A Ravenair pilot traced “I’m bored” over the Dee estuary on a Saturday test flight from Liverpool, and the message showed up on Flight Radar data at about 335 metres, or 1,100ft. The flight lasted two hours, and the words were visible while the aircraft moved over the Wirral, Cheshire, north Wales and the Dee estuary.
Wayne Barrett on Ravenair
Wayne Barrett, the operation manager at Ravenair, said, “I think the pilot was literally a bit bored, as it was just a test flight. Mind you, it was pretty skilful flying.”
He also said, “He’s not in trouble but we have had a lot of attention from it. The plane is now safely back in the hangar and the pilot is on his day off.”
Piper Tomahawk test run
The airline said the pilot was a flying instructor in his 20s, and Barrett said the Piper Tomahawk had gone up after a cylinder was replaced. He said, “I think the part was a cylinder that needed replacing. So when this happens we take the plane up for a test run to make sure everything is OK, which it was.”
The flight was therefore not just a novelty. It was also a systems check after maintenance, which is why the route drew attention once it became public on Flightradar24. For anyone watching the tracker, the unusual part was not the test flight itself but the way the pilot used the route to draw a message over open water between Talacre and Greenfield.
Talacre and Greenfield
Aaron Rheins, a flight tracking blogger on TikTok, said, “I’ve never seen a pilot saying he’s bored by writing it in the sky.”
That reaction fits the wider appeal of the clip: the message was large enough to be read from the tracking data, yet the aircraft was still moving at just under 100 knots. The scale made the phrase legible without turning the flight into anything more than a short maintenance check with a very public signature.
Barrett also said, “He was a bit bored but he probably had to concentrate a lot in the end to spell out the words so he was probably anything but.”
The unresolved point is why the route was unauthorised if the flight was needed as a test run, because that is the operational line this story leaves open. For Ravenair, the plane was back in the hangar and the pilot was off duty; for everyone else, the flight has already become the part that gets remembered.
