Flight trackers watching northwest Arkansas on Thursday would have seen a small plane looping back and forth over the same stretch of hills for most of the day. Once it landed, the full route told a very different story. Pilot Benjamin McDaniel had traced a sprawling GTA 6 tribute across the map, complete with the game’s logo and pieces of its cover art.
According to FlightAware, McDaniel’s Cessna Skylane RG took off from Bentonville Municipal Airport at 11:29 a.m. local time on November 5 and didn’t touch down again until 7:37 p.m. That adds up to eight hours and eight minutes in the air, and the tracking site logs an actual distance of 909 miles for a trip that started and ended at the same airport.
The track log shows the plane spending most of the flight at roughly 10,000 feet and moving at around 115 mph while it worked through the design east of Fayetteville. The finished route spans nearly 30 miles from end to end. It features palm trees, a helicopter, a woman in sunglasses, the Grand Theft Auto VI logo, and a row of cars stretched along the bottom.
McDaniel says he has been waiting 11 years for this moment
McDaniel, who posts his work as @thepilotpicasso, shared a time-lapse of the route on X the following day and tagged Rockstar Games directly in the post. The clip has picked up tens of thousands of views so far. “I spent 8 hours drawing GTA 6 in the sky but realistically I’ve been waiting 11 years for this moment,” Benjamin McDaniel wrote.
He later added a reply urging his followers to tag Rockstar so the studio would see the drawing. Nobody below could have spotted it in person, however, as the image only exists as a GPS trail on flight-tracking maps. No smoke was involved, and the full picture only came together once the plane was back on the ground in Bentonville…