It continues to amaze me that every time an airline comes out with anniversary livery, it looks exactly like the ones that have come before. First, we had ATA’s 25th anniversary. Now at the time, this looked good, because it was the first of its kind. (Sorry, I couldn’t find a shot of the actual plane on their website so I settled for a model from the retail shop.)

Then Horizon came along and decided to introduce a 25th anniversary scheme that once again brought out the streamers. True, the colors were a bit different, but it was basically the same thing. (This one came from the Alaskair.com site.)

Now, SkyWest has come along and decided to roll out a 35th anniversary plane. Thanks to AirlinersGallery.com, we have an early look at the bird.

It’s the same friggin’ thing! Come on, you guys can do better than this, can’t you?

Last week, both Singapore and Aloha came out with some cool looking new planes. First up, let’s take a look at Singapore’s first A380 to come out of the paint shop. I definitely don’t think they got its best side. That cro-magnon looking forehead is definitely exaggerated even further with all that white space. (Taken from Singapore website. Photo credit: Airbus – C. Brinkmann)

Next up we have Aloha’s Wyland-painted 737. Yup, they say it was hand-painted by Wyland, but I don’t know if you can actually hand paint and airplane without affecting drag. Anyway, you might recognize the name – he’s famous for painting huge marine life murals primarily in the US but also all over the world. I found this one on the HNL RareBirds blog, a great place for airplane porn in the Hawaiian Islands.

First it was the Nevada plane last week, and now it’s the Arizona plane. I just received this photo of the plane taken by Kevin Trinkle:

Thoughts? It’s pretty boring. The tail is fine, but when you compare it to the spectacular old Arizona colors, this is nothing special. Bummer.

Without any exciting Delta news, it’s always easy to fall back on some good old fashioned Airplane Porn. This time, it’s US Airways once again.

US Airways has made it clear that all old America West 757s in special color schemes will be repainted in the regular US Airways colors. Fortunately, they’ve decided to refresh some of these schemes and put them on A319s. The first of these was the Cardinals plane, and now we have the first state flag . . . Nevada. They haven’t painted over the old 757 yet, so the airline sent me this excellent shot of the new one passing the old one.  (Photo Credit:  Kevin Trinkle)

The word is that the Arizona flag plane is in the paint shop now and the Pittsburgh Steelers and Carolina Panthers planes are on their way in the next couple months.

It’s now official, Delta is out of bankruptcy and on its own again. Let’s just hope they fare better than United has in its first year out. So how is the airline marking the occasion? Well, how about a “week-long celebration of emergence into a new era“?

In normal-person speak, they actually are doing something. Today is the official emergence and with it comes the new brand and logo. As you can see on the logo at left, they’re ditching the blue and red widget for a two-tone red one instead. The font is now all caps and more block-y (we’ll just pretend that’s an accepted way of describing a font). Delta’s media site has now been updated with the new look, but apparently someone forgot to change the site where CUSTOMERS actually go. Oops.

Of course, with a new logo comes another new livery. I talked about this one recently when photos of the new colors were supposedly leaked. Well, those photos were correct. Here is the new livery on a 777 for your viewing pleasure.

It definitely looks better than the dark photos of that model in my previous post (duh), but I still don’t think I’m a fan. The body is too white, especially when compared to the very dark blue of the tail and engines. The red widget on the tail (which I like far less than the old blue/red one) isn’t even fully there. Why is it so trendy to have your logo not fit entirely on the tail? United did it and so did Northwest.

That being said, I’m glad they kept cost-savings (PDF) in mind with this livery. That’s probably most important of all. This new livery reduces the number of colors used from 8 to 4. It also reduces the number of time required to paint a plane by one calendar day and 20 20% fewer man-hours.

The airline says that all airport signage will be up to date by the end of the year, but it will take four years to fully paint the fleet. So, that’s day one of the emergence. Can’t wait to see what the rest of this week long fiesta brings.