An Arkansas pilot flew in a strange pattern for over eight hours, then his completed flight path revealed a tribute to GTA 6

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.

McDaniel is a commercial pilot and flight instructor who started flying in 2020, and he has said sky art began as a way to build hours and stay sharp outside of teaching. His earlier designs include the Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, and Spider-Man. He says each piece takes weeks to plan and is flown as one unbroken line from takeoff to landing.

The timing of the GTA 6 tribute lines up with Rockstar’s final push before launch. On the same day McDaniel was in the air, the studio posted a gallery of nearly 40 new screenshots of Vice City and the rest of Leonida, signing off with “See you in Leonida on November 19.” Two days earlier, Rockstar confirmed that digital pre-loading opens on November 10.

Getting to this point took a while for GTA 6, as Rockstar first targeted fall 2025 before pushing the game to May 26, 2026, and then again to November 19. McDaniel’s flight is one of the more creative ways fans have marked that long countdown, which has also seen fans faking GTA 6 playtime through a PS5 glitch earlier this year.

Pre-loading will require up to 212GB of free space on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and the new screenshots follow a gameplay reveal that Rockstar shared through Netflix in August. However, a PC version still has no release date, as the studio has only announced the console versions so far. Pre-orders for those versions have been open since June 25.

The official cover art that McDaniel’s flight path echoes will be available as a free printable poster on Rockstar’s website on November 19, the same day GTA 6 launches.