A pilot just “drew” GTA 6 across the sky over Arkansas — on a flight tracker

Eight hours in a 1978 Cessna, one flight path, and the GTA 6 logo appears on Flightradar24 days before launch.

Two weeks before Grand Theft Auto VI is due to launch on November 19, a pilot from Arkansas has turned his flight path into fan art. Benjamin G. McDaniel III, who calls himself “The Pilot Picasso”, spent about eight hours flying a 1978 Cessna 182 out of Bentonville. Seen from the ground, the flight was nothing special. On Flightradar24, the route traces the GTA VI logo and motifs from the game’s cover: a woman with a pistol, a sports car, an alligator, palm trees and a helicopter.

How flight-track art works. The drawing is not skywriting. It exists only in the GPS track that flight-tracking services record. The pilot plans the picture as a route in advance, then flies it by hand, turn by turn. One missed turn and the line is off for good.

Not a Rockstar stunt. According to current reports this is an independent fan project. There is no confirmation that Rockstar Games commissioned or paid for the flight.

How to see it yourself The drawing lives in the flight history, not in the sky. On Flightradar24 or similar trackers, you can open the aircraft’s past flights by its registration (N1810R) and replay the route. The full picture only appears once you zoom out, because every line of the logo is a stretch of flight path that’s miles long.

A small art form with a big audience GPS and flight-track drawings have become a niche hobby among pilots and runners. A shape that looks simple on a map takes hours of planning: every corner has to be a turn the aircraft can actually fly, and wind pushes the plane off course all the time. That is why drawings like this one take a whole day of flying, and why they spread so quickly on social media when they work.

Why it matters. GTA VI is one of the most anticipated releases in years. Fan projects like this one show how much attention the launch draws, even from people who are not developers.