Yesterday I went to the actual Grand Canyon. It would be a little odd not to while I'm in the area. I didn't stay terribly long relative to what I could have, beginning at Desert View and ending at Yavapai Point.
Desert View is a significant place for aviation history. It is the location of the memorial to the 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision. United Air Lines Flight 718, a Douglas DC-7 registered N6324C and named "Mainliner Vancouver", and TWA Flight 2, a Lockheed L-049A Super Constellation registered N6902C and named "Star of the Seine", collided in mid-air in the area visible from the Desert View observation point. All 128 people on both aircraft were killed. It was the deadliest commercial crash in US history, and the deadliest crash on US soil. It is still the deadliest crash in Arizona.
More than just the staggering number of deaths, though, this crash is meaningful because of how many lives it has since saved. Air traffic control in 1956 was essentially nonexistent, unrecognizable to someone living in the modern day. This crash forced reforms that essentially ended the conditions which allowed it to happen. Today, the idea of taking it on faith that pilots will always notice other planes and taking no other steps to prevent collisions is entirely unthinkable, and something like this is more or less impossible. This crash was also a major catalyst in the replacement of the Civil Aeronautics Administration with the FAA that we know and...know, by a congressional act in 1958.
The crash site itself is inaccessible, but in 2014 it was declared a National Historic Landmark. It is now commemorated by an plaque and informational board in the shadow of Desert View Watchtower, where you can easily see the place where two planes collided over a half-century ago. It wouldn't stand out unless you knew what you were looking for, but it's there, nearly unchanged from what it was when 128 people lost their lives amid its breathtaking scenery.
The long answer: Nobody knows. A lot of people have no idea or have never even thought about it. Many people have a person in mind they think he resembles, but they know that it's probably wrong. A non-negligible number think they know, but they do not necessarily agree with each other. After the research I have done on the topic, I believe that I do know who this face is, but this is not going to be an argument for my position - merely a presentation of this logo's origins and the theories as to who this face represents, a few thoughts about community and feeling like something is part of yours, and the story of an incredible man.
But first, a content warning, and a disclaimer:
This post will discuss use of an outdated term used to refer to Inuit and Yupik peoples which is broadly considered offensive. It is, unfortunately, inseparable from the story of the face on Alaska Airlines' tailfins. While I have discussed somewhat heavy subjects, including racism, on this blog before, it has generally been in reference to statistics or vague allusions to commonly held offensive sentiments, and I think that discussing a specific word which has caused pain to a group of people requires a little bit more of a specific warning.
Below the cut, there will be discussions surrounding Alaska Airlines' use of said word, with a bit on its broader context. This post is not meant to be a downer, and I don't think it ultimately is. But there is a lot to the story of the "happy face", and there is no use telling the warm and fuzzy parts inside the hood of the parka while ignoring the temperature outside of it. There is so much more to this story than outdated language, but it is still a part of it that can't be left out without overlooking the very people who the tail represents.
I imagine the context of that warning, unfortunately, becomes clear immediately.
Indigenous Alaskans make up 15% of the state's population, made up of various groups of what are called 'circumpolar peoples', who historically lived in the very northernmost habitable parts of the planet - Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, and parts of Canada and Scandinavia. While these groups are broadly somewhat related they are distinct in culture and history.
Alaska, specifically, has over 200 federally recognized tribes, around the same number as is present in the entire rest of the country. (That has its own context, but my point here is to illustrate the diversity of indigenous Alaskan background.) These cultures include the Athabaskan, Aleut, Eyak, and the two that those without personal familiarity tend to think of - the Yup'ik and Iñupiaq. All of these terms themselves further comprise multiple communities, and indeed Yup'ik and Iñupiaq refer to specific groups of peoples from the larger groups of Yupik and Inuit peoples - the groups in question being the ones who live in Alaska rather than Siberia or Canada.
The reason this is important is that it is generally agreed that the face on Alaska Airlines' airplanes is an Alaskan Native, and specifically a member of one of these two groups. A few people apparently assume him to be Abraham Lincoln or Bob Marley or some other famous person (in fact, I am editing this to say that one of the replies to my first post was someone saying they'd always thought it was Abraham Lincoln) but I doubt these theories are ever serious. It would be weird to put a representative from Kentucky on a livery for Alaska Airlines (...which admittedly is based in Washington). The reasons for this assumption are fairly straightforward - it's a reasonable leap from a face surrounded by what looks like a fur hood being identified as Alaskan. But I wouldn't be making this post if the answer was just 'eh, some Alaskan Native'. (And I would find using the generic ornament of an indigenous group as branding more than a little tasteless, in all honesty.) It is broadly thought that this logo is based on the likeness of a specific individual. The question is who.
MEET OUR MYSTERY MAN
So, let's start at the obvious place. He's their logo, so...what does Alaska Airlines say about the identity of this mystery man? Let's take a look at the press release for their 2016 rebrand.
I'll be honest, I wasn't keeping up with airline livery news in 2016. Indeed, I wasn't keeping up with much of anything and I can't recall much from that period. So I...did not know about this, and it took the wind out of me a bit when I learned it happened.
So, let's begin with that term. 'Eskimo'. I feel gross even typing it. This is an exonym used to refer broadly to Yupik and Inuit peoples, though many who use it aren't necessarily aware that the term refers to multiple distinct cultures. I've heard it used for the Alaska Airlines man, and I had always assumed this was out of the ignorance of individual people. I live in the United States, where it's still often used casually (as are a few other unfortunate terms other places avoid - the country seems to have perpetually not gotten the memo, so to speak). In Canada, it is more or less universally considered to be offensive, due to the groups in question expressing their opposition to its use, and this seems to be the general trend over time in the US as well. So while, unfortunately, I do hear people casually say it from time to time, that's mostly annoying classmates. I didn't expect to hear it from Alaska Airlines.
The phrasing, however, is just as much of a problem. 'Our' Eskimo, as a probably unintentional consequence of phrasing choices, implies ownership of not just the logo but the man himself. I don't think I particularly need to explain why some might take issue with this.
And take issue they did. There was a petition! The hashtag #notyoureskimo was started on the website formerly known as Twitter. Anchorage Daily News quotes user angelascox making a statement I think really cuts to the quick of it: "No, @AlaskaAir … you don't own an Eskimo."
Alaska Airlines did listen.
Well, that's..........better, I guess. Unfortunately, it does still use the word 'Eskimo'. And I should note that it isn't universally considered offensive and I've found Alaskan Natives who state that they don't mind use of the term, but these seem to be the minority, and as time goes on it's being phased out further and further. In the context of Alaska Airlines' use, the Anchorage Daily News provides a few perspectives:
Maria Shaa Tlaa Williams, director of the Alaska Native Studies program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Tlingit, said in an email the broader issue is about the use of "a somewhat antiquated word."
"(Eskimo) is a colonial term and it should be: Inupiaq, Yup'ik/Cup'ik, Siberian Yupik or even Inuit, or even generic term such as Alaska Native," she said.
Bobbie Egan, media relations director for Alaska Airlines, said the company made the decision to keep using the word "Eskimo" after conducting focus groups with Native leaders throughout Alaska, but she did not have details about those focus group results.
"Many of our employees and customers commonly refer to themselves as Eskimo and we've always sought the input and counsel of employees and customers," she said.
I do wish those focus group results were made public, but all the same this isn't particularly surprising. Whenever a term begins to be considered offensive this opinion is generally adopted in a bit of a mosaic fashion, with typically younger people first expressing discomfort and those from different walks of life having their own opinions - some more swayed by the distasteful aspects, while others refuse to let that stop them from using a word they've called themselves their whole life. This is broadly true across all sorts of contexts. I do think it's never an outsider's place to critique someone's choice to use whatever language they feel best represents them, but if there is a large portion of the group in question who find it derogatory we should avoid using it ourselves. There are certainly 'outdated' terms I use for myself but would feel a bit unhappy seeing used carelessly by someone who didn't understand what it meant and was using it, bluntly, because they didn't know better or didn't care to know better. If you are from a group which has historically been derided by others you can probably fill in your own example here.
There are a few reasons for the distaste many have for the word 'Eskimo'. To begin with, it's an exonym. This term was not used as an identifier by any of these groups, but by outsiders to refer to them, and particularly by Europeans and settlers who heard these words from other groups they encountered earlier and then never bothered to ask the people in question what they actually called themselves. Beyond the inherent issue of self-determination, the fact that these were the historical users means that it was often pejorative and othering and ought to be left behind with terms like 'oriental'.
The term is generally thought to have originated from a corruption of an exonym used by one or more Algonquian-speaking groups. The most popular conception is that it stems from a Cree term meaning 'raw meat eater', which people understandably find pretty offensive. There are a number of other theories, and recently linguists seem to most support an interpretation that it is derived from an Innu-aimun word meaning 'one who laces a snowshoe'; it could have evolved from both of these terms or neither, and I don't think it matters when it is already widely perceived as meaning something offensive. 'Well, actually'-ing somebody who says a term is offensive to their ethnic group by pointing out a benign linguistic origin is a pretty pointless thing to do - we've had this conversation before about the name Lufthansa. But beyond that, basically every slur I can think of was once a completely innocuous word that just needed someone to invent a hateful enough way to use it. And people have been using this word rather hatefully for centuries. Regardless of origin, it is a dated exonym, and if the groups it refers to don't feel it represents them that's enough reason for me to stop using it.
The other reason that this term is broadly bad to use is that it's just not a good way of conveying which people you're talking about. 'Eskimo' is generally agreed to encompass Yupik and Inuit peoples, which are two large and diverse populations spread across Siberia and North America. These may be closely related and similar cultures but they are not interchangeable. 'Inuit' has recently seen more frequent use as a replacement, which is at least a step away from the language, but is often outright factually incorrect, as it will be used to refer to Yupik people - who are not Inuit, but are the largest indigenous population in Alaska. 'Alaskan Native' and 'circumpolar peoples' exist as umbrella terms which are understood to be umbrella terms by just about everyone, but there is a legitimate misconception that these groups are all the same because of the use of a single term for them.
Maybe Alaska Airlines uses the term because they think 'Alaskan Native' is awkward for a slogan and they don't want to tie themselves into knots by committing to specifying whether the man is Yup'ik or Iñupiaq. That would be a problem, as they don't actually know who he is.
Beyond the term, there is the issue of objectification on a larger scale than phrasing. Annie Wenstrup, the writer of the petition linked earlier, makes an important point - if the Alaska Airlines man is the likeness of a real person, that person has not been paid for its use. Beyond that, Alaska Airlines is using the very concept of an indigenous Alaskan to market itself. There is definitely a dehumanizing element to it. Alaska Airlines is far from the only company to have ever used ethnic groups as branding, and I think that ultimately it's not my place to linger on this topic. It would be wrong to not mention that this is an element of his story, that people do raise this issue, and that this is a discussion that should be had. I, however, don't have a fully developed opinion. This is a conversation for Alaskan Natives to have, I think - I just don't understand the context of their relationship with the airline specifically, and I have no more ownership of the man pictured than Alaska Airlines. Because he was not an object. There is every likelihood that he was a real person.
WHO IS THE MAN ON THE TAIL?
The website mentions a short film. Unfortunately, the Way Back Machine didn't manage to get it, but it did catch the associated article. The thing this article communicates most clearly is that nobody knows who this man is.
Whether the artists were inspired by [a real person] remains a mystery to this day – both within the company and without – as no official documentation has ever been uncovered indicating that [...] the Eskimo [...] was based on a specific person.
Even Alaska’s archivists, a team of retirees and long-time employees passionate about preserving the company’s history, can’t agree.
As someone who is myself studying to be an archivist, I am currently tearing my hair out and flinging tables at people mere decades ago for never keeping any records!!! What is wrong with you people?! Why do you never think of me in the future wanting to know the context of things you probably think are obvious?!
Well, anyway, this might indicate that he's just a generic representation of an Alaskan Native. That would not just be a disappointing answer to this mystery, it would also be pretty offensive. I know that the NFL (an organization known for its racial sensitivity, as I think we're all aware) is a bit slow to catch onto this but I think at this point in history we're all on the same page about using indigenous groups as mascots, right? It's weird and dehumanizing. But that's generally in reference to a stock character based on a stereotype of this group, and often one which is an offensive caricature. Given the percentage of Alaskan Natives in the population, some of whom were certainly involved in making Alaska Airlines what it is, isn't there a chance that this is a loving homage to the group native to the land this airline represents? A way of saying 'this is who this airline connects to faraway places'? I think this was certainly at least the intention, and whether this is still tokenizing, whether the phrasing on the website - a warm, welcoming presence and a reminder of commitment - stirs up an uncomfortable feeling is ultimately a question for Alaskan Natives, and one with a far less unanimous answer than that of outdated terminology.
However, I'll say this up front: he is not a generic representation. He is a specific individual. If he weren't I wouldn't have written a whole post about him.
So let's go all the way back to the beginning. If we do this we find our mystery man was actually not created to be a generic literal face of Alaska Airlines. The intention was not an indigenous mascot, but to represent Alaska's heritage...in more than one way. Mr. Alaska Airlines was once a jellybean.
YOU MIGHT AS WELL PUT HIM ON THE TAILS
image: Vic Warren
In 1972 a set of four new "Alaskana" liveries were introduced for Alaska Airlines' relatively small 727 fleet, replacing the older 'Gold Nugget Jet'. (I will definitely be reviewing those one day.) They were designed by Vic Warren and meant to represent the heritage of Alaska's population, and came in four variants:
"The Prospector" - in red, a miner with his pick, representing the people who flocked to Alaska from the lower 48 during the Gold Rush
"The Totem Pole" - in green, a totem pole design representing Southeast Alaskan indigenous groups such as the Eyak, Tlingit, and Haida - I wish I could be more specific but I can't seem to find the specific totem pole this is based off of
"The Onion Dome" - in fuchsia, today I learned that's actually what those are frequently called! They are meant to represent the history of Russians in Alaska.
And, "The....you know. Him." He's in blue. You may notice he looks a little bit less genial here. , and there's a bit of lighter color detail. No elaboration needed.
It does feel distinctly less tokenizing when there's a white prospector right next to him. In fact, the rephrasing in the quote taken from the archivists is actually because they were referring to both our mystery man and the prospector, whose identity is even more lost to history. This feels quite a bit less sinister than naming your football team a racial slur. It's like if an airline representing Massachusetts (keep reading, Cape Air, this is a free idea for you) had a set of jellybeans featuring a Wampanoag person, a furious man in the process of being given a traffic citation, a whale, a large textile workers' strike, a university-aged Dunkin Donuts employee who can just barely cover the rent at the two-bedroom apartment they share with seven roommates, Giles Corey being pressed to death, Paul Revere, the Harvard University logo, and Tom Brady. It goes from feeling exclusively dehumanizing to
Over the years, though, use of the other three designs dropped off. I'm not sure why it did (well, I can hazard a guess about the Onion Dome) but that's just the reality. Maybe the totem I understand being difficult to immediately identify as a totem when it's in monocolor with little detail on a large plane. I do think it's a bit of a shame - I love jellybeans and I love representing more than one culture in a place as large as Alaska - but I get it, their fleet was small.
As for why our mystery man won the deadlock with the Prospector, that's beyond me, but it almost feels like it was destined given he was the initial basis for the concept at all. Again from Vic Warren:
The first time the Eskimo art was used was in a large newspaper ad promoting Arctic Tours. [...] Since it was a newspaper ad, the initial appearance of the Eskimo was as a large, strong black image. The marketing director at Alaska hated it, even though the ad performed well. [...]
A few months later, [I was] given the assignment to create a new corporate image for the airline [...] At this time the airline [...] only flew from Seattle to Alaska and within Alaska. They had recently moved their headquarters from Anchorage to Seattle and were taking a lot of political flak for abandoning Alaska. Our direction from the airline was to “create something very distinctive and modern, yet totally Alaskan.”
In retrospect, it sounds easy, but I worked for three months on every kind of jet design I could think of. [...] the airline’s account executive was sitting with me in my office. [...] He stood up and stomped out of the room, shouting, “Oh, to hell with it! You might as well put that damned Eskimo on the tails!” Ta-daaaaaa!
[...] I looked at the history and culture of Alaska and came up with four designs [...] But it shortly became evident that the Eskimo was the most popular image. And it was expensive to use all those different designs, so the other three left.
And thus Mr. Alaska Airlines was brought on board properly. And people were very attached to him. The thing mentioned earlier, that the airline was getting flak for losing their Alaskan identity - that comes back later in 1988, when the airline considered replacing him with a logo of a stylized mountain in the shape of the letter A. People hated this new logo so much I cannot even find a picture of it. This attempted replacement was for reasons unrelated to the criticisms I've mentioned earlier - he looked bad when printed small, was difficult to recognize, and might suggest to the people of California that Alaska Airlines only flew to Alaska. People were so incensed about this idea, however, that the state legislature decided this was a problem for them to tackle. From the LA Times:
The Alaska Legislature, which went into session on Monday, will consider a resolution asking the Seattle-based airline not to junk the colorful logo for one featuring a stylized mountain, said state Sen. Tim Kelly of Anchorage.
[...]
Alaska’s 20 state senators have voiced support for the resolution, he said.
Do they not have anything better to do with their time? No...zoning laws or tax brackets or ordinances? I mean, they've got some experience in aviation, I guess - they did make it illegal to push a moose out of a plane, or to look at moose from a plane. You also can't get a moose drunk. Actually, they have a lot of oddly specific moose-related laws, which I think is a form of environmental storytelling. You also can't wake up a sleeping bear to take a photograph of it. Safety is a priority, though - it's illegal to sell a child a stun gun and you need a concealed-carry permit for slingshots, so their priorities are clearly in important places.
Regardless, one thing Kelly said stood out to me. Emphasis mine:
“It may not be the best representation of an Eskimo, but it’s our Eskimo,” he said. “(Alaskans) feel an affinity with the airline. Alaskans feel it’s their airline.”
Okay, so this could be one of two things: a coincidence (more plausible, I guess, since it's not that weird of a combination of words) or an intentional reference to this statement by the company, which I think I would respect a bit more - a nod to history, all that - but if this is the case it seems quite strange they wouldn't have mentioned it as context for the use of their phrase when apologizing for it. Not important, just wanted to bring it up.
Despite the fact that the airline got a letter of support - “a graphic designer who is related to a pilot thought it was good"- they obviously did not replace him. Vic Warren actually weighed in himself on the topic:
My position was that if the airline’s image was confusing, it was because of the name Alaska Airlines, not the Eskimo logo. If they wanted to be a more amorphous regional carrier they should change their name to a version in the Air West mold or, at any rate, something less specific than Alaska.
And I do think I agree with him. You can choose between being relatable to everyone or having a heritage, making your brand just as much about where you started as where you are. I prefer the latter, but I have the opposite mindset of an airline. I am all about history and expression, and don't remotely care about attracting customers or making money. There is a reason Alaska Airlines doesn't have a tumblr blog.
“The Eskimo is a friendly, human symbol of the north, of the spirit of Alaska,” wrote Satch Carlson, an Anchorage Daily News columnist. “Take him off the Alaska planes in favor of some abstract, hip, meaningless design, you’re taking one step closer to that impersonal austerity that characterizes most other airlines today.”
...wow, so even in '88 they were tired of Eurowhite, it seems.
THAT LOGO THAT LOOKS LIKE MY TIO
So of course they kept the face. He got tweaked over the years - the 'fly with a happy face' campaign adjusted him to look a little bit less stoic, and of course the details were updated as graphics technology improved. But this is The Alaska Airlines Guy now. People are attached to him. An interesting effect of this attachment, though, is that a lot of people are pretty sure they know who he is, and that he's from their town.
People already recognize him as any number of a massive slew of celebrities. I find this extra fascinating because I actually have congenital prosopagnosia - I cannot recognize human faces, and while I can generally identify people in daily life by context like voice, posture, fashion sense, and hair, recognizing people from photographs is far more difficult. Unless I have two pictures next to each other and can compare the individual features it's basically useless - I never get that sort of 'click' of recognition - so it's been really interesting reading all the different associations people had, of which I have seen literally dozens if not hundreds. Reddit user DaBigBird27, in one of my favorite anecdotes, relates an experience where he was told by an LAX employee to look for the logo that looks like "his tio". And isn't it incredibly fascinating how that works? How you can tell someone you've only just met to find the picture that looks like your tio, and they'll know what you mean?
Look, there's something about grandfathers. I don't know what it is. (Uncles too, probably - I don't have any, though.) I hope I'm not insane for saying this, so any other grandfather enjoyers can weigh in, but I feel like grandfathers occupy a certain formative place in everyone's mind. He is one's earliest exposure to an old man and thus becomes their fundamental conception of one. Unless he is phenomenally cruel this ties him together, part and parcel, with the features of old men that can bring you comfort and happiness. I certainly experience this with my grandfather, despite having known him for a really tragically short length of time. If I were able to recognize faces, I think there's a very real chance that I would have thought the Alaska Airlines man was him for a moment.
And this seems extra true for those from Alaska. The Anchorage Daily News continues to provide a lot of anecdotes of locals discussing the universal feeling of proximity to the logo.
Perry Eaton, an Alutiiq artist who is originally from Kodiak Island but now lives in Anchorage, said that some people insist they know the Eskimo's true identity.
"It's always been sort of a tongue-in-cheek conversation," Eaton said. "Nobody's gotten emotional over it, it's just sort of interesting. He's very iconic. Some folks are adamant that they know who it is."
“If you’re from Barrow, you think maybe he’s from Barrow. If you’re from Kotzebue, you think maybe he’s from Kotzebue. If you’re from Nome, you think maybe he’s from Nome,” says former mayor Lukin. “I have not met an Eskimo elder who doesn’t sort of smile like that.”
Another piece of writing, although accompanying a story that (as far as I can tell) is fiction, or at least dramatization, contains some context that is definitely not:
By the way, that page also had a lively discussion which included a number of other theories about the origin of the image, a number of people claiming a family relationship with the person depicted [...]
Whatever the case, the image has obviously evolved and become less stern over the years. When the image was digitized there were further touch-ups and adjustments made. Most sources agree, though, that a remarkable number of native Alaskan people say that the person: “looks just like my grandfather!”
Even Alaska Airlines' own (archived) website describes this phenomenon.
“When I was a little kid, we all thought it was our own grandfathers,” says former Kotzebue mayor Maija Lukin. “We all thought it was our tata. Even if it didn’t remotely look like our grandfathers.”
Well, let me finally get to the point, because at least some of these people are correct. While he was intended to represent Alaskan Natives as a whole, the man was based on the likeness of a real person. There are two leading theories thought to be plausible. Both were real Alaskan Natives with ties to aviation who lived memorably in the proper timeframe to have inspired the logo.
CHESTER SEVECK
I'll begin with Chester (his full name seems to have been Chester Asagaq Seveck Downey but he is most frequently called Chester Seveck), who is the more common theory. (And indeed the man on the tail is frequently referred to as 'Chester' by people who think this.) The above-quoted Kotzebue mayor, for example, is convinced it's Chester, who was himself a Kotzebue resident. It's a remote place which relies on air travel to provide necessities, and Chester was said to have greeted passengers and crew as they left the airplanes together with his wife. He was often mentioned to be a reindeer herder, but I was afraid that this would be all I could find about this man who clearly was beloved by so many people that to this day he's remembered this widely.
Thankfully, unlike so many people who pass into history with only vague and distant reference to memorialize their full and remarkable lives, Chester Seveck has written a memoir, published by a bush pilot who considered him a close friend. It's called Longest Reindeer Herder and is available in its entirety for free, with the pilot and friend in question, Frank Whaley, including a selection of photographs he himself took of Chester. I really recommend everyone read it. It's not very long but it's extremely dense with information, giving a first-hand account of the development of airborne connections between remote regions from the side that doesn't normally get to tell their story. It also tells a lot about Chester, his family, and the incredible things which happened to him. One that really stuck with me was the time he was shot with a rifle but unharmed, because his parka absorbed the force of an entire bullet! It reads almost like a journal, very matter-of-fact and brief recounting of events which would have at the time been whirlwinds of emotions and little details now lost to the steady flow of history, but all of this was put to paper at once, and it's staggering just how much one life really is, how much we can learn from just some of one man's memories. About him, about the world he lived in, and about reindeer herding.
When it comes to aviation, Chester's experiences are a joy to read. He recounts his first time coming to the US, together with his wife.
Then Jack Whaley take us to Los Angeles. We flew in night time. We saw the lights down under us. I remember when we newly married in the year 1912 July 12th, I was dreaming my wife and I we saw the stars and sky under us. We were above the sky and stars I told my wife. Now my dream come true.
Eventually Chester, too old to continue his work with massive herds of reindeer, retired and began to work for Wien Airlines, traveling for promotional tours and guiding tours in Kotzebue. He refers to this as 'herding tourists'.
There are stories of the Lower 48, too, of the tours he went on with his wife. He mentions appearing with Steve Allen, Art Linkletter, and even Groucho Marx. He appeared in a minor role in "Ice Palace" (1960), a very poorly reviewed film which also happened to be the motion picture debut of one George Takei.
The final section of his memoir:
For long live and joy life, I believe these things--Keep busy and do good work. Have much good exercise. Eat good food, no waste anything and every day enjoy what it gives and do not spoil this day with much worry of tomorrow.
Be happy. I know this way how I be "Longest Reindeer Herder." Start 1908, finish 1954, altogether 46 years herd reindeer.
Chester was undeniably a gregarious person. He seemed to really genuinely enjoy the high profile his partnership with Wien brought him, not for any material gains but because seeing the world and showing it to other people made him happy. He had a high opinion of himself that he wasn't afraid to share but there wasn't an ounce of pompousness in it; he just knew what he was worth. He loved talking about himself and his story - I found at least one other interview he gave. If more people were like Chester I think the world would be a much happier place. I really envy the people who got to have him show them around Kotzebue.
His memoirs were taken down in 1973, and the ending sort of reads as if he's right at the end of his life, but that's not true. He lived until 1981, dying ten days after his ninety-first birthday. He has many living descendants, with 172 grandchildren and great-grandchildren at the time he wrote his memoir. I actually saw a couple of them in the wild while researching, talking about growing up and being told he was the face on the airplanes.
Chester is by far the most common claim for the Alaska Airlines face. People from Kotzebue are proud of this. I saw another Reddit commentor, who has since deleted their account, mentioning their mother telling them about him growing up.
I think Chester is a fantastic person to feature. His connection to aviation and his warmth and kindness, eagerly welcoming tourists into his home village, makes him a fantastic symbol of Alaska. This post has been my favorite to research of any I've written. Reading people's warm memories of BWIA and learning about the incredible history of aviation in Sri Lankan folklore are both things I cherish, but reading Chester's account of his own life was genuinely almost overpowering. I am a history student. Sure, I study public history specifically, but I still study history. I read about history. I read long textbooks, in-depth research documents, and primary sources. I read old newspapers, memoirs, observations by travelers. My sophomore seminar was an in-depth study of remarkably preserved legal documents from one specific witch trial in 17th-century Germany. It's rare that something comes around like Chester's memoir that reminds me how much I adore humans. We have always had so much to give. There is a legitimate debate about the ethics of Alaska Airlines monetizing the likeness of an indigenous group, but I'm happy that they put a face on their tails if only because it means I got to read Chester's writing. I wish more people did.
But there's one other person frequently speculated to be the face of Alaska Airlines, and it would be remiss not to discuss him.
OLIVER AMOUACK
There is less available about Oliver than there is about Chester - at least, less I could find. He appears to have lived from 1895 to 1987, and unlike Chester, who I only ever saw called 'Eskimo', Oliver was known to be Iñupiaq. In the 1950s he was a performer in a travelling show called "It's Alaska!", but that's about all you can find with search engines.
image: Alaska Airlines Corporate Archives
This is more or less the only image of Amouack I could find. He's the man on the left. Look familiar? That's not a rhetorical question. I'm face-blind.
That isn't all there is to be found, but what else there is I don't have access to at present. Brenda Ritchey, Oliver's granddaughter, has written a biography of him - "Know the Happy Face: Biography of Oliver Amouak", published 1997. The thing is, this book is crazy hard to get your hands on. Buying a copy is definitely way out of my price range. It's hard to find them for double-digit dollar amounts, and they go up over a thousand. There are several copies held by public libraries but most are in Alaska, which is pretty far away from me. Thankfully, there is one in a collection in New York, and I'm trying to get it on interlibrary loan. If I can get access to it, I'll make a follow-up post, hopefully adding context to Oliver's story like I did for Chester's. Clearly, his granddaughter thought it was worth telling.
Although Oliver is the less frequent claim, a few people are very confident that it's him. And it is impossible to prove conclusively whether it's him or Chester, or neither...or is it?
POINTING THE FINGER
This is where history ends and speculation begins. What you read from here is not fact - it is my own conjecture, made by someone with around a week's worth of research - someone who is literally unable to distinguish human faces, no less - and I encourage questioning it. But I'm going to make my argument: I am loosely convinced that the face on Alaska Airlines' airplanes is, in fact, Oliver Amouack.
The first set of reasons are contextual. Oliver, when he was in "It's Alaska!", was directly employed by Alaska Airlines, while Chester, though he did greet tourists for the airline, seemed to have much closer ties to Wien Air Alaska. If someone was looking for inspiration in Alaska Airlines' archives I think it's far more likely that they would have stumbled on Oliver's likeness than Chester's.
The second is, admittedly, rather weak, but I still feel it's worth mentioning. While the modern "happy face" is smiling, the original Alaskana image was not.
Take a look. This man is very poised, but he's also definitely got a bit of a stern look.
Now, while there do exist images of Chester Seveck where he isn't smiling, they are rare and mostly candid, taken while he's focused on doing something, like herding reindeer or singing, and often faced mostly away from the camera. They also tend to be from when he was younger, which the man in the image is clearly not. Given how frequently he was seen looking overjoyed just to be wherever he was, I find it a little bit unlikely that Chester would inspire an image I would go so far as to describe as 'frowning'.
image: Vic Warren
Now that's a bit more like Chester, but this isn't the original image. Rather, it's a later edit to make him smile, for Alaska's "fly with a happy face" campaign. I find it somewhat hard to believe that, were this Chester, it would have needed editing at all.
I also think that, were he to be the basis for the image, Chester would have brough it up when putting down his story. His memoir is from 1973, and the livery was introduced in 1972 with an even earlier newspaper ad featuring the same image. Chester had the healthiest high self-esteem I've seen in my life and he would definitely have mentioned this with pride. Maybe he was never told, but I suspect if this were the case he would have asked about it. It would be a little hard to not notice your own face on an airplane while greeting its occupants.
There's a major spanner in the works, though. That spanner is Vic Warren, designer of the initial Alaskana liveries, himself. Although it is no longer up, the Way Back Machine has helped me find an old post on his blog, discussing the logo and his design process. When I quoted him earlier, that's where I got it from. And he does kneecap my theory quite a bit - he outright states it's Chester.
Back in 1973, when I designed the Eskimo, an elderly Eskimo gentleman in Kotzebue was working as a greeter for the airline on its Arctic Tours. You got off the plane in Kotzebue and he was one of the folks who came up and helped you into a fur-trimmed parka to protect you from the cold. It was sort of an Eskimo version of the Hawaiian lei.
We had photos of him and others during the welcoming procedure. I used one of those photos as the basis for the art. His name was Chester Seveck Downey. Surprisingly, lots of rumors have announced that the art was based on all sorts of people, including Richard Nixon. Once, I heard a story that he was really Bob Marley!
So that should settle it, right? Maybe. Actually, though, I think Vic Warren may be misremembering. I don't mean to gaslight this artist who created an extremely recognizable and enduring logo, but he already states that the design was done in 1973, which is impossible because the liveries were introduced in 1972. He actually gives 1973 as a date throughout the post multiple times, even though I've seen it claimed the design was in the works as early as 1970. The post was first written in 2014, so I think it's perfectly reasonable for your memory to slip over 40 years.
Getting a date slightly wrong and forgetting who you based a logo on are two different levels, but I'd like to further argue my earlier point - if the reference truly was Chester greeting passengers I am absolutely sure he would have been smiling, and I can't imagine why Warren would have changed this in his art. I think it's possible he misremembered, and I also think it's possible he assumed the photograph of Oliver was of Chester somehow. Far be it from me to accuse someone I've never met of racism, but, look, most people fail implicit association tests. I think it is entirely plausible a (presumably) white man contracted by an airline he didn't work for personally could see a photograph of one indigenous man and just assume that it was of a different one he was more familiar with, especially if Oliver and Chester have similar faces, which I assume people who can tell think they do.
I don't think any of that conjecture is particularly convincing. I wouldn't personally be convinced by it. The burden of proof here is a lot higher than 'maybe he was confused'. But what finally swayed me to believing Amouack is most likely our man was a post on, of all sites, the digital sewer pipe known as Quora.
An aside: Quora has introduced a feature where at the top of the page you are given a response by ChatGPT. While this is going to give you an answer of higher quality than many of those provided by the 'human' users of the website, I find the answer it generated for this question both incredibly factually wrong and somewhat disrespectful.
So the most obvious thing is that ChatGPT is misgendering Oliver/Chester. This immediately makes it clear that this answer is fully nonsense to basically anyone sentient, though it still may well fool some Quora users. The 'names' given, Tlingit and Haida, are both those of indigenous Pacific Northwest peoples. As in ethnicities, not individuals. Fred Kabotie was a real person, and a real artist, and accomplished and prolific, and someone you should absolutely learn about, but he was not Tlingit - he was Hopi. As in, from Arizona.
image: Grand Canyon National Park
I am rather confident Fred Kabotie has nothing to do with Alaska Airlines.
What really disturbs me is that, while there is an option to ask more questions in an app, and an option to downvote, there is no place to state that the information given is wrong, never mind to correct it. Even the app formerly known as Twitter has that.
Beyond that, there's no way to give this feedback to the bot. Downvoting isn't the same thing as actual negative reinforcement. This means that there is no way to stop the bot from giving the same answer to the same question in the future, even though it is wrong, and even though in this particular case a major aspect of its wrongness is that it seems to believe all North American indigenous people are one coherent group to the point it considers Hopi the same category as Iñupiaq, which is a bit like lumping together Spain and Norway.
So, not to pontificate, but this is one of the reasons ChatGPT is so potentially dangerous. It can generate text which seems quite a bit like an answer while being completely gibberish, and it could certainly fool people. Deep-learning algorithms, as of right now, are not capable of fact-checking. You should never rely on them for answers.
Besides that, though, there are actual human responses. Most of them are, as you may expect of Quora, total dreck. But sandwiched in between someone who seemed to be under the impression that it's ambiguous if Chester was from Kotzebue or Nome and someone who appeared to believe the term 'prop' didn't encompass turboprops was an answer given by Keith Holmes, whose qualifications are 'knows Dutch'.
That doesn't sound promising, but he actually came with evidence. I'm going to give you the short version, but you should read his answer. Here is his method:
He took the original image of the logo, then flipped it horizontally to match the image of Oliver Amouack from the It's Alaska! poster.
Then he overlaid them and very slowly lowered the opacity. Like, it's torturously slow, so I'll just show some 'keyframes', but that slowness means that even I, faceblind as I am, could clearly see that they line up nearly perfectly.
In the 1970s, this process would have been done with physical paint. But nowadays it's incredibly easy to just up the contrast and lower the saturation on an image. So Holmes (aptly named) did precisely this.
...yeah. I mean, there he is. I think we found him.
AN IDENTITY UNCOVERED
So, there it is. People's opinions vary about who this man is and whether he should be on the tails at all, but I think it's Oliver Amouack. But I want to finish off this post, which has had its ups and downs, on a somewhat open-ended yet positive note.
No matter who this face is, there are people who love him. And I'm not talking about people who love making money off him, or about senators. I mean regular Alaskans. Even Annie Wenstrup, in the original text of her petition, acknowledged that there is a warm fuzzy feeling that people have about him. Though its inclusion is definitely potentially a bit sinister, the Alaska Airlines page discussing the history of the logo released concurrently with the rebrand touches on it.
“When I see that face, I feel proud. I feel like I’m home,” says Sallee Baltierra, a concierge in Alaska’s Anchorage Board Room airport lounge. “I love to see that Eskimo on the tail in other cities that we fly to, from Liberia, Costa Rica to Nashville, Tennessee. It makes me feel like there’s a little piece of home there waiting for me.”
The ethics of how it is done in this particular case are worth discussing, and whether the logo as it stands now should be retired is not something I am in a position to weigh in on. For better or worse the happy face is part of Alaska Airlines' history. The mystery has been put out there for people to solve, and it won't go away if they take him off the planes.
And while there are good reasons, reasons I agree with, that people scoff at the idea of representation being the same thing as justice, particularly when those with no skin in the game are making millions off it, Alaskan Natives are most of the history of Alaska, and they have propped up Alaska Airlines from its earliest days. They have been pilots, cabin crew, ground crew, maintenance, customer service, passengers, and, yes, tour guides. They have been there from the earliest days of McGee Airways, and when Alaska Airlines finally goes under they will be there on its very last flight. There is a difference between acknowledgment and objectification, and that line is not one for me to draw, but it is at least good that the question of who this man is can lead people to the stories of the real people who are so often forgotten.
The fact that I believe the happy face is Oliver doesn't make that reality. It could well be Chester. It could be someone else. It could be your grandfather. It definitely isn't my grandfather, but I showed my mother a picture and she did say that he looks very much like my grandfather...we are not Alaskan Native, I think it goes without saying. I don't think anyone I'm related to has ever even been to Alaska.
But I think there's something positive to be taken from his anonymity to most of the world. There are certainly negatives, the sticking points of profit and objectification, but were it not for the fact that there was a mystery here to dive down I would have never known Chester Seveck existed, never mind read his memoir. I wouldn't have known Oliver Amouack existed either, and I hope I can read his memoir too. If there is any reason for me to 'well, actually' someone who says the face is definitely Chester - and I'm not sure there is - it wouldn't be because it isn't him, but because I want to give Oliver the same recognition.
And I hope other people wonder who the face is, and look for the answer online. My blog isn't very large, and I'm entirely happy with that. I love writing my incredibly niche posts about airlines, and I'm not doing this with any expectation or hope of fame. But given the small amount of articles on the topic I hope that my blog shows up in the search engine results, maybe on the second or third page, and that maybe it can direct someone to Chester's story. I am overjoyed to have read it and I want other people to read it too. His life was a unique and meaningful one and I am grateful that he chose to share it with the world. I am excited to pass it on to all of you.
I set out to find the identity of the man on Alaska Airlines' livery. What I found was the story of a man who touched far more than Alaska Airlines. The happy face could be anyone. He could be your grandfather. He could be (and probably is) Brenda Ritchey's grandfather. In a sense I think, although his literal family should be compensated for use of his likeness, he is your grandfather - not because he is literally your grandfather, but because he carries that poised warmth that so many grandfathers have. I think there is a real benefit to leaving this open-ended - at least enough to keep that mystique that drives people to make that Google search and learn about the overlooked and thought-to-be-nameless indigenous men who make Alaska what it is. Maybe the real happy face was the grandfathers we thought he resembled along the way.
And Alaska Airlines be damned, Chester Seveck herded reindeer for 46 years and had his dream of stars and sky beneath him come true. That's more valuable, to me, than having a famous picture based on you. Pictures reflect reality, but Chester was real, and it is accounts like his which make history human.
You are watching a video on a popular video sharing service. It is a full episode of a popular and long-running show, generously uploaded for free. It is narrated by a calm man with a BBC accent of the sort which belongs exclusively in documentaries.
The narrator names a date between 1903 and the current year. It is accompanied by a location - an airport. An airplane is on approach. It has a certain number of people on board, and it flies for some airline. There are pilots, most likely two of them. They make some sort of mistake, and maybe there's an issue with the weather, or the ILS is down, or the instruments are giving misleading information, or some other thing has gone tailcone over teakettle in an alarmingly short timespan and now their approach is tremendously unstable. They aren't on the glideslope. They're too fast or too slow. They really need to declare a missed approach, but for whatever reason they don't.
The plane lands, or 'lands' - finds itself on the ground, regardless - either on or short of the runway. It bounces, or flips over, or just pancakes into the ground. The fuselage cracks, or splits, or peels open, or horribly catches fire. There is an evacuation. It's all very stressful at minimum, and an unmitigated tragedy at worst.
You scroll down to the comments for some reason. "Average Ryanair landing," says one near the top.
Ryanair (not to be confused with Ryan Air, a real but unrelated airline) is Europe's largest air carrier. It has over 550 airplanes and serves over 200 destinations. It is difficult to imagine an airline with a worse reputation - their CEO is a literal troll, their customer service is legendarily poor, and their ultra-low-cost model is one in which you inevitably get what you pay for. They are memetically despised, and their rough landings are the stuff of legend.
And yet their livery is understated, with a certain head-held-high gravitas. It is difficult to describe the legitimate cognitive dissonance which arises from Ryanair's aerosartorial choices, an effect that seems to touch more people than just me. On another airline, I wouldn't find this livery particularly thought-provoking. Enough substance to write a post about, but not something which lurks in my mind and draws my attention. But on Ryanair, it's downright fascinating.
I've said what I've said, but I'm actually a defender of Ryanair. Look, it's like getting a ticket on a bus or the metro. It's cheap (at least in theory - they seem to be getting pricier lately) and it gets you where you need to go and it's probably not going to be that long of a flight anyway so, I mean, whatever. I've flown some pretty long flights before in-flight entertainment was standard, Ryanair is fine. I never even noticed the hard landings until I saw people talking about them, and to be perfectly honest I didn't notice them afterward either. Maybe I'm just not bothered by hard landings, the same way I'm not bothered by turbulence. Who really knows? My point is that I'm something of a Ryanair apologist. I live in the US, where you just don't get dirt cheap flights like that and getting anywhere outside of your home metropolitan area by train (and even sometimes bus) costs even more than flying. Ryanair could make me board the plane by abseiling up it myself to save money on airstairs and I'd be fine with it if the price was right. I'm not a millionaire. I haven't got the money to go jetsetting around Europe on a real airline. So I mean this when I say it: thank goodness for Ryanair.
I mean, I'm not saying this because Ryanair is good, don't get me wrong. They are the Big Bill Hell's of airlines. They are the closest thing we have to John Mulaney's version of Delta. Ryanair is not just no-frills, it's hot-glued fabric scraps in the vague shape of a garment. They are legitimately comical in their commitment to service so Kafkaesquely bad that you almost wish you'd travelled by trebuchet instead! And all this for the low, low price of...well, I mean, they do get pretty low.
When I released my first questionnaire I added a question about Ryanair specifically because of its reputation and my own feelings about the airline. Multiple people did agree with me - well, it's definitely not comfortable at all, you won't enjoy yourself, but it's so obscenely cheap that this isn't really objectionable. You are getting exactly what you pay for. And, well, if you do want some semblance of the full-service experience you can pay an extra fee. Or a lot of extra fees. That's how they get you. The ULCC model relies on stripping out everything possible and then charging you extra for it. That does mean that if you need things like printed boarding passes or the ability to pay by credit card that come standard with literally any other airline you could end up paying a decent amount for your miserable cramped flight, but if you truly want the bare minimum they will charge you appropriately, and that is so important to me, because I have too little money to insist on being comfortable.
I do feel...particularly sorry for one respondent.
It isn't bad press they are legitimately a nightmare. A attendant once lied to me and told me that type of plane just didn't have toilets (it did. There was a working toilet on board) then proceeded to lecture me about 'not planning ahead and going in the airport'
This is kind of hilarious in a sad way and I'm very sorry that this happened to you. Ryanair is infamous for its bad customer service but it's rare you'll hear about cabin crew behaving this poorly at any airline. While this particular incident was a one-off, you probably will have a pretty miserable time if you need to call the airline about literally anything.
One person just answered 'bitches'.
Well, that answers the question "what is Ryanair", but why is Ryanair?
The world is full of low-cost carriers. Wizz Air, EasyJet, airasia, Allegiant, Jetstar, FlySafair, Volaris, T'Way, Azul, Nok Air, Frontier, Lion Air, jetBlue, and SpiceJet are just some of the dozens which fill the skies. They are often colourful, frequently grumbled about, and essential.
Low-cost carriers, and especially ULCCs, are a relatively recent phenomenon. They only sprung into being after aviation stopped being by necessity a luxury product. It's generally agreed that PSA (Pacific Southwest Airlines), an intrastate carrier from California colloquially known as the Poor Sailor's Airline, was the first low-cost carrier. While the large interstate carriers of the time had a sort of detached gravitas to both their services and their prices, and were often prevented from lowering said prices anyway due to federal taxes that didn't apply to intrastate carriers like PSA, a ticket on "The World's Friendliest Airline" was cheap and the service was casual and personable. The low-cost model is built on being an option for a normal person. If you don't have the money to fly TWA, you can fly on an airline which is made for normal people and charges you accordingly.
The model didn't really catch on immediately, though. I couldn't exactly say why - it might have to do with the lack of demand for air travel that wasn't either commuter flights or long-haul. There was some activity in the market, with Loftleiðir (a precursor to Icelandair) offering cheap-as-dirt transatlantic flights in the 60s and Laker Airways having a three-year tenure in the late 70s serving a similar market from a Western European base. Even today the long-haul low-cost market they served is notoriously difficult to make anything work in.
What is generally thought to be the next major player in low-cost airlines, Southwest, emerged in 1971. David Neeleman further refined the model, first with innovations in cost-cutting at Morris Air and later by raising the bar for customer experience at jetBlue. David Neeleman, though, was active right at the turn of the millennium. Low-cost carriers only really began to emerge in real numbers in the 80s and 90s, with examples that are long-gone, like the infamous ValuJet, existing alongside ones US residents have probably seen at their local airport, like Spirit.
Spirit is different from jetBlue and Southwest. Spirit Airlines is not just a low-cost carrier but an ultra low-cost carrier. As the name suggests, the difference is one of scale. A low-cost carrier provides less comprehensive and less ritzy service than a full-service airline, but they do so in the tradition of PSA, trying to provide a comfortable experience that makes people want to choose their airline. The ULCC model, on the other hand, guts out literally every possible feature and then dangles it in front of you on a string, telling you to pay extra if you want it. These airlines do not provide a good experience. There will be no baggage allowances, no extra legroom, and no priority boarding. The base fare, however, is almost absurdly low relative to even low-cost carriers, and as air travel becomes a fact of life more and more the humble ULCC becomes a necessary part of the ecosystem as the only way many people can afford to travel.
Ryanair is technically 38 years old, but it's only been a low-cost carrier since 1990. This pivot is the brainchild of then-CFO, now CEO (and ouster of the eponymous Ryan) Michael O'Leary, one of the wealthiest and most unpleasant men in Ireland.
image: Associated Press
Yes, this is actually a real image of the CEO of Ryanair. I imagine this may clear up a thing or two.
Why is Ryanair? Because Michael O'Leary, is the simple answer. Michael O'Leary is - and there is genuinely no better way to describe the man - a troll. If you take David Neeleman's image during his tenure at jetBlue, a sweet everyman trying to improve the experience by sitting in on flights and giving up his salary to employee medical funds, Michael O'Leary is the literal exact opposite of him on every point. A self-described "gobshite" and "obnoxious little bollocks" who has admitted to "not liking" aeroplanes, Michael O'Leary is a cruel, selfish, belligerent, publicity-seeking freakazoid on a mission to piss off everyone in Europe which has so far been largely successful.
I don't want anything I say about the man to come off as positive. Michael O'Leary is a wealthy ghoul (and, yes, he was born wealthy, no rags in his tale) who publicly berates, mistreats, and underpays his staff. He has expressed prejudice against racial and religious minorities, fat and disabled passengers, women, and just about anyone who expects to be treated with some measure of dignity. He has committed legitimate crimes, like impersonating journalists. He denies climate change and has accumulated his massive wealth by abusing the pilots and cabin crew who keep Ryanair adequate. In 2010 Ryanair was named one of the least ethical companies in the world. The fact that he is so absurd as to be hilarious isn't an endorsement or a defense of him.
That said, here is a short, curated list of Michael O'Leary's, and Ryanair's broadly (as their public image is really an extension of his and vice versa) most Ryanair shenanigans:
O'Leary installed a hackney plate on his luxury car and drove it in the bus lane to avoid traffic.
Advertisements have taken open and somewhat sneering shots at other major European airlines, like Lufthansa ('bye by Late-hansa'), British Airways ('expensive BAstards'), and the now-defunct Sabena (using a reference to the famous Manneken Pis statue). These have not been simple comparisons but outright name-calling.
One time they advertised sales to 'sunny' vacation destinations, like Norway.
Generally, their advertisements push so many boundaries that they were once found to have committed seven violations of advertising law in just two years, and I'm shocked they didn't begin an ad campaign centring around this dubious achievement.
They frequently misbrand airports way outside of major cities as being in that major city, with the most insane example being "Vienna Bratislava" - yes, Bratislava, the one in Slovakia.
Pilots are forced to pay for simulator checks while cabin crew are forced to pay for uniforms and training. Employees are even forbidden from charging their phones from office sockets, apparently.
Sometimes passengers are forced to carry their own luggage to the planes! Not carryons, luggage.
O'Leary, in a bold move, outright denied that the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull had created a massive cloud of volcanic ash hazardous to airplanes (it very obviously had).
He also said he would like for there to be a recession, since it would let Ryanair keep costs low. He said this in 2008.
One time he said travel agents ("fuckers") should be shot.
O'Leary claimed that Ryanair would begin offering business class, featuring "beds and blowjobs". I'm personally not sure I would want a Ryanair blowjob. That sounds really horrible.
Also, bold coming from an airline with no seatback pockets.
Apparently they tried to get planes delivered with no window shades (though they weren't able to because of regulations).
They've floated the idea of standing seats. I don't believe this will or indeed could ever happen but it definitely is truly dystopian.
Ryanair keeps trying to buy Aer Lingus. They keep failing, and they keep trying. Obviously, everyone in Ireland has a vested interest in making sure this does not happen.
Fundamentally, Ryanair doesn't care. They can and will essentially throw tantrums to get airports to charge them lower operating fees and if they can't get an airport to do this they just won't operate there. It's like negotiating with a seven-year-old. Except that seven-year-old is Europe's largest airline.
They wanted to buy the C919. This isn't, like, a bad thing, it's just really strange for a hardcore Boeing loyalist airline and I can't imagine how it would save them money.
image: Robot8A
This is the interior of a Ryanair plane. Note the safety cards attached to the seatbacks due to the lack of pockets, plus additional adverts on the seatbacks and overhead bins like this is a sports match in a massive stadium. It's also just quite ugly.
Fundamentally, Ryanair is just perpetually doing Ryanair things. Why is Ryanair? Because Ryanair is one giant publicity stunt. A couple of people answered my question by referencing the CEO saying he'd like to charge people to use the toilet, and that's sort of true in the sense that he's said he'd like to do this, but he's always been pretty clear that it's a publicity stunt:
Short of committing murder, negative publicity sells more seats than positive publicity.
Like, it's a bit. He's doing a bit. He's 100% in on the joke. For every one of the more particularly insane claims, like charging to use the toilets, he's outright denied it. Even some claims that are pretty borderline are ones he's contradicted at other points. He's a legitimate bigot who's created one of the most nightmarish work environments out there and just wants to suck money out of people by any means necessary, and he's indefensible, but that's not really what people talk about when they talk about Ryanair. They talk about charging for toilets.
Charging for toilets continues to be the number one story that resurfaces in the press and it’s the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve never done it, but it keeps coming up on social networks every three or four months, the media picks up on it and then someone writes a story on it.
Which I think is misplaced effort when he's also, for instance, a climate change denier who forces disabled passengers to pay for wheelchairs. And I don't believe for a second his climate change denial is based on legitimate convictions - he just doesn't want to have to spend more money. He would absolutely knowingly feed the world into an incinerator if it lowered costs.
Anyway, here is a picture of him having his face violently introduced to a pie.
image: Olivier Hoslet
All of this said, there's no such thing as an ethical airline - he's just playing it up to the extreme for essentially business clickbait.
I feel like the best example of Ryanair's general...Ryanairness is their Twitter account, which I have a sneaking suspicion Michael O'Leary runs himself to save money. It's mostly composed of firing back at complaining customers, Formula 1 opinions, and jabs at everyone from Boris Johnson to the British Museum. (Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point.) Their description, 'we sell seats, not windows', references the frequent complaints about seat 11A, which does not have a window. (To be fair, their website does warn you about this.) Their weird window situation actually generated my all-time favourite Ryanair tweet.
Here are some other winners.
No, seriously, I think Michael O'Leary might be writing these. I also really don't know how to feel about the fact that it appears someone at the airline - potentially O'Leary himself - has made an edit of a yassified Ryanair plane.
But at the end of the day, it's Ryanair. O'Leary himself has described aeroplanes as "a bus with wings on". As one individual tweeted,
THANK YOU to [Ryanair], for letting me see Europe for Feck All
and that's why I do think I genuinely have primarily positive feelings about Ryanair as a product rather than a company - you truly do see Europe for Feck All. (O'Leary has claimed both that he would introduce $10 transatlantic tickets to the US, and that he would make tickets literally free and make all profits from ancillary fees - while neither has yet happened, it takes one hell of an airline to claim that it's on the table.)
Ryanair isn't affordable, it's dime store. It's an airline you bought from Wish.com. It's the free pen you stole from a cup of identical pens at the bank which stops working within days. You're not just in steerage, you're on a tramp steamer. You get exactly the misery you pay for, and you go from one place to a different place.
And it's worth noting that Ryanair has at least one positive feature - safety.
When I ran my first questionnaire I asked respondents what type of airline they thought was most dangerous. Other than what's shown there was also an option for mainline full service carriers; unsurprisingly, nobody chose this. There were 50 respondents but 5 declined to answer this particular question, so the sample size isn't really significant enough to draw any conclusions from, but it's what I have. (I kind of wish I could stop to re-run this with my current follower count, but this post is actually a request. No, not for my wonderful beloved followers - for my dentist. Not joking. Thank you for making my teeth not have holes in them.)
20% of respondents indicated that low-cost or ultra-low-cost airlines probably had the worst safety records and practices. It's completely understandable why someone would think this, but without going into the actual statistics of plane crashes this simply isn't true, and in fact they're the safest category on here. While it obviously depends on the specific airline, low-cost carriers as a category are no less safe than mainline carriers. This is despite the fact that they tend to fly shorter flights and thus they operate more takeoffs and landings, which are the points in a flight where the majority of crashes occur.
How does that make sense? Well, part of it is that the airline industry has gotten very close to eliminating accidental crashes via innovations in technology and an incredible safety culture built on years of hard lessons. The world has paid in blood for crew resource management and GPWS, but it has paid, and now the sorts of crashes that would have been unremarkable just 20 years ago are completely unthinkable. Actually, in the 2010s it's quite possible more people were killed by planes brought down deliberately than accidents. But beyond that, the costs low-cost airlines cut tend to be ones that aren't safety-critical. They tend to operate shiny new fleets (better fuel efficiency, purchased in bulk) with large maintenance teams (shorter turnaround and less planes grounded for long periods of time) at less congested airports (lower operating fees) and indeed when I think about famous accidents that involve massive cutting of corners it's nearly always full-service airlines, save for egregious examples of low-cost industry pariahs out of business within a few years. Focusing on eliminating operating costs by making the passenger experience cramped and miserable allows for pouring all your budget into running a smooth and well-oiled operation.
The axiom "if you think safety is expensive, try a crash" is often attributed to EasyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou. And it's true. Beyond the cost of writing off a plane, of financial compensation to survivors and families, of lawyers and PR, of having to update your operation to make sure it never happens again...as O'Leary himself said, all press is good press...short of murder. A heinous, clearly negligent crash, on the other hand, can kill an airline as easily as it can kill people. It has done in the past and that threat will never stop being there. Airlines go out of business all the time for any number of mundane financial reasons. In many cases margins simply do not allow for something like a crash. Crashes have even ended the lives of deeply historic, beloved, well-established nationalized flag carriers, so this particular sword of Damocles could cut Ryanair's control cables just as easily. And they've managed to avoid this fate, with zero passenger fatalities and only one written-off airplane - the 2008 crash of flight 4102, caused by a birdstrike during landing.
And I'll be honest, "miserable and safe but a tenth the price of a train ticket from Boston to New York" (I am unfortunately not exaggerating) is a pretty appealing package to my non-millionaire self.
...so why do their planes look like this? I'm dead serious, it vexes me. I don't know what to make of this. Hey, did you remember I'm an airline livery review blog? Look, I can't help myself. Low-cost carriers as a topic, and how they're viewed, is probably the most interesting facet of the aviation industry to me. I feel like if I had infinite time and resources I might genuinely sit down, hit the databases and archives, run a few studies, and write a book about it - it's fascinating, and low-cost carriers are something that only economists and businesspeople seem to want to talk about. I think it's about time someone approached them through a lens of history and social psychology. There's not really academic value to what I do here, on Runway Runway, my tumblr blog where I call Lufthansa planes ugly, but if something doesn't exist I will create it even if my sample size is 50.
So how about how they're literally viewed - like, what their planes look like? Well, here are some low cost carriers I've reviewed. Notice something? They're bright and eye-catching. They don't take themselves too seriously. They're fun. The original low-cost carrier literally painted big smiles on their bright pink and orange planes.
Okay, yes, they don't all look like this. WestJet and IndiGo, for example, are fairly normal-looking. And there are full-service carriers like TAP Air Portugal (and condor. Absolutely condor.) that I would say have a pretty low-costy look to them. There is nothing wrong with that. Low-cost liveries are frequently colourful and exciting, with much more thought put into distinctiveness and charm instead of a passionless appeal to dignity. Indeed a lot of my most highly esteemed liveries, including all the ones pictured above, are low-cost airlines. GOL, for example, is a snappy, eye-catchy design in bright colours that's clearly not meant to look expensive. The same goes for Breeze Airways. There's even more examples out there I've yet to touch on, like EasyJet; ValuJet; Scoot; Spirit Airlines; Frontier Airlines; PLAY (and the late WOW air); Volotea; airasia, so on - to be dignified or clean is not the goal here. Even the names of low-cost carriers frequently are very hastily stapled together and generic, like EasyJet or Super Air Jet or Wings Air; JetSmart; SkyUp; Smartwings; FastJet; Sky Airline (just one!); MYAirlines; the classic ValuJet; flyadeal; and the legendary jet2.com, making no attempt at all to seem as if they have a legacy to fall back on. And there's even more out-there specimens, like Mango or even Nok Air. Many of them have specific themes, like Batik Air, Tigerair, or Buzz, which isn't something you see on full-service carriers, which brand themselves on national identity and the promise of luxury and good service - which is boring. Low-cost airlines, if they want to succeed, have to do something to make people remember they exist.
This is the fundamental shape taken by the low-cost product, which operates with few laurels to rest on and a mission of getting people to remember their website at any cost. Much like a can of Arizona iced "tea" guaranteed to cost ninety-nine cents, literally cheaper than a bottle of water, the package it comes in makes no attempt to look classy. And I am a heavy tea drinker who considers myself fairly discerning, whose favourite type of tea is gyokuro yamashiro (which is absurdly expensive), but you literally can't beat Arizona! It's potable and it's ninety-nine cents and it sort of resembles tea if you don't think too much about it and Massachusetts summers are surprisingly hot and the can is pretty and colourful. Sure, I'd rather have Ito En, but that costs normal money and Arizona costs 99 cents, and sometimes that's all I really have, and it gets the job done even if my teeth aren't enjoying the experience. A Wizz Air plane is a can of Arizona iced tea. It is ninety-nine cents and potable.
This isn't Arizona, this is a box of Darjeeling from Harrods. Ryanair outfits their fleet in handsome navy blue and gold. Their logo, an outline of a woman with harp-like wings taking flight, is simple yet elegant, and that feels so very wrong. I actually asked in my questionnaire what the colours of the Ryanair livery were, because I had seen people expressing casually that they weren't sure they could recognize so much as a Ryanair logo, and the results aren't worth showing in a chart because they're basically as good as random. I do want to specifically appreciate the person who answered "I don't remember but it must be whatever the cheapest colour of airplane paint is", though.
But the truth is that they have such a rich palette, and I do mean that in the sense of 'wealthy'. A deep royal blue paired with a saturated gold used as a sparing trim, these are the colours of an overstuffed plush armchair, not a budget airline. Aside from the name on the winglets and the giant billboard wordmark there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that is typical for a low-cost airline. This is not garish advertising, this is stately.
The layout itself is what I call "Deltalike". Delta certainly did not invent this style of livery but they are the carrier I associate most with it, likely due to the fact that I live right by one of their hubs. The Deltalike is a white plane with a painted tail unconnected to the main fuselage body, painted winglets, painted engines, and a painted underbelly large enough still be visible when viewed directly from the side. While a 'true' Deltalike uses a consistent palette for the engines, tail, and underbelly, there is significant variation. The detached tail is, in my opinion, the harbinger of the Deltalike, and I call liveries with an incomplete presentation of Deltalike features Deltalites.
This scheme is not as common as the Lufthansa Line variants but it is still very common, with its popularity probably peaking in the 2010s. Some examples of the true Deltalike include Air Canada, 2006 Icelandair, Azul, the old GOL livery, and jetBlue. Some colour-varied Deltalikes are the old Flair livery, the SAS red engine livery, and British Airways. An example Deltalite is the old Croatia Airlines scheme, which has a painted tail and belly and engines that are sort of painted. Sure, the engines are just grey and a bit of the tail extends onto the body, but it's got the colour concentrated in the right place and it has the painted belly, it's a Deltalite. A lot of liveries have painted engines and detached tails but no painted bellies, and I do consider these to be on the far end of the Deltalike spectrum, but they aren't what I mean when I refer to a Deltalike. They're what brown dwarves are to actual stars - related but not really the same.
Ryanair is a true Deltalike, but I would even call it an elevated Deltalike. The gold trim, like the cord adorning the hems a of a thick brocade smoking jacket, has an effortlessly shallow curve as it trims the rich blue underbelly, larger than that of a typical Deltalike and with a very deliberate shape to it which at the rearmost point covers half the fuselage by height but fades away to a sort of goatee at the front. This is not a plane which sat in a puddle of blue but an intentional cloak impeccably positioned, visible not just from the side but from the front. The engines, instead of being plain or just one colour with a website printed on, large and garish, are the same white and blue with yellow trim, the last traces of the setting sun melting into a glassy deep blue ocean below a stark white sky with which it inexplicably coexists. Sure, the detached tail still looks bad, it always does, but you can ignore it at most angles.
From below the dark blue creates that distinct cetacean effect, a certain brightness-inverted countershading effect, similar to what you see on airlines like KLM and other blue-side-up liveries. The underside doesn't have a huge, legible logo, visible even from the ground on final approach. One of the defining features of the low-cost livery, in my mind, is a large, prominent website. It's tacky and a little pointless (I mean, surely they can Google your airline's name if your wordmark is large enough) but it is downright ubiquitous. Even full-service carriers frequently heavily feature their website, but it's nowhere on a Ryanair plane. That's so, so incredibly weird.
Just...think about it. Their entire identity is outrage marketing. They are the xQc of airlines - bigoted, constantly in the news, and obnoxious. And nobody remembers what their livery looks like because it doesn't look obnoxious. This is like if MrBeast's thumbnails were lovingly curated aesthetically pleasing shots of scenery that could pass for screenshots from an actual film. It's not tacky and cheap and it's not generic and cheap, it's elegant and cheap. And of all airlines to look like this...Ryanair? Seriously? Ryanair?
image: Associated Press
The CEO.
The airplanes.
Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I find this deeply strange? This is not a clickbait plane. This plane is downright unclickable. It has never been clicked. I bet if I covered the name up and showed it to people (again, I wish I'd had the time to do this) I could fool people into thinking this is like United. Hell, I've learned from my other survey that the average person clearly knows less about liveries than I, the Joker of liveries, do, and can't identify basically any from memory. I could probably fool at least one or two people into thinking this is Singapore Airlines. I may try this on a few co-workers and then get back to you.
How did we get here? I have no clue. While Ryanair did start out as a charter carrier rather than a low-cost airline, and they always had blue and yellow as their colours, their very early liveries were just white planes with wordmarks.
This livery seems to have appeared very early in the history of low-cost Ryanair. Unfortunately, I can't date it precisely - the only thing I can say is that the earliest photograph I could find in this livery was from 1994. Based on the fact that their planes were photographed in different liveries right up to then, including this very brief TAM-like BAC 1-11 livery, I think 1994 is most likely the point they committed to it.
Oh, Adam Rowden, what a different world you lived in.
Even for 1994 this is a pretty conservative livery. Sure, this was before the real boom of bright and venomous flying billboards, but it's still strange. And Ryanair is no stranger to literal flying billboards in the form of logojets for such companies as Vodafone and Hertz, often sort of hideous ones, though I imagine these days nobody would ever want to associate with them like that.
And they never changed it, except that they did - to the modern, softer curve. This I can pinpoint with much more accuracy. It was changed in mid-2003 as new aircraft were delivered, while the older livery was phased out together with the secondhand airframes which wore it. I do not understand this at all. If any airline were to just make the decision to go full circus tent and be as garish as possible it should be Ryanair, right? Ryanair is a brand incapable of cowardly behavior. But they look far more sober than even the average modern flag carrier livery. I guess they don't think they need an eye-catching livery, but I just don't buy that as a full explanation. Imagine the news they'd make for introducing something truly heinous. I think their genuine best move would just be to put a huge picture of Michael O'Leary's face, blown up massively and poorly aligned with visible JPEG artefacts, all over their fuselages. All of Europe would be furious. So why? Why is this the situation?
So what's the verdict? This may be the hardest decision I've made so far. The options here range widely. I'll lay them out.
If I were rating this based on pure visual appeal, I would give it a B-. I am dead serious - this is a visually pleasing, well-balanced livery, simple yet elegant. The detached tail is my only major complaint. But I think Saudia's planes are quite pretty and I graded them low because I think they fail at representing their airline or having a distinct identity, so this cannot be my sole criterion.
I almost want to give them an F because of just how un-Ryanair they are, like how Copa's livery is literally not the Copa livery, but that feels wrong because that's still the Ryanair livery, it's not just a refusal to design a livery at all.
Do I marry these two into a tepid union destined for either divorce or a dramatic act of arson after a seeming eternity of languishing in mutual dysfunction in Tallahassee? I really don't want to do that, because attempting to balance these factors betrays the fact of their contradiction, the mental strain I've been afflicted with over this simple, pointless choice with zero consequences except maybe one of my followers disagreeing with me, which is fine. Unlike certain individuals I will not call you swear words and say you're an idiot.
The final option is maybe my least favourite of them all, because it's capitulation. It's admitting Ryanair is special, just the most annoying golf-ball-sized hailstone in the blizzard of absurd and comical frustrations which is the airline industry. But I just don't know what to make of this miserable little pest, this plague on the patience and knees of the traveling public.
Z. FUCK YOU IT'S RYANAIR.
It defies categories by being good, but being Ryanair. I hate that. I hate it, I hate their beastly little CEO, and I dislike that their planes are sleek, elegant, and could easily pass for an airline that doesn't instruct stewardesses to kick their passengers' shins as they walk down the aisles. If I am buying a ten-euro plane ticket I do not think the plane should look like this, teleologically speaking. At the end of the day I just have no better way to quantify my feelings.
We begin with a large fish even by the standards of the large pond in which we operate. A very intentionally chosen large fish. Deutsche Lufthansa is Germany’s flag carrier and the second largest carrier in all of Europe by passenger volume. In 2018, they unveiled a new standard livery for their fleet of airplanes, and it...well. It’s this.
Even the presentation - good lord, is this an auto show?
My feelings on Lufthansa’s 2018 livery are visceral. There’s no mental evaluation required, no taking it in, thinking about the choices made - I look at the modern Lufthansa livery and immediately, profoundly know that I hate it. And that’s not just because of the specific choices made - which are bad - but because of the space they occupy amidst a creatively barren wasteland within livery design. This is going to be a very long post, which isn’t standard for this blog, but my goal for an introduction is to break down exactly the sort of design that made me feel the need to start doing this to begin with.
But in reality that’s only the beginning. Yes, Lufthansa’s livery is specifically disappointing, but it is so much more than that. It is the purest distillation of the greatest challenge aviation faces today, far weightier than scheduling issues, outdated IT, and runway incursions. It is not the worst example of it, not in the slightest, but it is a large airline which has a very textbook presentation of symptoms and thus feels like a great example to describe exactly what I hate about this sort of design. Let me explain.
Essentially, airlines have found a formula. It goes as such:
Almost entirely white body. (There is a name for this trend: Eurowhite.) In some cases, there may be a colour on the underside, generally either a light grey or whichever secondary shade the airline has committed to. In the case of this Lufthansa livery, it is just white.
Aside from the white body there will be either a single colour (generally some dark blue, or less often some sort of red) or a few colours, usually but not exclusively on flag carriers to match their national branding. (The proliferation of red, white, and blue flags out there means that a disproportionate number of airline liveries are these colours.) Unless it is literally just a white plane meant to be as generic as possible for short turn-overs when leasing, it will at least attempt to have some sort of design, but it will be minimal, and:
All of the detail will be on the tail. There may be coloured winglets or engine nacelles, but other than that it is only at the rear of the plane that you begin to see any interest. Usually this is just a logo, though it may be an abstract design which looks like a default tumblr header. It will often only be on the tail, with nothing at all on the body proper.
The name of the airline written in a sans-serif typeface which is set as default on at least one word processor. Rarely will anything creative be done with this. It will (usually, except in egregious cases) match the impotent attempt at graphic design which has been confined to the empennage and it will have all the charm of a large retail chain’s flyer describing the benefits you’ll definitely totally get if you work for them - sickeningly corporate. Low-cost airlines may slightly vary the theme by putting their website onto the livery, either towards the back or just instead of the airline’s name. The brave will also write it on the ventral fairing, but most don’t even bother with that simple act. Some airlines have their name written in the language spoken in the country they’re based in, usually beside the English text, but most are only in English despite operating in countries where this is not the most widely spoken language.
Not every livery which has these features is badly designed, as seemingly small changes can make all the difference. There is the occasional livery that fits most, if not all of these features that has some clever tweaks or design choices which makes me actually think it’s fine, acceptable, maybe even decent. (I have taken the initiative of making sure a few of these are among my early posts, just to demonstrate that it can be done). And some airlines depart from this entirely and come up with something even more hideous. Yet I somehow find myself respecting even these more than I do Lufthansa.
The Corporate Standard Livery Design (Lufthansesque design, if you will) is - and I do not think I am being dramatic at all here - an epidemic. Taxiing through most airports, you sometimes have to actually try to tell the planes parked around you apart in the sea of red, blue, and mostly white. And I spend a lot of time looking at planes.
These liveries do not only fail to inspire me. They instill in me a profound disgust. They are not trying to be good. They are trying to be what I described earlier - decent, not worth complaining about, because that’s cheaper and easier than designing something good. Graphic design is not anyone’s passion here. They’re just trying to toe the line. They’re so poisoned by the modern minimalist-design brain virus that they don’t realise that to be acceptable a livery this simple needs to do something interesting. There must be a creative decision made somewhere, a compelling feature, or you may as well be flying an MLA-formatted plane. In their striving for adequacy they become not just ambient, but lukewarm. They are a bottle of water which has sat in the sun for so long that when you drink it, even though you’re overheating and parched, it feels only negligibly better than the air you’ve been breathing in.
To be fair, I do not only hate the Lufthansa paintjob because it exemplifies whatever-ness. Even in an industry saturated with gross in-flight nothingburgers served with some stale biscuits and a paper cup of Lipton tea, Lufthansa manages to offend in specific and unique ways.
Throughout its long history Lufthansa has had a handful of different liveries, but from 2018 onwards this has been the situation. They’ve never been brilliant, but it’s only gotten worse over time. I normally would commit to a separate post for historical liveries, but in a move that I don’t foresee becoming particularly common I’d like to talk about the history and evolution of Lufthansa’s liveries from the golden age to now - the fall, if you will.
(image: lufthansa bildarchiv)
Their early liveries were already pretty much plain white or metal, but they still had a few features that made them seem a bit less like photocopy paper which was meant to be printed plain blue but only got through a tenth of the sheet before ink ran out. To begin with, they used a lighter blue and combined it with a vivid yellow to add some actual visual interest. The layering of the yellow over the blue where it curves around and below the nose and on the ends of the tailplane actually draws the eye. The font choice is nice and legible, spaced apart in the center of the fuselage. I imagine it was easy to read even from far away. (Shame it’s a bit blocked by the wings from some angles, though.)
(image: lufthansa bildarchiv)
This early 707 design keeps the cheatlines extending past the nose but makes them sharper than the ones on the Connie to match the sleek profile of the jet. Back when this plane was painted adding white to your plane was a choice rather than the thing everybody was doing, which allows me to respect it for the choice it was instead of considering it the factory default. The bottom half, denoted by the cheatline, is left unpainted, which only adds to the sleekness of the overall profile, and the text is clear and plain but still aesthetically pleasing. The 707 is by modern standards pretty antique-looking; you can take one look at one and tell it isn’t particularly streamlined. This paint scheme, though, makes the plane look sharp and aerodynamic, despite not being revolutionary. I would go so far as to say I like this particular livery. This is, unfortunately, as good as it gets.
Oh. Oh no...
Let’s assess the damage here. The cheatlines now simply meet at the front without wrapping down to the belly of the plane and the nose is a simple black tip. I like it when airlines paint their planes’ radomes, and I wouldn’t mind it here if not for what it was replacing. The font has been replaced with a generic sans serif font which is closely spaced and put up into a corner, like the name on a homework assignment - it’s not really part of the total package, just there for administrative purposes. Most upsetting to me is the tail. While I wouldn’t say I love the little section on the old plane, it at least felt like it belonged there, creating a second blue-and-yellow layer above the white. Its placement on the fin above where it begins to taper gives the plane a bit of an aerodynamic feel. It’s certainly not changing the world, but it feels at home in the livery.
The new fin is a sharp downgrade. With nothing to mark the transition the fin abruptly goes from the white of the upper fuselage to a shiny blue which contains an enclave of the only yellow to be found on the entire aircraft. This makes the yellow stand out, as it has nothing to tie it in with the rest of the plane, and the fin itself feels almost like it’s been Frankensteined onto the fuselage from a different plane by a different airline. There’s nothing to mediate the transition from a block of white to a block of blue, like how the cheatline separates white and grey. It just is blue now, stop asking questions. This also means that the only part of the plane that the eye is really drawn to is...the tiny portion of the whole that is the fin, which may as well be floating detached in midair.
This is foreboding. Knowing what I know now, it feels like looking back at when a romantic partner began to act strange years later, after the divorce, as you walk by the house he bought with his mistress.
(image: g najberg)
The most recent, and only, time I flew on Lufthansa was in 2014 and was aboard one of their 747-400s. (Actually, if you’d still like to fly on a passenger 747, Lufthansa is basically your only option.) At the time, they looked like this. This is...just sad. They got rid of the cheatlines, because that’s trendy now, and they painted the whole plane white and made an attempt at lip service to the old metal lower half by painting just a bit of the plane grey, like if a human stepped into a puddle of paint that only covered the very sole of their foot. And I’m being generous by showing a 747, a plane which inherently makes any livery look less boring by being interestingly shaped itself, instead of the classic slightly pointy single-decker tube. Not to mention the double-decker design makes the text vertically centered instead of the default Lufthansa look of awkwardly shoved nearly all the way up the fuselage.
In defense of the modern livery, it’s possible to argue it’s an improvement on this. Honestly, looking at them next to each other, it’s difficult to pick out which one I find less defensible.
But then you see D-AIDV, an A321 painted in a heritage livery, and you feel the immediate, visceral “no!!! no go back!!!” as you remember that this is a false dichotomy and we could have something so much better if they weren’t peer-pressured into generic modern design.
And for what? For this?
(image: hvdfonts)
For the third time, I remind you of what we have been reduced to. We have achieved a state of reductio ad absurdum where this barely qualifies as a design. This plane is more or less a white blot. You can put as many insets as you want and it is still a white blot.
I am relatively sure that the font used is literally Helvetica. EDIT: I have been informed that it is not, in fact, Helvetica, but a custom typeface that happens to look almost exactly like Helvetica. This is, in my own opinion, worse! They did apparently use Helvetica in the past, though. Here is a very detailed description of the design process of the font, which manages to contain a grand total of zero ideas.
I would hate this on its own already, but it’s also so closely spaced and located so far up that it makes me feel like I’m suffocating. In my own experience as a dyslexic person, kerning is the single weightiest feature when it comes to if I can easily read something or not. While Helvetica, ugly though it may be, is generally considered a very legible font, any benefits from that are more than cancelled out by committing to making sure the entire name of the airline fits between the frontmost two doors with room to spare. It feels almost hostile.
Now, all given, I at least somewhat enjoy the shade of blue used for this livery, which is darker than the normal fare. I do miss the way the grey broke up the endless white space, though, and I mourn the yellow even more - in addition to being something to look at, losing it has also lost any visible reference to the flag of Germany, the country for which Lufthansa is the flag carrier. They don’t even have the black part of the German flag despite that being basically free. If they went for black instead of dark blue I would honestly respect this a hell of a lot more. One of the most recognizable flags in the world and instead your airline looks like a discount SAS.
Yeah, I said it. If we want to go even further with comparisons by including airlines that aren’t Lufthansa, this is basically the SAS livery. Except not, because the SAS livery does a lot that this doesn’t.
This is about Lufthansa, not SAS. I’ll look at SAS soon enough, because comparing their look to Lufthansa’s has made me appreciate it in a way I never used to. But I don’t think I need to elaborate too much for it to be clear why SAS’s livery works and Lufthansa’s doesn’t, despite the superficial similarities. SAS took their absolutely horrid previous livery and turned it into something which might not wow anyone but at least feels uniquely theirs, while Lufthansa had something which accomplished much the same and then diluted it into nothingness, Eurowhite writ large. Two washes and you’d wonder if your Lufthansa flight is actually a Smartlynx lease.
The way that the blue slices into the bottom of the fuselage and doesn’t fully cover the tailfin is...something? It’s a design element. It’s not nearly enough to save it, but it’s a design element. However, this presents another issue specific to Lufthansa’s paint job, best demonstrated with a specific plane:
(image: lufthansa)
Lufthansa is the world’s largest operator of the Airbus A340, a somewhat eccentric airplane which is perhaps best thought of as a four-engined A330. I love this airplane, and am delighted seeing it overhead on my walk home from work, because Lufthansa is kind enough to operate a daily service with it to my home airport, but that’s beside the point. The point is this: what I have pictured is specifically the A340-600, which is the world’s second longest in-service airliner. Yes, longer than the A380 and the 747-400, and, in fact, only shorter than the 747-800. With a plane this long, the Lufthansa livery creates an incredible look of rear-heaviness. This plane looks like it should uncontrollably pitch up until it’s perpendicular to the ground every time it takes off. Of course this effect is less pronounced on shorter aircraft, but it’s still there, and I dislike it.
You can barely even tell there’s paint at all on a much smaller plane! And the white bit on the front of the rudder which looks okay on a conventional empennage looks downright horrible when it’s only on the very tip of the t-tail’s forward point.
Oh, and when you take the windows out for a freighter conversion it gets even worse.
This is a generic-brand airplane. It genuinely reminds me of generic branding. There is a specific brand that has this exact appearance and I can’t remember what it is but it’s right there and I’m fairly sure I’ve seen it at CVS. I don’t think that’s what you want to go for when designing an airline livery, especially for an airline representing a country, but if Lufthansa wasn’t going for that they’ve failed.
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Overall, Lufthansa’s livery is superbly boring and not terribly well thought out. It’s not worth this absolute dissertation on its own, but I’ve singled it out to complain about general trends, and for that I probably owe it an apology. Said apology is predicated on the fact that it is still a very underwhelming and bad design which could have used a lot more thought. There are a million ways this could have been made decent, and none of them were implemented because that would have taken effort and time and creative vision. I think this post actually required more time and effort than Lufthansa put into designing their planes.
That said, Lufthansa gets a final grade of D. It’s...bad, it definitely is. There’s the vague flavour of the start of something, like the very distant smell from a barbecue happening three blocks away, but is that really even a redeeming factor?
No. The second-largest airline in Europe should be able to do better. If I have to stare at rows upon rows of their planes any time I’m at a German airport, they should have the decency to make them interesting to look at.
So most planes I've talked about so far on this blog have been modern Boeing, Airbus, Embraer, Bombardier, and ATR models. These are now ubiquitous basically everywhere. Occasionally I'll bring up an old Douglas or even a Lockheed airliner. But back during the cold war Soviet airplanes were a thing, and by modern standards they're really different from what we're used to.
As someone of Soviet extraction I have a weird amount of pseudo-nostalgic fondness for these planes, many of which were out of service before I was born. So let's take a look at one I've looked at a lot in preparation for an upcoming post - the Tupolev Tu-134.
I would not say the Tu-134 is my number one favorite of the assorted weird-looking Soviet planes out there, but I would definitely say that I enjoy it a lot and I think beyond that it's a good starting point for weird-looking Soviet planes. It was common, with the better part of a thousand produced, and you could consider it the rough counterpart to something like a BAC One-Eleven or an earlier DC-9 - a nice and reliable plane to carry a relatively small number of passengers a short-to-medium distance, with a t-tail, two rear-mounted engines, and swept wings. It's just...a lot spikier.
The Tu-134 was introduced in 1970. It was built because Nikita Khrushchev took one flight in a Sud Aviation Caravelle and was so impressed by the quiet cabins of rear-engined planes that he demanded one be designed immediately. (This becomes funny when one realizes that by modern standards the Tu-134, as is true of most planes of its era, is so loud it's banned from many airfields.) Like the other handful of planes that Soviet leaders decided needed to be designed because they saw a Western plane and went "hey, I want something like that", the Tu-134 was designed by Tupolev, who had also designed the Soviet Union's first jet airliner (the Tu-104) and the Tu-144 supersonic airliner. I find that even by the standards of Soviet planes Tupolev models, while they might not be the weirdest-looking, might be the weirdest-functioning in their own little ways.
A lot of Soviet planes have at least a handful of design features that are pretty off-kilter. To begin with, a lot of these planes are designed to work on unpaved airstrips, presumably because Siberia. This is extra true of a model like the Tu-134, which has engines located higher off the ground, reducing the necessary clearance from rough terrain and the chance of foreign object damage while on the ground.
The Tu-134 is a different sort of beast, though. It's the equivalent of a Soviet DC-9 or BAC 1-11, with the rear engines and t-tail, but it looks like it's trying to hunch in on itself due to its wing sweep being a spectacular 35 degrees. That's around ten degrees more swept than comparable designs. Why? Tupolev.
(Presumably the increased efficiency in high subsonic flight regimes was considered worth the risk of uncommanded pitch-ups, which feels in keeping with Soviet design principles of the time, which favored designs which were high-performance but very unforgiving. Maybe the tail and engines were heavier than on comparable models and thus required the higher sweep. Just my guess, though, and I know very little.)
I just love the spikiness of this plane. The sweep on the wings means that no matter what angle you see it at it looks a bit silly, and the forward spike on the tailplane is just awesome. This entire plane looks like an arrow, or like a paper airplane model that nobody bothered to make less pointy when they scaled it up. Even the tapering of the fuselage up near the tail feels needlessly aggressive. It feels like an airliner dressed up as a fighter jet, or potentially a missile.
This is a plane which looks like if it struck another, much larger plane in midair it would simply go through it like a needle. This plane looks like you should be able to shoot it out of a very large bow. The wings are slightly anhedral (another reason for the excessive sweep may be to balance this out, as anhedral wings, or wings which slope downwards, sacrifice inherent roll stability for controllability, but this stabilizing effect is also conferred by swept wings. Yes, that is an oversimplification, but this post is about the visuals of the plane.) This always kind of makes the Tu-134 look like it's midway through flapping its wings, or like it's starting the process of folding up its wings via a hinge in the fuselage. It's almost a bit uncanny to be able to see the underside of the wing from angles that you normally definitely wouldn't. Anhedral wings are also a common feature of Soviet aircraft, but most of those are high-wing. It's sort of rare to see a low-wing anhedral aircraft in general aside from fighter jets. Those use computers to reduce the inherent instability of the configuration, but the Tu-134 was analogue. Very, very analogue. It actually ran on direct current. Why? Tupolev.
image: Vitaly Kuzmin
One thing I really like about Tupolev planes is that their cockpits were painted a delightful teal. This is not a unique Tupolev feature by any means (actually, the DC-9 had it) but they're the most consistent about it of any manufacturer I'm aware of. This apparently was meant to calm down pilots, presumably coming in useful during the uncommanded pitch-ups. (Extra nasty on a plane hypothetically able to deep-stall, though I can't find any record of a Tu-134 ever deep-stalling and its safety record was actually pretty good for its era.)
I have no idea what's up with that spike on the tail. The 707's tail spike was an antenna for high-frequency radio, so this might be something similar, but I'm not sure. (Check out the sweep on those horizontal stabilizers, though!)
Edit: the tail spikey is an anti-shock body, it seems!
There are two main models of Tu-134. How do you tell a Tu-134A from a Tu-134B? If you're a pilot, you'll probably be clued in by the lack of an APU (...the ICAO apparently thought this was fine, which worries me) but that's a bit hard to notice for a passenger. Thankfully, it should be easy to tell on landing, because the Tu-134A didn't have engines capable of producing reverse thrust. This is very uncommon (for good reason) but not unheard of. Does it solve the issue like the BAe 146, with an air brake and giant spoilers? Absolutely not, this is Tupolev.
DROGUE PARACHUTE.
These are both the earlier Tu-104. I couldn't find any pictures of the Tu-134 using its parachute. Shame they didn't seem to bother adding liveries to them. Also, they're reusable, don't worry. And by 'they' I mean the parachutes, though the planes usually also are.
This does, surprisingly, have some actual advantages, in both high-speed emergency landings and in situations where the wheels can't find adequate purchase, like excessively gravelly or rainy runways. The earlier-mentioned BAe 146 was intended for operation on similarly rugged or short runways and, while it was generally safe, the margin for error was significantly reduced, with multiple fatal crashes related to overrunning runways in poor weather. Still, if I were the pilot of a plane which used one of these I would be perpetually terrified about the possibility of someone else running over my parachute. That would be potentially dangerous, not to mention incredibly awkward.
(That sounds like something you'd say to condescendingly ask a Tu-134 pilot why they're in a bad mood. Aww, someone run over your chute today?)
It's almost a bit bizarre seeing a Tu-134 next to a regular Western plane.
The main way to tell them apart at a glance, though, is the nose.
That little chin they've given her is where the radar is stored. Other airlines tend to keep this in the nose, but the Tu-134A used the nose for a much more important purpose. That's right, it's the
SOVIET NAVIGATOR PIT.
Soviet designs tended to use more flight crew for longer than Western ones, with planes retaining a dedicated radio operator and navigator in many cases. While this is a mostly innocuous design feature (you get severely diminishing returns for every flight crew member past the second, and risk breakdowns of communication by adding potential points of failure, but you do still have more brains on board to distribute tasks to) it has the pretty awesome result of the
SOVIET NAVIGATOR PIT.
This is to an extent a vestigial feature from the Tu-134's origin as the Tu-16 bomber (by way of the earlier Tu-124 and Tu-104 jet airliners, the latter of which was the second ever to fly). Still, this feature in Soviet planes isn't limited to Tu-16 derivations or even bombers, and can be found in planes like the Il-76.
Just think about flying on one of these. I get that it would be a nightmare for a lot of people, and I'll admit I don't love looking down at clouds from conventional cruise altitude myself, but I would love nothing more than to sit by one of these for a nice overland flight at a scenically suitable altitude (even though the glass seems like it might get cold).
Unfortunately, my hopes are not only dead but stillborn, as the Tu-134A is fully out of service. My hopes of flying on a Tu-134B are nearly as dire, but it's technically - very technically - possible. There remains one single operator of the Tu-134.
Air Koryo, the flag carrier of North Korea, still has two Tu-134 in its fleet. This poses a major problem, because currently my only passport is a US one, and US passports can't be used to enter North Korea. This ban is on the US's end rather than North Korea's, so if I could get a second passport from literally anywhere other than South Korea this would cease to be an obstacle, but even though I'm hypothetically eligible for a Russian passport there has never been a time I've wanted to get one less. You know, just in case I want to go to Poland or Latvia sometime. That is all to say...it's a race between Air Koryo retiring their Tu-134s, and me successfully getting another passport (and being able to afford a trip to North Korea on top of it). So unless any Irish citizens are eager to spend at least one year in a greencard marriage that dream is also quite dead. Sorry, sweet girl. It just wasn't meant to be.
Get a good look at those little raised bits on the wing, by the way. That's the old Soviet trick for keeping highly swept wings from doing that awful 'just kind of pitching up and losing control when close to stalling' thing, wing fences!
I just can't help but love this strange little pointy critter. Nobody ever designs planes that look quite this weird anymore, and I get that that's because the shape of an airliner has been more or less engineered to perfection by now, but it's still sort of a shame. This really was purely a Soviet thing - modern Russian designs like the Sukhoi Superjet and the Irkut MC-21 sort of just look broadly like 737s. The era of weird airliners seems to be largely over.
But at least when I review liveries, sometimes I'm able to gaze back through the rolled-up newspaper tube of history and see what planes looked like in a more imperfect time, when thrust reversers were an optional design choice and sometimes a plane was just very very pointy, because Tupolev.
No. 55 - British Airways, Part One - British (European) Airways and British (Overseas) Airways (Corporation)
British Airways.
Starting this post was harder than actually writing it. It's hard to start a post about British Airways, because it's a deceptively weird airline. If you very precisely altered my memory, kept my knowledge of the United Kingdom and of flag carriers but erased all I knew about British Airways and asked me to speculate about the UK's flag carrier, what I came up with would look absolutely nothing like British Airways. British Airways is weird. It was weird when it came into existence in 1974. It's weird now. It's a completely typical airline in terms of things like...routes and safety and in-flight meals and...I don't know...contribution to human rights abuses. But that's not what I talk about here.
The story of British Airways' livery is interesting. It's messy. It's political. All of that comes in due time. More than most other airlines, it just can't keep to a livery for too long - and that's when it even has a livery. In its early youth, British Airways couldn't really figure itself out at all. And in its even earlier youth...well, actually, British Airways isn't that old. It's also not the UK's first flag carrier.
image: British Airways
There is a reason that two of British Airways' fleet of retro liveries wear wordmarks that say other names. To discuss the history of the British Airways livery, I have to first begin by discussing the fact that British Airways...is a weird airline.
British Airways. IATA code BA, ICAO code BAW, callsign SPEEDBIRD. Flag carrier of the United Kingdom.
Honestly a better logo than at least 40% of actual airlines.
Well, it's actually a subsidiary of the unimaginatively named International Airlines Group, Europe's third-largest airline holding company, below Ryanair and the Lufthansa Group but ahead of Air France-KLM. IAG is a member of the oneworld alliance and is the parent company of British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling, and LEVEL, and just last year acquired Air Europa and began the process of absorbing it away from SkyTeam. To anyone who may have had the thought enter their head: yes, they do now basically have a monopoly on Spanish airlines. To any Spaniards reading, my condolences. At least you still have EasyJet.
Their largest shareholder is Qatar Airways, so when you really think about it British Airways is kind of a subsidiary of Qatar Airways a little bit. Their share is still only 25%, though, so that actually just completely isn't true, but in a vibes sense it feels that way from the outside looking in. Of course, all these airlines have maintained their own identities and operate independently. This is not a LATAM situation. British Airways adopted its present-day livery long before it merged with Iberia to form the IAG in 2011. I'm still not totally sure why they did that. Maybe they wanted to one-up Air France. Iberia's not exactly KLM, but - no, this is not that post.
British Airways. I've always thought it was a little bit strange that it was called that. Few places love reminding the world they're at least nominally still a monarchy more than England. KLM isn't the only airline with 'Royal' in the name - Royal Air Maroc, Royal Jordanian Airlines, and Royal Brunei Airlines are just a few other examples. And yet the United Kingdom has never had an airline, at least not a major one, named anything like The Queen's Royal Air Fleet, which is what I would have expected of them. No. British Airways.
There's not much gravitas to that, is there? Not really any punch. Nothing making it better than Air France. 'British Airways' is a pretty sterile name for a flag carrier.
Their callsign is SPEEDBIRD, though. And that's not sterile. That's awesome. That's Europe's equivalent to Pan Am's CLIPPER or China Airlines' DYNASTY, just pure style. But what is a speedbird, other than a really cool name for a jet?
This is a speedbird. Rather, this is the logo for Imperial Airways. Not to be confused with the very strangely named 1964-1986 Californian commuter airline Imperial Airlines, Imperial Airways was a very early precursor to what British Airways is now. In the inter-war years it served destinations like South Africa, Hong Kong, and Australia - the sorts of places two dozen or so wealthy individuals of power might have reason to go quickly. Unlike Imperial Airlines, Imperial Airways had a very fitting name.
So here's another weird thing about British Airways: it's young. Really young for what it is. Most flag carriers are pretty old, and the few exceptions are airlines founded in the 21st century to replace flag carriers which went defunct in the 90s and on, like Brussels Airlines or ITA Airways. Even when you discount centenarians like KLM and Finnair, most of the names you'd recognize in the rest of the world (and plenty you probably haven't heard of) existed by the 1940s, with the major Axis powers being forced to reboot theirs in the 50s. Even the places Imperial Airways served, despite not having the resources of an empire at their disposal, have far older flag carriers. British Airways didn't exist until 1974, making it younger than my mother, the Boeing 747, the Twin Towers, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the moon landing.
The primary reason for this was, as far as I can tell, bureaucratic shuffling about, but I'm not especially well-versed or interested in the history of UK corporations so that's where I'll leave this bit off. It is possible, and indeed likely, that someone reading this has the urge to say that I'm being uncharitable and that British Airways is functionally just BOAC or BOAC is just functionally Imperial Airways (or maybe nobody thinks that - I simply don't know enough about the corporate side of it to confidently dismiss the possibility of this indeed being the case). It's just not relevant because I'm ultimately here to talk about the airline as an entity in the public eye that has a livery, and in this sense Imperial Airways, British Airways, and the intermediate steps are fully distinct. So, for my taste, British Airways began operations less than a month before the release of the novel "Carrie". That's strange. British Airways is strange.
Still, even though in most other cases the process was significantly faster, very few flag carriers we'd recognize today were founded outright in their current state.
This timeline, compiled by Yesterday's Airlines, documents the 'family tree' of airline mergers that has built up today's British Airways. It actually goes back far earlier. Debatably it began with manufacturer Airco and its subsidiary airline Aircraft Transport and Travel, founded in 1916. Though it went under in 1920, its assets were repurposed by Daimler Airway (singular), which was one of the four airlines (mostly all subsidiaries of aircraft manufacturers) which in 1924 became Imperial Airways. That's right, even the building blocks on this chart are themselves built from blocks!
There are plenty more long-forgotten airline mergers beneath where this graphic cuts off, but this is all to say that the speedbird emblem originated with Imperial Airways, and it has floated to the top of this soup of assorted vaguely British brands, many of which nobody has thought about in decades. Speedbird aside, British Airways resembles basically none of its component parts in any ways that aren't just explained by them both being British, and Airways.
The speedbird was created by notable art deco designer Theyre Lee-Elliott, who created several pieces of iconography and many graphics and posters for the UK government, among other things, like the first-edition cover of "A Farewell to Arms" that an English teacher of mine once had as a poster on her wall. Much of his early work was for airlines, and the speedbird happened to stick.
Left poster isn't anachronistic - 'British Airways' was the name of a late-30s airline, itself merged from three other airlines, which would go on to join Imperial Airways as one of the components of BOAC.
Airlines didn't really have liveries as we know them now back when the speedbird was invented, so it would lie dormant as an emblem used on posters and signage for a little while. It was the only part of Imperial Airways' identity which survived when, in 1939, it merged into the British Overseas Airways Corporation.
'British Overseas Airways Corporation' has the same nostalgic punch to it as 'Pan American World Airways'. It was almost always just called BOAC, though, even in the wordmarks of its airplanes. When BOAC came into being the airplane livery was not what it is today. They began with just a painted tail and cheatline, scarcely worth showing or commenting on.
image: RuthAS
Okay, I'll show it, but I don't think it needs any further comment.
There's only one BOAC livery that was really recognizable a BOAC livery. It was still fairly boring. More like BOA(rin)C(g). (That one needs work.)
The only interesting thing about the BOAC livery, to me, is the way that sort of face mask shape combined with the tail almost gives it a sort of diagonal symmetry - the front with a blue dip below the white center, the end with a peak above it. It is a very efficient and deceptively effective, potentially unintentionally, use of geometry. I also appreciate the restraint of sticking to blue and white and leaving out red. The minimal nature of it increases the geometric feeling, really saving this livery from my complete disdain. The speedbird logo is really well-centered on the tail, feeling almost like a diagonal slash cut right through it, and I like the use of greyish gold instead of white, which makes it appear less jarring while still being clearly visible. For its day, these positives are certainly not to be fully ignored, though saying that this is a pretty alright 60s white-and-blue cheatline livery is not that high of a compliment. It is cleanly done but in no way exceptional, with a neat bit of art deco angularity to it that you really only notice if you stare at pictures of airplanes as a hobby.
On the other hand, it has a nothing wordmark that honestly just irritates me by breaking up that big clean white block in the same way an old scratch breaks up the flatness of an iPhone screen and it does that thing I hate where a cheatline sort of just...trails off under the tailplane that a fair number of 747 liveries do. It feels like they just couldn't think of anything to do with the end of the plane, which is never what you want from a livery, especially not from an airline that takes itself as seriously as BOAC did. It also uses the isolated tail block, which is a design feature I dislike. At least the extreme matteness of BOAC's midnight-blue-on-white makes it a bit less awful, and the white forward trim is a nice touch.
On balance, I'll give it a BOAC-. That is referring, of course, to the face mask livery, which I think is straddling the fence between 'adequate' and 'forgettable'. I truly have so little to say about the earlier liveries that I'm not going to even give them a grade.
The BOAC livery briefly flew again in 2019 (which British Airways claims to be centenary based on the foundation of Aircraft Transport and Travel, except I've mainly seen that said to be 1916 and most people's consensus is that British Airways was founded in 1974 and no earlier) when it was painted on the 747-400 registered G-BYGC. She was the last 747 to fly for British Airways, just a year after the livery was applied, and there were plans to preserve her in the heritage livery which never materialized. Sadly, she was scrapped in late 2023.
But there was that speedbird on the tail! The speedbird was so damn iconic that it was even BOAC's callsign. So where did it go?
We'll get to that. There's more to British Airways than BOAC.
BOAC was state-owned, and it held a place of national prominence...so it was the flag carrier, right?
Sort of. It was a flag carrier. BOAC was the UK's Pan Am, specializing in long-distance international flights (hence 'overseas' in the name). There was also British South American Airways, a short-lived national carrier which was absorbed into BOAC after two years, with its most notable contributions to history being the disappearances of its planes Star Tiger and Star Ariel, but a significantly more enduring brand was BEA.
This initial logo, also the work of Theyre Lee-Elliott, had a key motif to accompany BEA's slogan, 'the key to Europe'. I adore it. I like BEA a lot.
While initially founded as an offshoot of BOAC (which I suppose was the singular flag carrier from 1939 to 1946), British European Airways Corporation specialized in, as the name implied, flights within Europe (and other relatively nearby destinations). It was something of a VASP-and-VARIG situation. Nobody ever called it BEAC, though, even though it sounds like 'beak' and birds are a whole thing, because...flying...well, look, we can all understand, in retrospect, that one of the great tragedies of aviation history is that I wasn't there to have ideas. That said, maybe it's a good thing I never planted this seed, because their callsign was BEALINE, which is...just the most adorable thing I think I've ever heard. It genuinely makes me smile. It may be my favorite ever callsign.
They did eventually change their official name to just British European Airways. Sort of a shame, if you ask me - you could have been twinsies. Ah, well. Also a shame is the perplexing choice to shelve their rather nice and meaningful original logo and replace it with what I can generously describe as 'a square' in 1957. I think SAS did it better. I can't rule out that I just hate it because the old one was so much better, though. I've seen far uglier, but again - this is a square.
image: Adrian Pingstone
When it's on the livery, it's not even well-aligned! And it's difficult to imagine negotiating this onto an aircraft tail, even when dealing with a generously square fin like the Trident's. (BEA loved their Tridents, which were essentially designed for the airline's operations, and operated 70 of the 117 airframes completed. This makes me like them, because I love the Trident too.) That said, I think that if you're using a logo that is just the name of your airline, putting it on the tail rather than the front side fuselage is a bold move. Today it rarely pays off, but in the era of cheatlines and half-bare planes it actually avoids the issues of legibility and vertical space that a lot of other contemporary liveries struggled with.
Still, the square. It will simply never not look strange to have two straight vertical lines on a fin that's more or less diagonal to them, and I'm not sure how that could be fixed. They did the best they could, I think, but this was just doomed from the start.
On the other hand, I do enjoy its placement within the cheatline. It helps keep a sense of pace but doesn't break up the line, and it just feels like it clicks into place in a way I love. I like the continuity with the black line at the tip of the horizontal stabilizer, and I like that the white paint doesn't extend down as far as on a lot of liveries of the time, leaving the cheatline to taper above the Trident's rear-mounted engines instead of underlying them as many other airlines' did.
This logo and livery were designed by Mary de Saulles, who was trained as an architect rather than a graphic designer. I think it shows in the very simple shapes and lines present here, and it also shows in the fact that despite it technically not doing anything too unusual the BEA livery was very distinctive when actually on the apron.
BEA's liveries weren't terribly more innovative than BOAC's at first glance. But their black-and-red 60s livery was actually, deceptively, a standout of the era.
images: Ralf Manteufel | Adrian Pingstone
The red wings on BEA's aircraft were absurdly stylish. There are dozens of reasons involving weight and heat and aerodynamic properties that prevent airlines from painting the wings on their airliners anything but a very dull drab, and I despise it, but when even the all-black Air New Zealand plane has white wings it begins to feel like it's just not possible to do anything else. Actually, it is hypothetically possible, though expensive, as long as you avoid the leading edges, though I'm sure the margins for shape and weight of a wing are far more precise on a 787 than they were on a Viscount. Still, I can't help but wish airlines would swallow the costs of painting wings (not like liveries aren't already a needless expense if you're trying to really optimize), because just look at this. It's absolutely stunning. It brings BEA's livery all the way from completely forgettable to by far the most eye-catching in the approach pattern.
And, you know what? I'll give them a BEA for that.
It might seem like a bit of a strange evaluation when I spent two paragraphs complaining about that square, but just imagine being on the ground and seeing a Comet landing, the lack of underwing pylons leaving that big red wing, like the lining of a cloak. That's a real Riyadh Air first impression. So while yes, the square is a square and certain aspects of the livery's implementation on various models range from forgettable to clunky, I am disregarding all of that, because this is like Dracula showing up to a board meeting. They are literally flying Louboutins.
BEA's livery and branding evolved over time in a way BOAC just didn't. BOAC never had anything I would identify as a 'rebranding' - it sprang fully formed from the Queen's (or something) head and stayed in its pristine state until the day it abruptly vanished. This was not quite the case for BEA.
image: Adrian Pingstone
This is a preserved airframe, hence the very anachronistic car models in the foreground. Still, the livery is accurate.
Their final livery, introduced 1968, was this - the 'speedjack' livery. The speedjack is, more specifically, that delightfully pointed Union Jack emblem on the tail. I do like the speedjack itself, being one of the only decent uses of a Union Jack base I've ever seen. It feels obvious yet brilliant to turn the intersecting lines of the flag into an arrow shape. Unfortunately, far more was changed than just the logo.
My beloved flying Louboutin was gone. They still sometimes had the red wings at this point, but in every other way it was a new livery. I actually find that something is lost here, because the old BEA livery had red but not blue, and the BOAC livery had blue but not red, so they were sort of a matching set. Also, um, that wordmark is legitimately hideous.
It's a bit less horrible when it's not red letters on a white background, at least. And it does have a forward slant, a continuity...but this lacks the brilliance of Lee-Elliott's key or the charm of the de Saulles square.
The speedjack, logo, and livery were created by FHK Henrion, whose work has appeared on this blog before, though I failed to mention it. He designed the KLM crown logo!
...a logo I used to think was fine until learning about the absolute beauty they had from 1930 to 1938. Henrion designed the totally palatable 1961 version, and further modifications were made by the firm Henrion, Ludlow & Schmidt, with at least the 1991 change being the work of Ludlow. It's certainly gone downhill, but maybe I just think that because of how much I adore the 1930 iteration.
image: Piergiuliano Chesi
As for BEA - at the very least they kept the red wings. This is sort of a double-edged sword, though. This livery was, overall, far less distinct from its surroundings than the de Saulles livery, and the addition of the lighter blue to the fuselage really dulls the impact of the red against the stark black it used to share the airframe with. It just feels...flat. Neutered. Like an interim livery when one airline has bought out another and the paint jobs are changed out piecemeal. (And I think a red-only speedjack on a black tail would look fantastic, for the record.)
The details aren't much better. The cheatline feels almost too thin for the cockpit windows and the tiny wordmark makes the white fuselage feel as empty as it is without the little BEA logos making sure that isn't what you're focused on. Some models, like the Trident Three and Super One-Eleven, get their status indicated by text on the tail that looks like the default font of a word processor. It's just sloppy. Henrion's effort went to the speedjack, where a firm which specializes in image identity generally would be directed, and some interest was taken in the wordmark, but the livery itself feels like a pieced-together afterthought.
This gets a grade of...please just go back. I want to say D+.
How much of that grade comes from genuine dislike of the Henrion livery versus just thinking it's worse than what came before, I don't know, but it's one of the most immediate downgrades I've ever seen and the attempt to keep the most striking feature of the old livery while sapping it of its power feels almost insulting. It feels messy and pieced-together, and it's angling dangerously close to having the same approximate color layout as the old SAS livery - you know, the only thing that's ever failed the Star Alliance Test.
And, at least from the side, and from farther away, it really doesn't fail the Star Alliance Test. It's serviceable, and I wouldn't be nearly this harsh on it if I didn't know what came before. But I've committed to a chronology of what would become British Airways, so I have to mention both, and that includes looking at them, reading about their design processes, and forming detailed opinions of them. This livery was just doomed by its predecessor.
Even British Airways seems to agree with me, given that when they painted an A319 (G-EUPJ) in a BEA retro livery they chose the older black-and-red. Some liveries are simply iconic. Some simply aren't.
And, yes - the wings are red. At least, the bottom is. The top was forced to remain grey for reasons of 'reflectivity', which is fairly vague. Still, this should be a sign to other airlines - your planes will make an impression from below, and that impression could be as powerful as the one BEA used to make.
image: Ben Brooksbank
BEA, at its height, flew more passengers than any other airline in Europe. It had subsidiaries, including...Cyprus Airways. (Yes, the same one that's still the flag carrier of Cyprus. That's its own story.) They even operated helicopters.
image: RuthAS
Cursed? You decide.
And then, as the 70s began, the decision was made to merge the two state-owned airlines - something which I would personally have done earlier, and apparently people did try to do earlier but were prevented from doing by...politics. You know, just a couple people with titles that begin with 'Secretary of' passive-aggressively fighting over financial things. In 1974, what was probably inevitable finally became a reality.
image: Piergiuliano Chesi
It takes a while to repaint a full airframe. When two airlines merge the change is often done bit by bit, making sure the wordmark's right but not bothering with the rest. In 1975, G-AWZA, pictured here, still wore the speedjack, but the wordmark above her cheatline said something new entirely, and a new airline was using the callsign SPEEDBIRD.
And this is where I will conclude today, thwarted by image limit. Of course, being the person I am, I couldn't help but make my return for the new year not just a two-parter but a three-parter. Having dispensed with the British Airwayses that weren't British Airways, part two will cover the British Airways of the surprisingly recent past.
In the meantime thank you to all readers, old and new. I'm thrilled to be back from my break, and I hope you'll stick around for another year of Runway Runway.
Thank you to @lobstersinmyhouse for requesting PSA! And, in all honesty, this is exactly my feelings too. Pack it up, post over.
...okay, no. I am going to write a post, but I make no secret of loving PSA's airplanes. After all, one is even my icon.
image: Piergiuliano Chesi
There was never an airline like it before PSA sprang up in 1949, and there has never been an airline like it since. Decades after its demise I still feel a real sense of grief about the fact that it's gone. Pacific Southwest Airlines hasn't existed for longer than its entire time in operation and it mostly only operated in a single state, but it remains one of the most beloved airlines ever to exist. I'm certainly far from immune to catching their smile. So I'm very, very excited to cover the iconic grinningbirds, one of the best-known airline liveries of all time even 40 years after the regional carrier which wore it ceased existing.
PSA officially stands for Pacific Southwest Airlines. Unofficially, it was the Poor Sailor's Airline. According to a button they put out, it was this.
image: psa-history.org
But really, it can stand for anything you want. I think it stands for Pretty Smiling Airplanes.
You see, PSA's marketing leaned into the fun and casual as much as it was possible for an airline to do. They called themselves "The World's Friendliest Airline". Their branding was all bright, colorful, delightful. One aspect of it is particularly well known.
image: Piergiuliano Chesi
The name "grinningbird" is literal. PSA's fleet was lovingly painted with massive smiles directly under their noses. Their advertisements encouraged people to "catch our smile" across the state of California.
A preserved DC-3 in original Pacific Southwest livery
PSA was started as a single leased DC-3 hopping from San Diego to Oakland. Apparently their ticket office was literally a refitted military surplus latrine where they weighed passenger baggage on a bathroom scale. When they expanded with DC-4s they painted rectangles around the windows to make them look more like DC-6s. This was in 1955. And then, by the early 60s, they were taking off.
A pre-smile PSA Electra. The L-188 Electra is, of course, my favorite jet plane.
image: Jon Proctor
It was in the 60s that their planes stopped saying 'Pacific Southwest Airlines' and started just being PSA, and it was in the 60s when they caught their smiles. This was the point when PSA became PSA, transforming from just another intrastate airline in the pre-deregulation era to a turning point in aviation history.
a 1972 promotional button
image: psa-history.org
While the smiley faces are the most significant historical fact about PSA, also notable is the fact that they were the first low-cost carrier in history. Although PSA's routes were limited to Southern California, they charged $9.99 for a ticket other airlines would charge $13.50 or $22.05 for - and keep in mind that in today's money that's a difference of hundreds of dollars. Free of federal fare taxes and operating frequently, PSA grew at an intense pace with its new fleet of Lockheed L-188 Electras.
I love the L-188 Electra (not to be confused with the earlier L-10 Electra best known for Amelia Earhart reasons). Although Lockheed has long since moved over to exclusively making weapons for killing people, back when they were in the civil airliner market they made the most incredible planes which somehow ended up commercially flopping time after time. The Electra, for instance, was all but killed immediately by two early crashes caused by a sneaky design flaw. These were fixed, but the type's reputation had already been sullied. (Interestingly, similar early design flaws with far less prompt responses failed to kill either the DC-6 or the DC-10, despite the latter causing the deadliest crash in history at the time and the former having had the serious potential to give us a timeline where the President of the United States was killed because his presidential transport had a design flaw which encouraged going up in flames midair.) Ironically, the Electra is actually an insanely reliable and sturdy plane, and the example pictured is still in service as an air tanker under the registration C-GZCF, still doing her thing at just 63 years young. (Another Electra in Air Spray's fleet is a similar age but also survived being bisected across the belly by her own detached propeller, and she literally flew two days ago. These planes are on a level only shared with Nokia cell phones, especially for their size.)
That paragraph became about the Lockheed L-188 Electra. I did not mean for it to be, but I am leaving it in, because I love this plane. Looks great with the smile, too. The roundness of the nose gives the distinct appearance of something like a teddy bear snout.
From this point things only grew quicker. PSA continued to be PSA, acquiring more aircraft to fly more passengers. They did expand routes eventually, and once the 1978 Deregulation Act allowed they flew to some other states and even Mexico. Despite this, they remained an icon in their home state, and are often called "the unofficial flag carrier of California".
PSA stewardesses. I can't find an original source for either of these pictures, which have been widely spread without context or credit - although significant effort has been made to archive PSA's promotional content, a lot of it is, sadly, free-floating orphaned bits.
PSA's stewardesses wore bright pink and orange uniforms of miniskirts, hot pants, and go-go boots. They were encouraged to joke around with passengers, and so were the pilots. Other airlines at the time were still only slowly losing the unapproachable aura they had cultivated of stiff, sterile luxury and gravitas. PSA would get you where you needed to go without any fuss and they'd charge you half as much for it. And they weren't sloppy, either. Despite their low fares, PSA was incredibly safe, having one fatal accident in a span of time where American Airlines had 16, and even though nostalgia is obviously a factor I've only ever heard glowingly positive accounts of PSA, its service, and its staff.
image: Bill Larkins
PSA's fleet was...eclectic. Though they operated a few very popular models, like the Boeing 727 and McDonnell Douglas MD-80 series, a lot of their offerings were somewhat uncommon. The plane in my profile picture is one of their two L-1011 TriStars, another of Lockheed's underappreciated airliners and by far the most advanced wide-body aircraft of its time. PSA was unique in that it operated a jumbo jet, their "Mother Grinningbird", on a route that was not just domestic, but intrastate. They also apparently operated a single Bell 206 helicopter, which I can find no additional clarification on. Lastly, they flew one of the oddest airliners ever built in both function and appearance, the British Aerospace 146.
Just your regular high-wing jet. No thrust reversers necessary. Western-made but rocking the Il-76 wing anhedral. Super quiet because the powerplants are based off what you'd put on a helicopter. Seats less people than a 737-200 - six-across layout for maximum discomfort - and flies exclusively puddle jumps...yeah, I think four sounds like the right number of engines.
image: Ted Quackenbush
Across all these planes, they found a livery that worked and they kept going with it. The reason this post is so long is to give context to just how important this livery is. The grinningbirds were what started low-cost carriers, paving the way for the silly names of jetBlue airplanes in a future its founders couldn't even have imagined. The shift to approachability over prestige in airline marketing was PSA's lasting gift to aviation, as were the low fares and the knowledge that a 'budget' airline didn't have to be dodgy or unpleasant - they just had to charge less than TWA and Western.
image: Piergiuliano Chesi
PSA's colorscheme was incredibly vibrant. The red and orange colors feel warm and tropical, complementing the California sunshine in which these planes spent their time. Earlier liveries also had a shocking hot pink shade above both, though it was eventually painted over due to issues with paint fading - I think the livery is vastly improved with its presence, but I suppose needs must. Despite the airline serving commuters more than vacationers it puts one in mind of things like beaches and ice cream stands - warm, high-energy things. The sorts of things one might smile about, if they like those things. I hate those things, but these planes make me like the idea of them, because they're just so darn happy to take me there!
The design of the fuselage is incredibly bold despite not using much more paint than any other airline of the day. While the striking colors definitely contribute to the overall look being more than the sum of its parts, I think there's also a few bits of clever design that really elevate the design of the plane.
The tail has a design almost like an inverse hockey-stick. Instead of following the cheatlines for maximum sleekness it chooses to diverge from it, creating a sharp angle that keeps the aerodynamic feeling while feeling fresh from similar designs of the time. By having the thin line from the tail trailing down towards the fuselage it prevents the block of empty space on a regular hockey-stick livery, where the forward portion of the empennage is fully unpainted, and creates a feeling of continuous color and excitement while keeping some staccato punch.
Similarly subtle yet effective are the stripes themselves. They aren't of an equal width - rather, the red stripe is thinner than the orange one, and in planes with the additional pink stripe this one is even wider. It feels a lot more dynamic than simple even-width stripes, feeling almost as if you can see the colors start to mix into each other. The 'mixing' feeling is helped by the fact that the cheatlines wrap under the nose instead of simply ending where they meet. The small painted white line under the main colored ones, above the unpainted metal of the underbelly, creates basically an extra two stripes for the price of one despite being so subtle many people probably didn't notice it.
On its own, the design of the bodies of PSA planes is already good, but it practically ceases to matter when you get to the face.
The way the top line of color wraps around the back of the cockpit windows makes it look almost like the plane is wearing sunglasses. And then there's the little painted black nose and, of course, the huge ear-to-ear grin. I don't really know what else to say about this because it's all been said time and time again.
I genuinely don't know how else to express it. PSA's livery was gorgeous and it was perfect for PSA. In all honesty, I don't think it's possible to improve it at all. My one slight criticism is that the actual PSA wordmark, though designed well, is a bit small and out of the way, but to be totally honest it's barely necessary. You see the smile and you know exactly who that plane is flying for.
PSA gets a PSA+.
So what happened to PSA, if they were so successful? Did an economic shift catch them off-guard? Did some demographic evolution rob them of their old customer-base? Did a change of management result in a new owner running the airline into the ground? Did it have anything to do with the fact that the one time they were involved in an accident it spent eight months as the deadliest crash in US history?
Nope. They got bought out by USAir because they wanted more routes on the West Coast.
Yeah. That's the story. Neither a bang nor a whimper. They left one morning and didn't come back. That was the end of PSA, the first-ever low-cost carrier, California's most beloved airline, and one of the best-designed liveries in airline history if not the very best.
There is, however, one final twist. USAir eventually was sucked into the gaping maw of American Airlines. With this merger American Airlines also inherited the rights to PSA's IP. In classic fashion, they created a wholly-owned subsidiary by the name of PSA Airlines, just to make sure nobody else could get the trademark.
Under the iron fist of first US Airways (USAir's eventual rebrand) and later American Airlines, we were allowed one last grinningbird - an Airbus A319-100 registered N742PS. It's strange, seeing the PSA livery on a model of airplane they never operated. It's a rare example of the design on airframes that have that rather distinct 'default' modern empennage, all sharp and tall with no t-tail or third engine. The implementation could take some notes and the colors look bizarrely plastic, but I will never stop loving her no matter how much they take from her. How could I not, with that smile?
Unfortunately, in April of this year she was re-painted to a standard American Airlines livery. Although the Allegheny and Piedmont heritage liveries were removed at the same time, I almost don't even notice their absence because of the loss of our very last holdout from a much more colorful time and place. Part of me feels a sort of ripping-the-bandaid-off relief at it. American Airlines shouldn't get to parade around the skin of a much better livery worn by a much better airline. That isn't theirs; they didn't earn it. And there's no way to rebuild PSA now that times have changed and the industry is unrecognizable from the days when a ticket from San Diego to Burbank cost $9.99. All the same, the loss of yet another smile hurts. There's no way it wouldn't. And at the end of the day it makes me feel a little dead inside just imagining the mindset of the American Airlines executive who walked by her in the hangar and instead of smiling back gave the order to paint her white. And that day, the sky got a little less colorful and a lot sadder.
Maybe, in a strange sense, the way it happened is better. Nobody ran PSA into the ground. They did not cause some sort of reputation-ruining accident through willful negligence. Their customer service did not decline until they were widely grumbled about. They didn't die infamous for poor safety and loose morals like Pan Am, or splitting at the seams and betraying their reputation like Chalk's Ocean Airways. No, I don't think an organic shriveled going-under would have held any more dignity than this. I think the ending PSA got is as graceful as the ending to something like PSA could be. There is no end to the glory days which forces itself into our memories. There is no decline. No sunset to fly off into. There is a loss to mourn, but no accompanying moment to curse. Lost at sea, ship never found, nothing to imply a terrible fate; all we know is the poor sailors aren't here anymore.
Maybe it's not universally known to people who aren't interested in subjects that bring them close to it, but to those of us who love planes PSA is truly special. Its quiet apotheosis has made it synonymous with the very best an airline could be. The joy of a time where a regular person could finally afford their first plane ticket and be greeted by colorful people who talk to them like friends, where even the planes are smiling, is encoded into the DNA of PSA's remnants, into every anecdote told by an aging former stewardess and into every Polaroid taken of one of those smiling planes parked on a sunny California tarmac. It was there, and then it was a distant echo of warm breezes and idle chatter that feels almost close enough to reach out and touch. PSA never died. One day it was flying passengers to their destinations, planes smiling their same smiles. The next day it was fond memory, already graduated to the distant sunny shores of nostalgia.
