There was talk of cloud slicing machines that would allow for skywriting in any weather. Engineers worked to develop glowing letters for nighttime skywriting. Reporters predicted the skydrawing of elaborate illustrated ads, envisioning enormous shoes and automobiles splashed across the sky. Extraordinary palettes of colored smoke would brighten the sky in vivid reds and electric greens, they said.

Pilots dabbled in color but it never worked as well as simple white. And for all the hype, skywriting fell out of favor in a matter of decades. Americans may have been dazzled by what some called “smoke casting,” but it was no match for the broadcast technology that was being developed at the same time: Television. Clear TV reception was no guarantee in those days, but skywriting was completely dependent on fine weather. “We have to have blue skies,” said Suzanne Asbury-Oliver, an Oregon-based pilot who runs one of the last remaining full-time skywriting businesses in the country. “You couldn’t say, ‘I am definitely going to write at noon on Friday over Times Square,’ because it might be cloudy or it might be snowing. And even if you could, you couldn't really say how many people actually saw it.”

The allure of better reaching distinct audiences pushed advertisers to TV rather than to skywriting. Radio and print were already defaults. And there were other limitations to buying ad spots in the sky. In 1961, The New York Times described a skywriter who sloppily put out a message that didn't make sense, only to fly back up, strike a line through the thing, and begin again. There were few skywriters left by the early 1950s. But in the early 1970s, in a burst of nostalgia, Pepsi decided to start skywriting again with a single plane from its earlier fleet. That's how Asbury-Oliver got her start in 1980. The red, white, and blue biplane she flew for Pepsi is now on display at the Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center. “I flew that for 23 years for them, and it’s hanging up there just like I left it the last flight,” she told me. “It still has my cushions and my headset.”

Today, Asbury-Oliver flies her own supermodified De Havilland Chipmunk. She taught her husband how to skywrite, and business is steady. But Asbury-Oliver says she couldn’t recommend the work to anyone new to skywriting who might want to make a living at it. “We always have called it a lost art because it was dwindling when I started and it still is dwindling,” she said. “There's really just a handful of skywriters left.”

These days she's writes occasional marriage proposals into the sky and takes assignments from companies looking for unusual ways to advertise. “An ice cream company in Portland, Oregon, hired me with the intention of writing the longest message that had ever been written,” Asbury-Oliver said. “It was, ‘Cool Moon Ice Cream.’ I don’t think we’ve done anything longer than that since.”