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As a YouTuber, I'm always looking for things that I can do that would offer relief to people and collectively allow them to exhale out of their nose. I've been making videos for roughly five years.
The first one I did involved me pretending to be a model, which landed me tickets to London Fashion Week. I also broke into security conventions pretending to be a guy called Rob Banks. In another prank, I printed my resume on my car and parked it outside of my dream job at the BBC.
These big and outrageous stunts have no deeper meaning, they are done to bring people together and to share in the enjoyment of something that is just inherently silly.
In April 2022, I came across a news article about a guy in America who in the '80s had written "Welcome To Cleveland" on his roof, so planes would see that when they flew over, even though he lives in Milwaukee. I thought that was a really fun idea.
I also thought that it would be very funny if I could create my own version of that prank as, thirty years later, it is still being spoken about.
I began to think of a similar idea. After doing a little bit of research, I wanted to target Heathrow Airport in England by writing a sign including another location, to confuse passengers into believing they had landed at the wrong airport.
But I realized quite quickly that the planes at Heathrow descend over central London, so there wasn't enough space to install a sign. I then looked into Gatwick Airport and spent days researching how a plane descends on the live flight tracker, Flight Radar, and drew a circle on either side of the plane to pick fields that would be visible to passengers.
I watched countless YouTube videos of planes descending to understand the geography and what one could see from the plane. I finally chose Gatwick Airport, as it has lots of green space on either side of the approach, which was fantastic. It's also quite well-known. I went to my producer and we knocked on the doors of the people who own the land around Gatwick airport; some bits of land were owned by businesses, but some were private. Because it was weird to ask a stranger if I can use their field to install a random sign, we asked to rent their field for six to eight weeks while offering a fee of £2,000 ($2,370).
We finally came across a lovely family who would like to remain anonymous, but they allowed us to rent their field from May until early July, right beside the field where the planes from Gatwick land.
I finally had this field and I thought: "What am I going to write on it?" We wanted something applicable to British people who would find it enjoyable, but we also knew that not all those flying in were going to be British.
We thought a lot about writing "Welcome To New York", "Welcome To Edinburgh", or "Welcome To Dublin", but none of them were punchy enough. We then looked up the worst-rated airport in London, and according to Google reviews, it was Luton Airport.
This was perfect, as we didn't have that much land to work with—we roughly had 60 to 70 meters, and so we wanted as few letters as possible.
We then started the process of creating a sign. We couldn't paint the sign if it was going to be on the field for three months, because the paint would fade. That's when we came across the idea of using tarpaulin. So I paid £1,000 ($1,183) to hire an artist who ordered about 200 square meters of tarpaulin and cut out the letters which were about eight meters by three meters in size each.
The sign took two weeks to make and after it was finished, we put rivet holes in all of the letters. There were roughly 400 ringlets which we then added to the ground. At the end of May, we went down to the site and it took us five or six hours to hammer 400 pegs into a hundred holes. We wanted to make sure that the sign was very much nailed to the ground.
All together, pulling off this prank took about five to six weeks of effort and work. And the scariest bit was that I had no idea whether this was going to be funny, and I also had no idea whether it was going to be visible from the plane. My team and I were very nervous because the success of this prank was hinged on somebody taking a photo from the airplane and sharing it organically on social media, and that photo then going viral.
At that point, I had spent £5,000 ($5,917) on the project and had no idea whether it was going to work. I had spent money to rent the land, for tarpaulin, for the artists time and expertise in creating the sign, for petrol, flights and all other miscellaneous things that come with a prank like this. So, I looked into the shortest flights into Gatwick airport to see whether the sign would be visible, and that was via Amsterdam.
Towards the end of May, I flew from London Heathrow to Amsterdam. I stayed on the flight because the plane was going straight back to Gatwick. I then sat on the left-hand side of the plane where I knew the sign would be visible, and bingo, it was!
On my flight, no one was really looking out of the window or paying attention to the sign. At one point, I asked the lady behind me if she saw the sign, to which she responded it was probably a joke.
At that point, I thought that maybe the prank hadn't worked. The funniest bit was that because I didn't go through passport control in the Netherlands, my passport was not stamped. So according to customs, all they saw was that I had left the UK and then arrived back, three hours later, but hadn't gone anywhere.
I was interrogated by border control and had to explain that I had come from the Netherlands but I did not leave the plane. I then explained my prank to them and the woman at border control looked at me, smiled, and said, "Oh, is that you? Cheeky boy," and she stamped my passport.
In my mind, I immediately knew that my prank had worked as it was being spoken about in the aerospace community. So past that, it was only a waiting game.
Roughly twelve hours later, I saw a tweet from a woman named Abby who was coming back from a holiday in Mexico early in the morning. She had genuinely gotten confused for five to six seconds, thinking that she had landed at the wrong airport. Thirty-six hours later, the tweets about the sign began to go viral and they took a life of their own. The prank was being spoken about on Portuguese radio and was even in the Israeli newspapers.
My profession is not something that you would sit down and think: "This is what I'm going to do." But I've always enjoyed having fun in public settings with people.
Creating videos has allowed me to make pranks and share my comedy with the world. And I am incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to be in that situation, and I continue to make things that people will enjoy and will bring a little bit of joy to someone's day.
What was so good about my "Welcome To Luton" prank is that there were no victims involved. It created a collective enjoyment of something that was light hearted and silly.
We've seen before that with many famous pranks, there has always been a deeper meaning or a victim involved. These big, outrageous stunts don't really affect people negatively, they are just a bit of fun.
Max Fosh is a YouTuber and comedian. Max is currently playing at Edinburgh Fringe until 29th August and will be at the Palladium on 3rd November.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
As told to Carine Harb.
