Tom Haugomat Uses Your Brain to Fill in the Blanks

The article this image accompanies is about how private aviation firms handle the air traffic-jam conditions at marquee sporting events. Last year’s Masters brought more than 2,050 business aircraft into the region. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, which kicks off June 11 across sixteen host cities in three countries, is shaping up to be one of the busiest events in private-aviation history. Tom Haugomat’s job was to illustrate that. His solution is to draw almost none of it.

In film theory the technique is called hors-champ, the French term for off-screen space, formalized by the theorist Noël Burch. A film frame is always surrounded by six zones of implied off-screen activity and a disciplined director makes them felt. A cropped airplane tail tells you “airplane.” Four overlapping airplane shadows tell you “many airplanes.” Your eye fills the rest of the sky without you noticing. Haugomat trained in animation at Gobelins in Paris and still works as an animated-film director alongside his illustration practice. An animator understands that the frame is a window, not a container.

There’s a concept in visual semiotics (the study of how images make meaning) that applies here. The philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce sorted signs into categories based on how they refer to things, and one of his categories is the indexical sign. An indexical sign points to its cause, the way smoke points to fire. Haugomat’s shadows are indexical in exactly that sense. Shadow without plane, like footprints without a person, tells you something was there. It’s a compositional device that indicates something is present in the scene that you aren’t being shown. A deliberate withholding that nudges the reader to complete the image in their mind.

The story in the piece is told from the private-jet passenger’s vantage. Haugomat puts the focus on the field, where the actual sport is supposed to happen, and shows the jet traffic as an encroachment. The piece itself is mostly interested in how private-jet firms are solving the problem. The illustration registers a different thought entirely, which is that the problem has costs for the sport on the ground. The image communicates this in two to three seconds of reader attention, which is roughly the standard Françoise Mouly, the New Yorker’s longtime art editor, has described for what makes a cover work.

"How Private Aviation Firms Cater to the Flurry of Travelers Flying to Major Sporting Events” was published in Robb Report’s Motors/Aviation section on April 20, 2026. Illustration by Tom Haugomat.