The buzz started last week that JetBlue would be rolling out a brand new livery for its whole fleet in celebration of the airline’s upcoming 10th anniversary. It turns out the hype was a little too much for what it actually was, and in my mind that’s a good thing. It wasn’t so much a new livery as it is a tweak on the old one. And really, what was wrong with the old one? Not much. But they made some good improvements. Take a look. First, they rolled out a new tail to add to their family of tails.

I like this one. The white on the tail makes it stand out, and it fits the brand very well. This will just be a new tail to add to the stable, so it will go on some airplanes, just like all the existing tails. But they also made changes to the rest of the airplane.

Can’t tell the difference? Let me refresh your memory.

The changes are small. The little Jetblue titles are now much bigger and visible. Also, the two tone gray/blue title is now all blue. I think it makes the name more recognizable, and that’s good. Also, you’ll notice that the website on the engines has morphed from www.jetblue.com to jetblue.com and it’s bigger as well. So, not really any huge changes but they didn’t need them.

This is a good change. It will be rolled out very slowly. When planes go into the paint shop, they’ll get the tweaks (not necessarily the tail), so it will take awhile. And there will be more tails coming. An employee contest will be held to design a new one. Let’s just hope they do better than when America West let a kid design the Teamwork plane. That was awful.

But if you want to see a truly spectacular new livery, look no further than AirTran which has painted a 717 in the colors of the Atlanta Falcons. This thing looks like a rocket, and the new black fuselage is just awesome. It’s too bad this is only on a 717. That means we won’t see it out here in LA.

AirTran sent me these pictures, but I have no idea why they didn’t send one of a full body shot. Click here to see a great shot from Mario Rodriguez of the airplane taking off (or should I say, launching).

This time, there actually is a person involved, but fortunately, he is fully clothed. Apparently, AirTran is really happy that Mark Malkoff made it through June without a hitch. This has been great publicity for the airline and its wifi efforts, and they’ve decided to commemorate the event with a giant picture of Mark, literally on AirTran.

That’s Mark’s wife, who appears to be rather happy to have her husband back despite the fact that he hasn’t seen a shower since May.

I hope everyone enjoys their 4th here in the US. (And for my British readers, I hope you aren’t still too bitter – it has, after all, been more than 230 years. You know we still love you.)

That’s right. Airship Ventures brought their Zeppelin down to Long Beach this past week for flightseeing tours and I was able to hitch a ride on one. What an incredibly cool experience. I’ll have more on it tomorrow, but for now, I’ll leave you with this shot of the Zeppelin (advertising Pixar’s new movie, Up) flying away at the end of our trip.

I believe that’s one of the biggest registrations I’ve seen painted on a modern airplane. Still, it looks pretty good to me. This shot comes courtesy of Guillaume Besnard. Click to see more of his photos. I’ll be back on Monday as usual.

Pretty nasty, huh? I wonder if something happened to this particular aircraft or whether this is a problem with United’s new paint in general.

Thank you, Tim Bowrey for the permission to post your fine work. You can see more of Tim’s photos on JetPhotos.net.

Next we the much better Pittsburgh Steelers bird. This one has been around for a few weeks now, I believe. While the plane does look really good, Steelers fans will be sad to note that the logo is on both the right AND left sides of the tail, unlike on the team’s helmets.

I’ll have a more in-depth story on US Airways and their attempt to fix operations in the coming days.