I’m really thrilled by how much you all enjoyed my Lufthansa rant. Here’s something...a little different. Just to rub in that I don’t inherently hate liveries just for having a mostly white fuselage, I wanted to talk about an example of that being done a lot better. I will also be doing so in a length which will probably be a bit more typical of this blog. I hope you all enjoy it regardless!
Kalitta Air (formerly Connie Kalitta Services and American International Airways; callsign “Connie”) is a cargo airline headquartered in Ypsilanti, Michigan. You see their planes around a lot if you randomly click on flightradar24 flights, especially over North America, but they don’t carry passengers, so to my knowledge they’re not a household name. At least, the friends I surveyed had never heard of them.
(image: kalitta air)
But their low profile conceals some pretty stylish planes. So, let’s discuss!
Like I said, I don’t blanket dislike mostly-white liveries just because most of them are super boring and Lufthansa’s in particular is terrible! So I wanted to follow it up immediately with an example of a mostly white livery which I really like - Kalitta Air’s sleek and iconic paint job, which the airline adopted (as far as I can tell from digging around) in the late 1980s.
It truly feels like Connie Kalitta’s main gig as a racecar driver transferred to the look of the planes with his name written on the side. (...what is it with racecar drivers and starting airlines? I mean, two nickels, but...)
The majority of Kalitta Air’s fleet are Boeing 747s, which does add to the look, in my opinion. Their fleet even contains the last 747-400 ever built! The iconography feels like it transitions well into the hump, and the entire thing looks balanced.
(image: kalitta air)
I’ll be honest, something is definitely lost on the remainder of the airline’s fleet, made up of Boeing 777s, in a pretty major way, but it doesn’t cancel out just how much I love the look of the 747s. Still, because the airline has kept this livery for so long, we can look back to the past to experience it on all sorts of shapes.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I still prefer the 747. That’s pretty incredible - I’m of the opinion that nearly all liveries look their best on a TriStar, so that opinion is a testament to just how incredibly good this livery looks on the Queen. It’s an acceptable-to-good livery on any plane, don’t get me wrong, but the core 747 fleet wears it transcendently well. (I am ignoring the 777s.)
If you’ve seen a Kalitta Air plane for more than a few seconds it’s likely the pictured N700CK, which got to flip a few assorted vehicles with her jet blasts in the 2007 Mythbusters episode “Supersized Myths”. Their 747s have been used in other media, but this is the main example. I think they couldn’t have picked a more striking plane to use.
Just look at the thing! The combination of red and gold makes it feel flashy and fast, a feeling which is added to by the swooping hockey-stick cheatlines which add a lot of interest to the fuselage with very little paint. It makes the plane feel streamlined and almost reminds me of the sort of paint jobs used on early high-speed trains.
(image: Science Museum Group Collection)
The font itself even feels fast, while being massive and quite legible even despite the shape of the A, and framed nicely on each side by the little wings. It does look a little like if a racecar was a cargo plane, and I love it. It’s not exactly maximalist, but every detail from the letters’ even heights to the ratio of gold to red feels perfect.
If you’re going to do a mostly white paint job (and there are plenty of reasons that airlines generally prefer to), this is how you do it.
Final Grade: A
N.B. For the sake of my own mental health, I am not going to touch on the atrocious revision of two years ago in this post. At the least, it looks like they’re not repainting old airframes and they have a small-ish fleet so they’re not bulk-buying new ones or anything, which means this livery will probably be around for the remainder of the service life of many fairly new freighters. Because of that, I do not consider the classic hockey stick Kalitta livery to be retired, and will not be tagging it as such. That said, since it’s not their current livery for new planes, I also am not classifying it as a 2020s livery.
If you have ever sent or received a package, particularly if you live in the United States, you may be familiar with FedEx, and @magic-gps requested that I discuss their airplanes!
FedEx (founded and formerly known as Federal Express) is a massive network for transportation of mail and cargo, and Federal Express Express (okay, no, I can't call it that, FedEx is legally the full name even though we all know what it's really short for) is its airborne branch, making up the largest cargo airline by fleet and freight tonnes conveyed in the entire world. Their largest customer is the US Postal Service, with whom they have an exclusive contract - any USPS air mail is carried by FedEx Express - but they also fly for countless other clients. They cover so much ground (air) that they not only have a dozen hubs but an additional SUPERHUB, located in Memphis. They're what DHL is for Europe but doing bigger numbers, and that's with UPS, Atlas Air, and Kalitta Air to compete with. Although they're based in the US, their website claims that their destinations include every US zip-code, plus "over 220" countries and territories. There are 195 internationally recognized countries at present. I don't think saying they fly everywhere is even really hyperbole at this point.
FedEx's fleet is massive and eclectic. They have the world's largest cargo fleet, with 650 planes (which are named by employees, frequently after their children). Add in FedEx Feeder, a second fleet of small propeller airplanes dry-leased to local carriers for use ferrying small loads to the full-size jets, and there's a total of 699 FedEx liveries in the skies with 88 more on order. They occupy whole swathes of tarmac. They're everywhere. Like snails after the rain.
Oh, and apparently this livery was designed by Lindon Leader (what a name) of Landor Associates, the prolific and highly regarded design firm responsible for hits like the SAS belly stripe livery and misses like JAL's two previous designs. I have higher standards for liveries that are just absolutely everywhere, so let's see if Landor was able to live up to them.
I'm going to be specifically talking about, because I presume this is what the requester meant, the livery FedEx adopted in 1994. The timeline of this is interesting, because the name of the airline stayed Federal Express until 2000, when the entire company rebranded from Federal Express to FedEx and added the redundant 'Express' to the airline's name. I've always thought that was very funny, and while that's charming to me I don't think I should be encouraging things like this. It's just sloppy and a bit weird to say.
Before they adopted the livery they did briefly trial a new logo. From 1991 to 1994 they had this!
Boy do I not like that! It's significant to the history of the company in that it shifted the colorscheme from indigo and burgundy to purple and orange, except that the difference in brightness here is really almost upsetting and the logo itself is...it looks like that. It's very TRON somehow. I don't find the tackiness pleasant. It's just ugly. The typeface they chose is bad. The wriggly X is nice but every other letter looks a unique sort of hideous, with the E in particular looking like a rake made of sponge which has been placed in water and left to soak. Thankfully they moved on quickly, replacing this logo at the same time as their livery.
The fact that there's six years between the visual rebrand and official renaming is interesting. Federal Express was already colloquially known as FedEx before the official renaming, and used it in their branding, but they weren't legally FedEx yet, so for that little span their planes bore both names.
This adolescent period in the life of modern FedEx featured the 'Federal Express' subtitle in this serif mystery font which I haven't seen mentioned at all anywhere. I couldn't find many more pictures with the full 'Federal Express', but there's a scattering of seriffed planes out there, it seems. It looks a lot better with the 'Federal' taken out just by virtue of legibility, and I have to say I'm very keen on the way the subtitle is offset to align with the start of the E. It looks nice and aerodynamic. When the first word is taken out it has the extra benefit of lining 'Express' up with the 'Ex' that stands for it.
But there it is! The FedEx logo. Adopted in 1994, considered a contender for the best logo ever made, winner of over 40 awards.
I want to disclaim for a moment. I think it's always been somewhat implicit that my opinions are just one manifestation of the infinite variability of human thought and inevitably subjective but I do need to re-stress this now: these are my own hot takes. My opinion is not legally binding. Lindon Leader is an incredibly accomplished designer and I'm not even a designer at all. There is a reason that FedEx's logo is so widely acclaimed. My criticism of it is not an attempt to contest its legacy, and is - again - just my opinion. And it is an opinion colored not only by the fact that I'm an amateur, and by the fact that my tastes are different from other people's, but by the fact that this logo is quite literally older than I am, and tastes have most certainly evolved since then.
I think the FedEx logo is...okay. I certainly do not despise it, but I would stop very short of calling it the best logo ever. I'm going to talk about why I'm so underwhelmed by it, and it's going to sound like I don't like this logo for a bit, but if you power through that you will see that my opinion about it isn't as straightforward as the sum of my opinions about its parts.
The fantastic thing about this particular logo is that it's easily the most-discussed and best-documented bit of branding I've yet covered, so it was a delight to research. I didn't even have to call in my font wizard, for example, because Leader explicitly states what it is in this interview - a proprietary typeface heavily inspired by Univers 67 Bold Condensed and Futura Bold. I actually like Futura (the Cyrillic version is one of my favorite Cyrillic typefaces) but don't love Univers 67 - it reminds me way too much of the handwriting style I was drilled in at school. US schools have truly heinous taste in the penmanship they teach, and much like how Parker cursive inherently reminds me of third grade, Univers 67 feels to me like an adult version of something I've long since outgrown. The design of the letterforms here, with the exaggerated x-height and all the lines (crossbars included) having a uniform thickness of 'very', reminds me of the posters on the walls of elementary school classrooms.
Take a look at this. The green line is hypothetically where the baseline should be, but the E and D descend slightly below it. According to my font wizard this is fairly common as an attempt to some sort of visual trick, but I don't like it. I can make it out from a distance and it significantly bothers me.
Speaking of misaligned, I've always felt like the vertical line on the E was slightly wider than that on the D, but had dismissed this line of thought as an optical illusion - the darker color and the lack of detail at the top, plus the lack of gaps at any point in the E, artificially make the D look narrower than it is. I tried lining them up, and I was right, it's an optical illusion. I still hate it. What isn't an optical illusion is that the middle line on the E is thicker than the second line on the F - again, hate it!
And I just don't like this font! It's like if they fed different fonts to a neutral network and had it invent a weight bolder than bold, like the neural-network generated upperer and lowerer cases. I'm aware of the existence of ultra bold weights, and I'm not talking about those, because those are regular ugly and clearly made by humans. This looks like an algorithm expanded the letters until they were touching.
But the touching bit is intentional. The FedEx logo is hiding a little secret, perhaps the most frequently cited reason for why it's so beloved. Between the E and X, Leader slipped in an inconspicuous arrow.
And I can't pretend this isn't really clever. It's subtle but once you see it you can never unsee it. My problem is that one feature doesn't make something good on its own, particularly when it's something you can easily miss at first. The Sneeze interview linked earlier sort of implies Leader built the font in large part around the idea of the arrow, and I find that a little problematic. Sometimes an idea is so fantastic you just can't let go of it, but when you're designing something you just can't be myopic like that. And, to be clear, I don't think Leader sacrificed the aesthetics of the wordmark to accommodate the arrow. I'm sure he personally thinks this font is beautiful. But when I evaluate it for myself, I can't allow one good feature to overpower my own dislike for the font overall, even if it is legitimately clever.
I do have some nice things to say, though. Well, mostly one nice thing. I love the color scheme. I think the purple and orange shades here are a wonderful choice, an uncommon one but one that manages to be a visually pleasing combination. If either of the shades were less saturated, or the purple were brighter, it would lose its cohesion, but Leader chose the perfect shades to bring out the best in each other. The old red and purple shades were absolutely hideous, but he transformed them into something great.
But at the end of the day my opinion of the logo on a granular scale is irrelevant. And I don't say that because I'm in the minority here or because I'm not allowed to have an opinion or anything else of the like. It doesn't matter because the FedEx logo is older than me and it is FedEx. When I see something purple and orange, I think of FedEx first. Let me use an example by invoking something better left dead.
In 2018 the Overwatch League, an esports league based around the maelstrom of poor decisions which is Blizzard's video 'game' Overwatch, played its first season. A charter member was the Florida Mayhem, a team which was in all honesty sort of a joke (though not exciting enough to live up to their name). I stopped following OWL after the first season, so I'm not sure if any of this has changed, but they finished second-to-last, made some very questionable choices on the management end, and were representing Florida. All of these facts are ontologically comedic. But above all, these were their team colors.
So, this creates the clear issue demonstrated above. Certain brands are so culturally entrenched that even a passing similarity in visual identity makes you immediately look like a pastiche, even if you're otherwise distinct. Mayhem's branding is, in my opinion, way better than McDonalds's, but it was still the right move when they changed to a completely unrecognizable color scheme in 2020. You just see some things and immediately recognize them.
The cultural specter of the FedEx logo is very useful to the FedEx livery. As long as you do not royally mess up - which they have not - a FedEx plane will immediately resemble a FedEx package, even if it doesn't actually look like one, since they're mostly white.
...well, okay, the planes are also mostly white. And I'll be honest, on the 727? This plane isn't half bad. The clean line of the t-tail makes this sort of straight-line-down livery look so much better, and the placement of the wordmark in front of the heavily swept wings keeps the white tube from looking quite so much like a white tube.
But the 727 isn't the only airframe they fly. They're the largest operator of six separate types, most of which are fully retired from passenger service, including the MD-11. Their MD-11s are literally the only trijets you'll see around in the US these days - they only started retiring their DC-10s in 2021, nearly ten years after they flew their last passenger flight. They're pretty unusual among large cargo airlines in that they flew the 747 for just over five years, and not particularly on their own initiative, having acquired a few from a merger with the Flying Tiger Line. So the way the livery looks on the 727 doesn't tell the whole story.
Okay. So that...is a couple of white tubes. That's somewhat unfortunate.
I want to clarify that, while this style of livery has become increasingly popular over time, culminating in its codification as an outright trend in the late 2010s and early 2020s, FedEx adopted this livery in 1994. It is wrong to say that the FedEx livery resembles TAM, Lufthansa, or Icelandair, and more correct to say that all of the above carriers are wearing a style similar to FedEx (though Qantas and MALÉV came first). Despite the fact that I've been known to call these 'Lufthansesque', Lufthansa didn't invent this style and didn't do it best. Still, doing it earlier doesn't excuse it.
FedEx in particular suffers from the rear-heaviness issue. Though they have a larger logo which balances it out better than some (Lufthansa), it's kind of countered by the fact that FedEx exclusively operates planes I'd consider on the long and thin side. It makes the white look all the more dominant on the airframe.
FedEx does take one measure to mitigate this - the undersides are painted grey (in a style I've been calling 'Deltalike' to myself even though Delta absolutely did not do it first) instead of being the same white as the rest of the fuselage with the purple fully wrapping around. Also, they have the line remain straight on the third engine of trijets, instead of committing to one shade or the other, as older trijet liveries frequently did.
Compared to an ASL Airlines lease which keeps the underside white and the purple as a contiguous loop, this creates a much more streamlined look. But it's not enough to save this.
And I think what bothers me the most is how at odds this is with the thing people say is so brilliant about the logo - the arrow.
Arrows are, as Leader pointed out in his interview, definitely not a new phenomenon in airline liveries. Hell, we even had Arrow Air.
But there's a reason for that. Arrows represent forward movement. They're fundamentally indicative of speed, efficiency, and polish. And airplanes are more or less shaped like arrows, when you think about it.
Something being done very frequently doesn't make it somehow creatively bereft. And it's not like only painting the tail and the big of fuselage directly below it is reinventing the wheel either.
Cheatlines, and hockey sticks especially, were not a particularly new thing when my perennial example of 'boring idea, good execution', Kalitta Air, rolled out in the 1980s. In fact, they were done to death. But Kalitta Air's choice in color and shape, use of proportions, and stylish logo set it apart from every other airline to use this style.
There is a reason arrows are so common. They are speed and precision and kinetic energy. When you refuse to consider making something common your own, you often shoot yourself in the foot. With the logo constructed, with the motto 'the world on time' written on the nose of each plane, absolutely nobody would turn up their nose at FedEx having an arrow motif on its livery.
Ultimately, I'm a bit sad, because the FedEx logo, while I don't like a lot of the choices made in regards to the font, would provide a truly fantastic jumping off point for a livery that would elevate it beyond the point anyone could ever dismiss it as being part of a crowd of very similar designs, the way I have by lumping it in with Lufthansesques. Arrows, being a fundamentally long and tall shape, would also avoid the pitfalls of a livery type which I have already on multiple occasions critiqued for inherently creating a look of rear-heaviness, particularly on longer and thinner airframes, especially when the color used is a dark shade to contrast a white base.
That said, the FedEx livery gets a bit of a free pass where something like Lufthansa doesn't. FedEx's logo is so ubiquitous that unless you actively interfere with or muddle it, any plane bearing it will immediately be recognizable as a FedEx plane the same way a truck or package is. As a branding exercise it is certainly successful. It looks clean, it's by no means exceptionally ugly, it does its job...but it is so rich with potential and so impoverished in execution. Doesn't it just look like this plane isn't taking off, but being pulled by the weight of its purple slice towards the ground?
I'm giving FedEx a D+.
I don't feel good about doing this. I think this is an opinion which is not only contentious but downright unpopular. But as I've mentioned a few times my grades take into account more than just broad aesthetic appeal. Branding and environment factor in, but what also factors in is, as I said in discussing Saudia, wasted potential and a refusal to capitalize on what you have that's clearly good. When I graded Air Astra down for not reaching its potential I meant it as a kind gesture, not even a sort of tough love but an acknowledgment that I like what they have and I know they'll do better.
FedEx, however, is just disappointing. For the frequently cited best logo of all time, this is just unacceptable. This verdict brings me no joy, but the fact that this logo is so beloved doesn't mean I can go easy on it - to the contrary, it had a lot to live up to, and it just didn't.
This post is about liveries, I promise! That is the only thing it's about. No tangents to be found!
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! New* livery dropped from an established airline!
*not, like, brand new. Just relatively new. I was informed of it very recently.
It must be pretty hard to name an airline. I've never had to do it, but I have worldbuilt fantasy settings, and choosing names for things is broadly speaking very difficult. There's a reason so many surnames are either vocational, geographic, or patronymic. It's really hard to come up with something interesting and you just have to settle for "that's John from Over There. Yeah, the greengrocer. Yeah, Bob's kid," and that's how it's always been. When etymologies develop they tend to develop slowly and unintentionally. You usually don't just hit on a perfect name for something, but you need to put something on your tax forms, if you do pay those.
Flag carriers have it easy. They just get to use the name of their country, maybe with a 'royal' tossed in if they're still a monarchy. But private airlines? You have to mess around a bit. Some hit on something pretty good, like IndiGo or, I hate to hand it to David Neeleman, Breeze. And some, on the other hand...completely phone it in.
I have a soft spot deep in my heart for airlines with unbearably stupid names. Things like 'Jet2' and 'Fly2Sky' and my personal favorite, 'Fly Air'. Cargo carriers have their own brand of this, some combination of 'Cargo' and frequently 'Logic', leading to my personal favorite 'CargoLogicAir', which went defunct last year.
One name is really weirdly popular. Seriously, I don't get why it's popular, because it's a terrible name. I've done a lot of talking about national airlines, lowercase, adjective followed by noun, but it's time to talk about National Airlines, proper noun, capitalized.
Why would you name your airline this? It's such a silly name. National...to what country? Certainly it's probably clear based on what country it's operating in, but I don't think that's an excuse. And there have been an entire five National Airlineses in the US. Since 1934 there has never been a period of five years or more without at least one, and sometimes more, National Airlines in operation. It's a bizarre phenomenon and my only guess is that it's a side effect of the US's lack of flag carrier, where legacy carriers all wanted to have a name that sort of sounded like what a flag carrier might have. United Airlines, American Airlines, US Airways/USAir, Republic Airlines...National Airlines just feels like it belongs there.
I might cover this livery in future. Let me know if you'd want that.
Without question the most historically significant National Airlines was the one founded in 1934. Based in Miami, in the 70s it was one of the elite few carriers - the others being Braniff, TWA, and of course Pan Am - allowed to operate service to Europe, meaning it was actually an international airline. It was merged into Pan Am in 1980.
Today's National Airlines was founded in 1985. That's right, they've existed for nearly 40 years, likely without your knowledge! They fly charters, both passenger and cargo, though since 2015 they've also had a couple of scheduled routes - and yes, they fly internationally. Their fleet has ten entire aircraft. To be fair, they're all jets. The smallest thing they've ever operated is a DC-8.
For one whole year they had a Tu-204, for some reason.
If you know them, you probably know them for that one plane crash! And that's not important at all here and occurred in circumstances completely irrelevant to normal operation for basically all airlines, but I just want to point out that the accident plane was named for the owner's wife, and years on the company gave the name to another airframe. I'm not saying that this plane is also going to crash - it is so unlikely that it's not worth considering - but I do just feel like that's got to be tempting fate. Imagine telling your wife the second plane you named after her also crashed. I can see that ending in divorce.
Imagine if the plane was literally named after your wife, too. I could never do that to myself.
I didn't know there was a .aero domain. Huh! You learn something new every day. "We Deliver The World" is funny for an airline called National, and even funnier now that they're a scheduled passenger airline. Anyway, the livery. Nicely branded, not terribly many similar ones to confuse it with, big billboard wordmark in a legible and minimally offensive sans serif font. As for the main design...I look at it and vividly feel like it's familiar but can't quite place where from. Of course, it has quite the typical vaguely patriotic vibe to it, but that can't possibly be the entirety of it, so what...oh. I think I know what it reminds me of.
It's a shame the USPS doesn't have airplanes, because they could probably do something at least a little interesting.
It is far from an exact resemblance. But I think that has to be it.
The design on the tail also reminds me a bit of the IndiGo swoops even though they're definitely not related. It's just that sort of really long dramatic wave pattern in a similar color scheme. They even both have a sort of 'trim' on the side.
I do think the wave loses something by getting cut off sharply in the middle there. It reminds me of Airbus's carbon fiber livery where it starts to resemble a mermaid's tail...and that's something airlines should try to do on purpose, yes, but doing it by accident doesn't really do it for me. It feels like it stops the momentum in a way.
National made the...interesting choice of using both white and silver in the same livery. I think it...kind of works, if only because the white surrounded by the blue doesn't really blare out the way it does when it's the main color. The silver itself is...also interesting. It looks like the plane has been painted using metallic sharpie.
They probably use these to cover up chips in the paint.
This livery has a lot going on but it just feels kind of cluttered and boring, to be honest. It is undeniably USPS-y, so I think maybe somebody who doesn't live in the US wouldn't look at it the way I do, but it just reminds me of mail even though I don't think they even carry mail. The idea of being a passenger on a USPS-looking airplane is a bit strange to me.
Flag in the window not changing my mind about the feeling of the name.
This livery is one of contradictions. Clearly recognizable yet somehow generic; full of atypical features yet somehow still boring. It feels almost inexplicably cluttered, and above all it feels sort of sloppy. I think that's really a sign of the era it comes from. The 1980s were a weird time for airline liveries. It was in the early 80s when cheatlines really began to fall out of favor, and we entered an era of airlines trying to figure out what they wanted to do instead. They experimented with colorblocking, vertical stripes, all sorts of things that hadn't been seen yet. Not all of them were super creative. We got a lot of planes that were half white and half off-white, some early Eurowhite-esques like SAS's belly stripes and JAL's good-logo-bad-livery situation. It also produced a fair few liveries which really stuck out, enough to carry over to the modern day. Korean Air is a prominent example designed around the same time as National. Also designed around the same time is my second-ever subject, a livery I chose to cover specifically to discuss how a mostly-white livery could be done well: Kalitta Air. And a handful of these odd liveries are still flying right now, like KAL's.
Okay, but the all-grey, two-tiered wordmark DC-8 livery actually looks so much better.
That's where the sloppy feeling comes from, I think. Cheatline liveries, modern Eurowhite liveries, minimalist billboard liveries, even the transitional 90s horizontal colorblock - these were iterated on over and over again. They might be boring but they usually seem very deliberate. In the 80s, liveries were designed how I used to build characters when I was a preteen playing 3.5e. You add things and you don't really think about how they work together. And there's...some charm to it. But you know what? It's been nearly 40 years. Maybe they've refined it to something a little nicer.
No. No. How could you do this to me? You solved a problem by making it worse! Like, yes, it does look marginally cleaner at the cost of individuality, but just...why leave the red line in if you're cleaning things up? Before, it lined up with the start of the blue curve, but now it has no reason to exist! It looks less like part of the livery and more like, whoops, my monitor's yaw string is telling me my desk is slipping to the left!
Like, it's such a minimal change, and in theory, yes, it addresses my earlier issues, but it doesn't actually manage to stop being generic or boring, and it doesn't manage to stop looking a little messy and lacking in direction, and honestly removing the singular color they didn't share with USPS didn't help them either!
I think what bothers me most, though, is that it doesn't feel much more deliberate. It might be the fact that they made such minimal changes, or the fact that they didn't manage to make it look that much neater, but it looks like they tried to improve their livery without knowing what makes a livery good or bad.
Once upon a time they were novices trying their hands at an art which was in a turbulent place for even experienced airlines, unsure of what they were doing but trying their best. I can't give them any sympathy for that anymore. They have committed to being persistently incompetent. They make lip service towards improvement, but they don't know what improvement would look like. They're out of their depth. They're washed up. They don't know what to do.
Airline liveries often seem to function on a trend cycle similar to clothing. Every ten years or so, large airlines do a brand refresh. Smaller carriers, maybe every twenty years. But some liveries stay longer, either through timelessness or through inertia.
Kalitta Air was timeless. They kept their livery for what felt like eons and it never stopped looking good. Sure, it's a little retro, but in a classy way. It doesn't look dated, it looks stylish. I mean, this company was founded by a racecar driver!
I really like this picture on their website.
Maybe a couple of little tweaks wouldn't be the end of the world. I think the cheatlines could be shortened a bit, maybe, since they make the nose look a bit like it's being pinched, or like the cheatlines are a very elaborate moustache, and maybe the wordmark could be moved a bit forward. Minor tweaks on that order have been made before. But the livery as a whole is fantastic.
In 2021, they released a new one.
The livery of a cargo carrier from Michigan is a very minor part of my life. But when I first saw this image, I really, for a moment, thought that I genuinely wished I had never been born.
I read a lot of comments about it on whatever forums I could find. Generally a lot of my opinions are actually a bit contentious, but I couldn't find anyone who disagreed with me. And one thing I saw repeated fairly often was that this plane looks unfinished. You can't modernise something by just taking away one of its most prominent features, if not its very most prominent feature, even if white is in fashion. This livery was designed with cheatlines. Taking off the cheatlines doesn't make it look like a modern livery, it makes it look like a charter plane midway through being painted for a wet lease. It's just miserable.
And National Airlines isn't as bare now, and wasn't quite as incredible before, but it feels much the same. You can't update something by just removing part of it. That's not new. It's not modern. It's not slick, or clean, or minimal, or whatever else you want to call it. It's unfinished.
So they start out sloppy and they end up looking like a shell of their former self. What do I rate these? Well, I definitely prefer the original livery, that probably won't shock anyone, but the difference is so negligible. Sloppy and inept. Being silver instead of white, or cleaner rather than messier, isn't going to save you.
So they'll both get a D+.
That feels like such an unfulfilling rating to give, but at the end of the day I don't feel like there's anything else to say. They were just figuring it out, and I am too. I blindly stumble into a tepid dissatisfaction that makes me feel nothing at all, really, to the point my own distaste for the revision feels phoned-in. But there's really not much else to say about it. It doesn't feel like anybody, in this process, really understood what makes a good livery, and they didn't learn a thing since 1985.
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