»Trump’s visits batter family’s banner-towing air service,
LAN TANA—Hadley Doyle-Gonzalez says President Donald Trump’s weekends in Mar-a-Lago have all but put her family ’s banner-towing air service out of business.
The flight restrictions placed on the Lantana airport effectively shut down Sky words Advertising, owned by Hadley and her husband Jorge, she said Monday.
Hadley said the couple’s keeping the family Piper Super Cub but has put its two other planes up for sale. And Jorge has taken a job flying for a commercial airline.
The “mom-and-pop shop” had operated at Lantana for a decade, she said. The couple has three children.
Skywords still has contracts in Broward County and up on the Treasure Coast, but the bulk of its business is in Palm Beach County.
Because banner advertising is almost exclusively a weekend operation, and operates mostly during the tourist-snow bird season, Skywords lost 82 percent of its contracts and gave back about $250,000, she said.
“Nobody ’s renewing,” she said.
Sky words’ contracts suggest that it won’t pay refunds for unanticipated flight restrictions, but the company didn’t feel right about that and refunded the money, she said.
Hadley said the couple has a separate drone business, contracting to shoot aerials for local governments, insurance companies, agri- cultural interests and others. She said she has 20 pilots and 42 drones; some are employees and others are subcontractors.
She said the drone operation also is heavily restricted by the presidential flight limits, but unlike the banners, she can do that work during the week, when Trump isn’t in town.
The drone operation and Jorge’s work for the airline are the only things allowing the couple to keep the banner-towing operation open at all, she said. And, she said, “If we relied on our banner-towing business, we’d probably have to move in with my parents.”