【2004 Archives】

If you004 Archivesto test fly an aircraft for 18 hours, with no passengers and no destination, you might as well get a little creative.

While testing their newest 787 Dreamliner engines, pilots for aircraft manufacturer Boeing did just that. Boeing’s jet flew a total of 9,905 miles across 22 states, on a flight path that drew a near perfect outline of, what else: a Boeing 787.

Flight tracking website Flightradar24 followed the plane’s progression and mapped its path throughout the journey.

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The plane took off on Wednesday from Boeing Field, a few miles from Boeing’s Commercial Airplanes division headquarters in Seattle. It landed at the same airport 18 hours later, but not before creating a massive outline of itself in the sky.

From wingtip to wingtip, the outline spanned 1,500 miles from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula all the way to the southernmost tip of Texas, making the image roughly 40,000 times larger than the jet which drew it.

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According to a tweet from Flightradar24, the flight was meant to test the new Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 TEN engine, which will power the 787-10 variant of the Dreamliner.

The plane reached a top speed of 655 mph at an altitude of 37,000 feet. Flightradar24 tweeted out a GIF showing a timelapse of the outline being created.

The gif this @BoeingAirplanes 787 drawn with a 787 deserves.

Still in the air at https://t.co/ltUSXWvJ2a pic.twitter.com/FOWMsfqYW1

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) August 3, 2017

This isn’t the first incident of ‘aerial art.’ Flightradar24 has previously blogged about flight paths that took a more whimsical route.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

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