Wing Walking in the 21st Century
If you’ve been to an air show recently and seen a lissome, lithe, lovely and leggy wingwalker, you’ve witnessed a free spirited young woman performer, Carol Pilon. So there I was, trying to explain to a captive PR woman that I had ambushed on the phone, what a great idea it would be to introduce her clients to this great wing walking team. Needless to say, she cut me short after about thirty seconds of my sales routine and said “Wing walking?” pause “I’ve never heard of wing walking, I don’t know what it is so it can’t possibly help my clients with anything. Good day.” This was followed by a brief click and the lonely, resonating tone, heralded my failure to the world in monotone drones. She should have waited until I told her about the media coverage my team regularly garnered but you know? I don’t think she liked me.
To the best of my knowledge, wing walking has been performed in North America for the last ninety three consecutive years. My chosen profession is easily recognizable to those with inherent love for all things aviation but to the rest of the world, I might as well be invisible for I have surely failed to be seen. Therein lays the dichotomy. How can something so daring, so vivid, so loud, so well documented, so publicized be so utterly imperceptible to the non aviation enthusiasts of the world? I decided to do a little survey. I took it upon myself to question all my acquaintances about wing walking. Most were happy to inform me that they had never heard about wing walking until they had met me and readily admitted that had they not met me, they probably would still be in the dark about it.
This tells me that we need to get the word out and this is the word. Exceptional! What is a wing walker and what can they do? If you’re my wing walking team the first thing you do is bring a truck load of entertainment value with you to an event. You also bring a fair bit of diversity to break up the sky. You offer spectators a change from the ordinary and you make yourself appealing to aviators and non aviators alike in the audience. The other thing you do is capture media in a substantial way. All that invisibility I was just talking about makes us look brand new and shiny even though we’re a century old. Any event with good media participation should be able to count on us to bring in 20 to 25 k worth of media value per median event of 30 k spectators.
Basically, we pay for ourselves and more before the gates even open. We represent over half of all female air show performers and we can appeal to your feminine clientele which comprise 42% of all air show spectators. We are superb role models for young women and let’s face it; we sport the coolest uniforms ever. No one else gets to dress up like a super hero to go to work. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect there might be a reason for that.
If you are planning an event, you might want to consider throwing a wing act into the mix. You will get huge impact for your dollar, your audiences will be entertained, you can break up the monotony of an all monoplane line-up, you can garner very desirable media coverage and more importantly, you can help me get the word out. The word is exceptional because we deliver exceptional value, exceptional entertainment and we create exceptional experiences.
