The evolution of airline livery design

Part 9

Aircraft external color schemes are a matter of great pride for airlines. They promote their owners’ corporate identity at each airport to which they fly. But one airline in the 1960s decided that having just a single color scheme applied across its entire fleet was a rather dull concept and took radical steps to change all that. Let’s investigate further.

Airline color schemes, or ‘liveries,’ have evolved hugely in recent decades. Today, special ‘retrojet’ liveries and others marking special events or anniversaries have become commonplace. Others, from special one-off schemes to those that publicize corporate sponsorship deals, are seen fairly often nowadays at airports worldwide. he evolution of the airline livery has come a long way, particularly since the introduction of jet aircraft. Traditionally, an airline would have a set design and apply that livery to every plane in its fleet. During the 1960s and even into the 1970s, the textbook for designing a paint scheme to be applied to the outside of your new airliner remained a fairly slim directory.

Based either on bare metal or a predominantly white fuselage, the general rules were to select a color for the ‘cheat lines’ that ran along the fuselage, slap your airline name above the forward windows and finish off with your airline’s logo on the tail. This basic…