Devils fan Katz reaches new heights, 'draws' logo with flight path

If they need a plot for the next "Top Gun" movie, the New Jersey Devils may be ready to write a spec script.

The mission, of course, would have to involve taking a very specific air route so that the GPS tracking path of the plane's trip would look like a Devils logo, because that's exactly what Jeremy Katz did this week.
The 35-year-old Devils fan, a native of Summit, N.J., who now resides in Seattle and works as an engineer for Boeing, wanted to do something special when his favorite team came to town.
"I wanted to do anything where aviation tied into it," Katz told NHL.com. "I'm certainly not the first person who's ever done it. There are test flights for Boeing where they draw a picture over half of the country. But I had this idea to fly the logo, just to see if I could do it."
He did it. And it was spectacular. Katz's GPS flight path tracker "drawing" came out better than if you gave the average person a pencil and paper and asked them to draw the logo.

In the time leading up to the Devils game against the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena on Thursday, one that of course Katz had to attend, the team tracked him down, interviewed him on television and shouted him out on social media.

His plan was pretty simple. Well, pretty simple except for the whole flying a plane part of it.
"You have to account for the weather, the terrain, the airspace. If I am up there and another plane gets near me, it's pretty much ruined," Katz said.
So, he went out at night, a rainy, blustery day - "not the best flying day you could have," he said - but never wavered in his commitment to showing the love for his favorite team. He had a sheet of transparent paper with the logo on it and taped it right over his tablet.
"I had it taped to my iPad, I lined everything up, then it was just flying to the points," Katz said.
Total flight time was a little under 90 minutes. The logo took about 30-40 minutes to complete. Fans loved it. The team loved it. Katz even met "Mr. Devil" himself, Ken Daneyko, who let him try on some of his Stanley Cup rings.

"The response was way bigger than I expected. It really blew up way more than I would have thought," Katz said.
To get this level of loyalty from Katz is nothing new. Before the Kraken existed, he regularly made the trip to Vancouver when the Devils played the Canucks and almost always hit Prudential Center for a game when travelling through the Northeast.
"It's been about seven years since I missed a game and that was because I was on a flight and the game was blacked out," Katz laughed. "And there were some tough years in there. I'm definitely not a fair-weather type of fan. But to see them now, you can tell they are building, and they are setting up to be good for a long time."
As far as any future plans to top this outing, Katz has his answer ready.
"I'm waiting to do the Stanley Cup," he said. "But there's only one team I'd do that for."