours at an average of 3,000 feet and 100 knots groundspeed. Kudos to Hines for both his navigation prowess and, ah, “penmanship.”
