On Sunday, as he was trying to process the mass shootings that has just devastated several Nova Scotia communities, Dimitri Neonakis couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed to do something.
“In this terrible time, in this terrible tragedy, I just wanted to embrace the community… to tell the people that I love them and I think of them in my own way,” Neonakis told Huddle in an interview Monday morning.
He knew he couldn’t go to Portapique, even though he wanted to. And he didn’t have any other way to communicate his love or support to the victims.
So he turned to the only tool he could think of: his plane.
Neonakis is a hobby pilot who’s been flying for about 20 years. Since 2017, he’s also run an organization called Dream Wings. Through it, he takes children with special needs on educational flights.
Yesterday, he decided to trace a heart in the sky with the flight path of his plane directly over the affected communities.
So at 7:35 pm, just as the sun was setting, he and his partner took off from a windy Halifax runway in his Cirrus SR22 single-engine airplane and flew towards the Bay of Fundy.
The flight was quiet and peaceful.
With his iPad perched on his knee, Neonakis began tracking his flight path, adjusting the plane’s direction by two degrees every ten seconds to create the shape of a heart.
The middle was the hardest. When he got there, Neonakis banked in a tight, 60-degree turn to create the v-shape he needed. Then he restarted his two-degree course corrections and finished off the design.
A little over an hour later, at 8:41 pm, Neonakis landed back at the Halifax airport. The air traffic controller directed him to exit Charlie and had him follow Alpha and Juliet to his parking spot.
Then she told him how beautiful his flight path had been.
“Right then and there I knew we weren’t alone in that cockpit; there were thousands of people with us,” Neonakis said.
Shortly after he completed his flight, radar images of his flight path appeared on the internet, attracting hundreds of thousands of likes, shares, and comments of support.
Neonakis said he never intended for the heart to go viral. It was something he and his partner just felt they needed to do, and they expected only a few people would ever know about it.
“I wanted to tell the people, ‘look, I’m here, I’m supporting you, I think of you.’ But nobody was watching. It was all something I felt like doing myself, and it felt good,” he says.
However, he said that his small gesture has become even more meaningful now that it has touched so many people.
“I fly a lot every year, and I know every corner of Nova Scotia. But this was probably the best flight I’ve ever taken,” he said. “I hope it helped people out there know to stay strong, we’ll get through this, and we’ll get through this together.”
A version of this story was published in Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
