#deltalike

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.

(By the way, it is indeed Alaska Airlines. I have always found that somewhat unintuitive. It's just not how you're used to hearing things phrased, right? It's Possessive Noun Airlines, Air Noun. America Airlines would sound weird. Alaska Airlines sounds weird. I am never surprised when people mistakenly say Alaskan Airlines, but it's Alaska Airlines. Just so we're all on the same page.)

Alaska's a bit of a hard place to navigate. Big empty place, lots of ice, lots of mountains, islands, trees...not very much asphalt. That's even true now, but it used to be way truer, and even back then people did still live there. And there's a lot of things those people might maybe like to have, like medical care, or food, or just the hypothetical possibility of getting somewhere without having to get the snowshoes out. In that sense, Alaska is a really perfect place for aviation to flourish.

More or less as early as physically possible, when there were planes available that weren't requisitioned for the first World War or owned by the ultra-rich, people were flying in Alaska. In a lot of ways the basic landscape hasn't changed that much. With its surplus of difficult environments and paucity of actual tarmac Alaska's harsh wilderness is an environment only suited for "bush" flying, using smaller, more rugged airplanes specialized for the environment. Some of the most popular models of bush plane are very old, not that dissimilar to what you'd see in the 50s and 60s - apparently, they just don't make them the same anymore, and as long as you don't get your de Havilland Beaver crunched horribly into the side of a mountain there's just nothing that can replace it. Alaska is full of planes on floats, planes on skis, and taildraggers on tundra tires, most of them high-wing and piston-engined. Bush pilots are a unique sort, often doing work that's neither glamorous nor lucrative (nor safe, with Alaska having two to five times the accident rate of the lower 48) but undeniably necessary.

That's not as true of Alaska Airlines. They have a modern fleet, a good safety record except for that one time, and as a category III carrier they make over a billion dollars in revenue each fiscal year, meaning their finances aren't too strained (except for that one time). Unlike the local carriers that connect remote parts of Alaska to resources and to major cities, Alaska Airlines connects Alaska to the rest of the nearby world. (Though it also does short, multi-stop milk run flights.) It's a necessary part of the ecosystem, helping to keep Alaska's beautiful but hostile terrain from getting in the way of daily life. Before they became Alaska Airlines, though, they were far more similar to what you might expect of...Alaska airlines.

Image: Roy S. Dickson

In 1932, a man with the fantastic name 'Linious McGee' started his very own airline. You could just do that back then. In 1934 it was merged into Star Air Service, another tiny airline. Star Air Service had also been founded in 1932, born from the flight-school-starting dreams of a wealthy miner with the similarly wonderful name 'Wesley Earl Dunkle'. Apparently Star had its first ever aircraft, a Fleet B-5 biplane, brought to Alaska by steamship, which I just find fairly interesting. I guess this was before you could even ferry an airplane directly to Alaska by air. They ate up a few other small airlines (and their routes), and in 1943 they won a small scuffle against another pretender to formerly rebrand themselves as Alaska Airlines. So it's been 80 years of that now!

They've gone from flying Curtiss Robins, Ford Trimotors, and Lockheed Vegas to flying basically only 737s, save a few vestigial A320 family aircraft acquired when merging with Virgin America which they plan to phase out by the end of 2024. Their livery is also on E175 regional jets operated by Horizon Air and SkyWest. The airplanes flying for them number around 300. That's incredibly large even by the standards of major airlines (not even counting the SkyWest planes that have the livery).

The Alaska Airlines livery is not breaking any molds and I need to say that upfront. This is a very straightforward pattern I've taken to calling the Lufthansa Declined, or the Lufthansa Line SAS Variation. (Because the push and pull of trend cycles in brand identity is basically comparable to chess, right? Maybe? No? Not really?) I've recently codified the concept of the Lufthansa Line, the straight line continuing where the tailfin left off to carve through the fuselage. This is a very common and very disappointing fuselage trope. The Declined, or SAS Variation, is named for an airline I specifically contrasted with Lufthansa from my very first post on this blog, SAS.

The SAS Variation simply curves this line outwards towards the front of the plane, stopping the cutoff from being quite so blunt and hopefully undoing the unbalancing effect somewhat. This can solve some of the nastier effects of Lufthansa Lines, particularly on shorter planes, but can also look very wonky if implemented without enough care. It's not always a big improvement, but it's definitely not the exact same thing, either, and it's this shape which Alaska Airlines attempts. Being introduced in 2016, this livery actually pre-dates SAS, but Delta and Lufthansa weren't starting their own namesake patterns either. The names aren't attributed based on innovation, but on formative status in my own specific understanding of airline liveries. SAS as contrasted to Lufthansa is the holotype for my creation of the taxon, and thus earlier liveries are retroactively SASlikes. Birds are dinosaurs and whales are ungulates. Taxonomy is imperfect and has to accommodate new discoveries within a sometimes unintuitive framework. That's just how it is.

I think they do better than many. The fact that they use so many colors, layered over each other, is crucial to the effect. It accomplishes similar things as a gradient might, transitioning from dark to light with minimal pain in the process.

Image taken from Alaska Airlines's very useful branding style guide.

The shades of blue and green used resemble the Aurora Borealis. I can't find anything confirming that this is intentional but I can't imagine it isn't. I think they're very nicely chosen. Different lightings can make the blue (Alaska's material calls it midnight blue, but it's technically Prussian blue) look anywhere from true vivid blue to more of a deep ocean color, which is one of my favorite shades. In particular, the very washed out yellowish green is an absolutely gorgeous choice for a highlight color. I like that the colors aren't given equal purchase, though, and that the green is used sparingly for highlight, and to create that lovely subtle 'halo' around the face on the tail. Sometimes less is more, and this is one of those cases. In fact, their own website states:

Midnight is our primary brand color, and should be used sparingly to avoid overuse—giving more prominence to the Alaska Airlines brand.

(They also note that they took specific efforts in the design process to make sure these colors had significant contrast between them to meet accessibility standards, which I really appreciate and want to see more of.)

For example, if the 'intermediate' blue colors took up more of the plane, or were separate from the green, I would probably not feel any real way about them. I definitely wouldn't think they were nice if they just did a standard Lufthansa Line block with each color individually expressed. But using them as a trim to a nice clear deep blue, overlapping each other in a way that's very carefully mapped out but seems at a glance essentially random, halfway to mixing, like the dark tail is melting slowly into the fuselage...that's nice. That adds something.

The partially-overlapping, brushlike curves are further expressed as swashes on the winglets and engines. What's interesting to me is that if you look closer you can see that the little curves are on both the inboard and outboard sides of each engine and winglet, so you get that consistent curve, hypothetically, no matter what angle you see it from. I do think I appreciate that. The curves are just never going to all line up, because airplanes are inconveniently three-dimensional and there are as many angles to view them from as there are Planck lengths at a distance where you can tell what it is you're seeing. This is a weakness in all liveries more detailed than a Braniff jellybean and adding the curves to even the side of the engine that you're usually not going to see is definitely an appreciated attempt to mitigate this. Does it work? Maybe not totally, but I see the effort.

While there's never a perfect syzygy into one continuous line, the curves seem like they're part of the same nebulous body from most angles. I appreciate this approach. I think making things look pretty good from most angles is worth more than making things look really good from one angle and awkward from all others. As they say, the perfect is the enemy of the good. I absolutely love the use on just the inside middle of the scimitar winglet, which I already think is a gorgeous feature that just elevates the MAX and retrofitted 737NGs compared to the vanilla model. It's distinctive and stylish, and the limiting of the color to just the lower half of the upper blade has a real restrained elegance to it - these slashes of color are all the more effective for the way they interact with the space around them.

Just look at these winglets. They're such a tiny feature. It's absolutely wild that I can be this in love with winglets, but there's just something about split scimitar wingtips that make me go completely wild. The amount of space and the interesting shape leaves so much more room for creativity than just about any other wingtip device. Alaska Airlines does have planes with other wingtip styles, and it uses those effectively too - covering the lower half of canted/blended winglets and fully encompassing the interior of less pronounced split winglets - but this is where they look their best.

Back to bad angles, though...

Alaska Airlines has a weird weak spot, and it's from the front and slightly above. All those gorgeous swoops on the winglets and nacelles are basically impossible to see due to their two-dimensional nature, and you can see how the colors don't fully cover the back of the fuselage. My normal policy is to judge liveries by their weakest link, but I honestly almost want to be lenient on this because of how unlikely it is that you're ever going to see an airplane from this angle. The only situations you're ever above an airplane in are ones you're basically never going to encounter as a regular passenger. Don't get me wrong, I still think this could have been designed in a way which eliminates this weak point, but as far as weak points go this is quite excusable. Is that what Thetis thought when she dipped her son in the Styx? Sure, probably, but I stand by my take. For a lot of liveries their worst angle is close to side-on, which is just fully experience-ruining. This? I'm okay with this, relatively speaking.

On the other hand, one of the better angles is one a lot more people will see - below and to one side. The taper of the different bands of color really prevents the awful jarring cutoff that Lufthansa Line and SAS Variation liveries often have, and I feel like they trick the eye into thinking up more of the fuselage is occupied than it really is. Also worth noting is that the grey underside, which resembles a shadow, is actually intentionally painted on, which is lovely. This is a feature common to the Deltalike livery trend that I outline at the start of my Southwest post, which I do think is one of the things that makes me honestly a bit sympathetic to Deltalikes when looking at them next to Lufthansalikes - at least there's an attempt to distribute visual detail evenly. Deltalikes were already a bit dated by 2016 (it was not the longest-lived trend, though it came at a time in my life perfectly positioned to make me think it was more prominent than it was) while SASlikes were on the rise, and this livery has aspects of each, but it feels less like a conflicted result of an intermediate period in dominant trends and more like something which intentionally pulled features from both where it thought they might work best. It's rare that I get this sense from a livery. That's the right way to use trends - as inspiration, not a template.

Alaska Airlines is definitely not a true Deltalike, and I would argue it's not a true SAS Variation either. (For the record, I would consider the 1998 SAS livery a Deltalike, funnily enough!) It incorporates features of both, which makes me feel uncomfortable classifying it definitively as either, though it's definitely more of a SASlike than not. For example, from the side it just is a SASlike, because the grey doesn't go high enough and isn't contrasting enough to be visible except from below. This is in contrast to actual Deltalikes, which have a thin but clearly visible line on the lower side where the underside's block of color bleeds out.

This grey color is also on the engine nacelles, although it is very subtle. This does bring up a minor gripe of mine, which is that the design on the pods cuts off at a bit of an awkwardly sharp angle, usually not worth remarking on but possible to notice from some angles if you are, say, a livery reviewer and you look at these things very closely. What I do like, though, is that the grey on the belly actively connects to the color on the tail, feeling like an extension of it instead of an awkward choice made to mitigate it.

The final specific feature of the livery I think I want to comment on is the wordmark. I really like the wordmark. It's not in their custom typeface, AS Circular, a Roboto-ish sans serif I'm not a gigantic fan of, although I really like their custom web icons. They also use Highest Praise by Adam Ladd, a fairly cheap commercially available font.

As for the wordmark itself, though, I can't seem to find what font it's based on! I have to say the original 1966 logo would be great if another airline were to use it, the 1972 is somehow giving supermarket chain, and the 1990 logo would be great if not for the weird way the K overlaps the A, which just feels sloppy and unprofessional. The 2014 and 2016 incarnations, though, are great. The 2016 one (designed by the firm Hornall Anderson) feels like a great update, just cleaning up the earlier version, though I somewhat miss the lightning-bolt S.

The placement is what I want to talk about, though. Placing a wordmark is more of an art than you might think - I'll show a couple examples of Alaska itself doing a slightly wonky job later - but when Alaska's placement is good it's great. It's one of the least cramped-looking wordmarks I've ever seen, feeling free and airy, spreading upwards above the window line. The descending line on the K and the trailing like on the A both create a feeling of freedom, like it could just keep going but doesn't want to, yet is tastefully restrained and doesn't actually overstep its bounds. I like the solid single color, and I like that it reaches almost to the engines, preventing that empty-forward-half feeling. The one thing I'll comment on for this set of images is that the left-to-right reading direction of English does mean that it looks distinctly worse seen from one side than the other. I much prefer the forward slant, which feels aerodynamic fitting with the motion of the plane, vs the alternative, in which it feels like the wordmark is trying to catch up with the aircraft's nose.

On shorter planes, though, Alaska fumbles a little. They choose to line up the wordmark with the engines instead of with the nose, creating an awkward look when it overlaps the door and nearly reaches the cockpit window. I would have leaned in the other direction were I them. This picture also demonstrates a strange feature which rears its head in certain lightings where the shading on the tailfin image makes it look almost wrinkled. I don't have anything to add to that or know how to solve it, but I need to point it out.

On a very long plane, conversely, the back half of Alaska's planes begins to feel that Lufthansa Line emptiness. The vast, vast majority of their planes are of a moderate enough length that neither issue is too overpowering, but I'm taking a wide view here! Also, the wordmark here seems to not be aligned with the engines, so...what's the idea?

Alaska Airlines is an interesting livery. More interesting than I thought I'd find it for sure. It's not just a SASlike with pleasing colors and a nice wordmark, it's a SASlike with thought put into features that can mitigate the inherent weaknesses of the SASlike. It doesn't always fully succeed, nor does it comprehensively fail, but it definitely tries.

At the end of the day, as usual, I wish there was less white. I'm sure it could have been done. I don't have an obvious solution in mind like I do for some hypothetical redesigns, so it's something I would have to think over and really dig into, but, like, Alaska Airlines makes more than a billion in revenue every year so I think that's reasonable to expect from them.

I initially started using the grading system as a way to categorize liveries without limiting myself to a very specific scale that I'll dither about for years and then change my mind about later, but it's started to end up in that role. I just don't know what better solution there is, so I'm going to continue trying to make it work. Alaska Airlines is a livery that I ultimately think I like, that I think is designed decently, but that is limited by the fact that a really good SASlike is still a SASlike - mostly white and rear-heavy. It's getting the most possible out of a flawed paradigm, and I've been inconsistent so far on how I rate a good SASlike or Lufthansalike because it causes me some legitimate cognitive dissonance.

I'm giving Alaska Airlines a provisional B-.

I think I might downgrade it to C+ later, which is why I say it's provisional. A good execution of something really limited - how do I even rate that? It's somewhere between tepidly good and better-than-average, which is a really awkward place to be. But that's probably a conversation for another day, because this post is long enough and I'm still not done.

Okay, I teased this earlier.

Him. Who is he?

The short answer: nobody knows. Not me, and not Alaska Airlines.

The long answer: deserves its own post. Both because it's long, and because I've hit image limit. And there will be images. Join me in tomorrow's bonus, where we climb our way through the rugged terrain of seemingly-lost history to attempt to put a name to this ubiquitous face.

Icelandair is not a concept that needs much explanation. It's right there in the title. It is an airline, and it is from Iceland. If you want a little more information, here's a summary written in 1997 by John K. Morton for his book "Jetliner Glory". (Scan mine)

As you can see, Icelandair was, at this point, rocking a supersized nothingburger of a livery. With just a cheatline and some paint on the bottom of the nacelles to accompany the logo and wordmark it feels less like SAS's belly stripes or Tibet Airlines, where it looks like a plane painted white, and feels more like they just forgot to add the rest of the livery.

While I do slightly prefer this older take with the more faded colours, the bare metal underside, and the contoured down-sloping cheatline, it's still pretty nothing.

Oh no. Oh nonononono don't do that please don't-

Thank you. That's much less worse.

The blue-and-yellow livery was adopted in 2006. I don't like this but this feels necessary. What stands out to me about Icelandair, above any individual feature of their fleet, is that they are fundamentally incapable of departing from whatever the most simplified and common design trend of the time is.

70s and early 80s. Single rule cheatline, large font wordmark, bare metal lower half.

80s and early 90s. All over paint, text moved forward to just behind the forwardmost door. Beginning of strict adherence to Eurowhite en masse.

Aughts to late 2010s. This is an era of somewhat refined Eurowhite. This allows very specific colored parts of the airframe: a block of color on the underside, a detached floating tail, colored winglets, and colored nacelles.

My opinion of this specific livery is that it is nearly identical to Delta's. Similar dark blue shade, exact same layout. The only difference is that Delta's blue engines make the livery look more coherent and Delta's logo is far more distinctive. I consider Delta to be the platonic ideal of this type of 2000s Eurowhite, and Icelandair uses the exact same layout.

I will say...it could be worse. Icelandair does not fail the Star Alliance test, so I cannot give it an F.

It's getting a D, for Delta.

But hey! Great news! They literally just unveiled a new one! And they've given me a nice webpage describing their thought process. I keep seeing more and more airlines do this with their 2020s livery releases and I think it's awesome.

image: icelandair

And they're jellybeans! I make no secret for my love of jellybeans. These come in five colours: boreal blue, magenta, sky blue, yellow, and green. Each of them is meant to represent a different aspect of Icelandic natural phenomenae, which I would expect at least partially stems from the response to their widely beloved Hekla Aurora and Vatnajökull liveries.

The two colours not pictured above: boreal blue (left) and green (right)

I really like these choices of colour. I think my favourite is ultimately magenta because of how striking its contrast is with the main blue, but none of these look even a little bad.

I do wish there was a little more integration of the jellybean colours into the rest of the livery (maybe the winglets or the engine nacelles, or as an outline on the wordmark, or extended to the underside of the plane), but the concept itself is solid and each colourway is pleasing. While I think this is a welcome change from the earlier yellow-and-blue scheme I am very happy that they kept a yellow variant.

Red engine SAS livery jumpscare in the background.

I would say the main thing I dislike about the new livery is the billboard wordmark. It's fine in theory but I utterly despise the typeface they've chosen and I find that sans-serif typefaces look fine when they're small but get uglier and uglier the larger you make them. It's a very boring downgrade, especially compared to the tasteful little serifs on the very tips of the old one. They were a minor aerodynamic touch but they were very nice compared to this, which is giving corporate brochure in a way I can't stand. At least it keeps the middle fuselage from being blank, I suppose.

I do like it a lot better on the Dash 8, though it's a little too low to the bottom for my taste. They could solve this by just making it slightly smaller, but they've apparently fully committed to a font that is, in my opinion, too large and widely spaced.

I feel like they also missed an opportunity with their logo. I've seen people say that it's a stylised 'F' to represent the company's first name, Flugfélag. I've heard someone else say that it reminds them of a stylised aurora, and I agree with them. I think there was a lot of room to play with both of these, and that it's a shape that's simple enough and dynamic enough to lend itself well to livery design, and that they could have created something so much better had they made more use of it - especially with the jellybean colours.

The final thing I want to point out is the tail. It's very blatant that the 2020s equivalent of the detached tail is the slightly-integrated tail, which loops down and just prevents the tail from being detached while still leaving the majority of the fuselage blank white without really adding much visual interest or presenting much in the way of creativity.

SAS and WestJet are two other airlines from those I've covered which do this. Now, they could both be a lot worse - WestJet has a nice wordmark and I've already talked about why SAS does a lot that's more interesting than the tail - but I can't deny that I dislike this trend. It fixes the ugliness of Detached Tail Syndrome but without adding much. It is the bare minimum. It is an upgrade from bad to nothing. And I think it's worth noting that both of these airlines, and indeed the majority of airlines with slightly-integrated tails, used to have detached tails. The Lufthansa clone of the 2020s is the Delta clone of the 2010s.

But I think Icelandair's new livery requires comparison to one 2020s livery more than any other - our old 'friend', Lufthansa.

The reason I point out Lufthansa is that unlike SAS and WestJet it does not feature a curve, but a straight line downwards. It also features more than one colour on the tail itself, sort of - I mean, it has the contrasting white stripe.

I don't think I particularly need to linger on why I like Icelandair's livery so much better than I like Lufthansa's. But I will point out one aspect in particular. The descriptions of the inspiration behind Lufthansa's livery focus on how sleek and modern it is. It occasionally mentions nebulous 'German values' (a phrase which in context refers to Europe's obsession with the most hideous sans-serif fonts on the face of the planet and soul-sucking minimalist white design but which sort of makes me shudder as a disabled bisexual Jew, a set of traits seemingly min-maxxed for being a target of...well, you know) but beyond that is wholly and almost gleefully corporate, scoffing in the face of the fact that flag carriers are almost by design intended to be unprofitable, to provide air transport to residents of their country and to serve as propaganda.

Air France lost heaps of money on Concorde, Alitalia went fourteen years without turning a profit, and do you think carriers like Rwandair or Air Niugini, which just don't have the demand to operate planes filled to capacity, are able to make money? Of course not, but they operate anyway because people need to get places and it's a statement for a government, especially one without the means of a massive European power with centuries of stolen resources at its disposal or an ultrawealthy Gulf state, to put their names on a plane and say that this is a service they are providing to the people they are, on paper, meant to provide for.

This is not a feature unique to airlines - just think about the way high-speed rail in China and Japan are inherently tied to their national identities, as something these countries have built as a service to their people and as something which makes them better places to live. Think about the Space Race, which was a dick-measuring contest more than it was for science. The US government is notorious for its unwillingness to fund science projects but if it means sticking it to the reds it's worth a couple billion to put a man on the moon.

Any sort of project which invents or builds by necessity becomes a symbol of national power. Sometimes these things are useful, like high-speed rail, and sometimes they advance science, like reaching the moon, but, like...did Ferrari World need to exist, or is the UAE willing to spend a bunch of money to say "look how awesome we are, we have the fastest roller-coaster in the world"? Did the USSR need the Tu-144? Of course not - luxury air transport wasn't a thing, they couldn't charge a premium, and there wasn't anywhere safe to release a sonic boom over, and it was rushed out in a state that couldn't really be considered airworthy just to serve for less than a year while diverting resources from actually useful aerospace projects. The Tu-144 set back Soviet aerospace engineering by decades but it was worth it for the chance to say they built the first supersonic airliner, which will remain technically true forever. Countries are chomping at the bit to displace people and abuse labourers and waste money and resources to build stadiums that will lie derelict for the rest of time just to get to say they hosted the Olympics.

These things are worth losing money for. To say 'we are willing to lose money to give our people transport and to have our own airline with our own flag on it'. Flag carriers do not need to be profitable. If they happen to turn a profit that's a good thing for the country but it's not meant to be the point. That the US has never had a flag carrier feels like a very pointed statement to me - no handouts, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and build your own damn airline. While many large airlines elsewhere have their own founders with their own marks on history and large personalities, none of them have the cultural capital that Juan Trippe or Howard Hughes do. Icelandair's equivalent of Juan Trippe is the aurora.

I cannot imagine a carrier which reflects its national identity less than Lufthansa does. Perhaps they want to forget that they are a flag carrier and by this nature propaganda. After all, despite being largely a different entity, they bear the name of a flag carrier founded by the Third Reich. They had an easy out of this. They could have stuck with their initial name, Luftag. They could even have taken the name and branding of Interflug, the East German flag carrier, but better to be founded by the actual Third Reich than by the Communists, from their perspective. It's probably better to lean as far away from what they were made to be as possible. And from their point of view to be as corporate as possible is actually probably a reflection of what there is to love about Germany, given that this is their background. I find that incredibly sad. If I were German, this would make me furious. There is so much more to Germany than anything Lufthansa has ever been. It is insulting not just to my eyes but to the idea that it is meant to be part of German identity.

Meanwhile, Icelandair's inspiration is Iceland: the natural features which make their country worth visiting. They are aware of this - they actually used the Hekla Aurora livery to promote the fact that they offered free week-long stopovers in Iceland. Their website explicitly lays, interspersed with images of aurora over snowy mountainous landscapes which seem to stretch on forever, that this is what Iceland has to offer.

And since we spend so much time in the sky, we drew inspiration from what we see in front of us, and what we see in our country from above. [...] By extending our color palette, we have a chance to bring the vibrant Icelandic spirit to the world, and to show the world the diversity of our people: The Icelandic spirit is available to anyone and everyone who wants to share in it.

At the end of the day, flag carriers are a form of propaganda. That word normally has a very nasty connotation, but it doesn't have to be things like war crime coverups and attempts to quell rebellion. In this case, it can be an encouragement for Icelandic people to be proud of something about their country as well as an attempt to drum up tourism. Is it still a calculated attempt to sell you something? Sure. But it's an attempt to sell something Icelandic people are proud of, because they live somewhere with beautiful features that don't exist anywhere else. I really want to visit Iceland, and have for years, for the exact reasons outlined in Icelandair's material about their new livery.

And does this livery actually overtly communicate these things? No, not really. I think it's something you can see when you have it explained to you but wouldn't notice at a glance. But the fact that this was considered at all, much like condor's justification for their flying striped nightmares, keeps me from feeling the same sort of disgust I do for liveries like Lufthansa's.

So, Icelandair could do a lot better. But they're doing a lot better than they ever have before. And they have succeeded, fundamentally, at being Icelandair.

I leave them with a final grade of C.

It could be better. Far better. But they're at least using the right equation to get the wrong answer. If they ever get the courage to design something which doesn't follow the dominant trends in whatever the decade's particular flavour of Eurowhite is as if it's copied from a template, I think Icelandair could come up with something really great, and I hope I live long enough to see it.

And, as a final note on their commitment to their national identity, I will be discussing their three non-crossover special liveries: Þingvellir, Vatnajökull, and this blog's first twice-requested livery, Hekla Aurora. But they will get their own post, because this one is already preposterously long, so get ready to see a lot more Iceland very very soon.

1946 - The Original

image: Bene Robió

This picture is of a modern plane, OY-KBO “Christian Valdemar Viking” (all SAS planes have names ending in ‘Viking’) wearing a retro livery, but it contains the only part of SAS’s original livery of any interest at all. 

If we zoom in we can take a look at the end of the cheatline, where it morphs into the figurehead of a Viking longship. This is a nifty little touch that represents their national identity and is itself sleek and nicely designed.

And it looks even better on the 747.

It’s also the only notable thing about this old livery, so it’s not worth lingering on for too long. I thought it was worth mentioning because it's neat, but this livery was literally adopted when they very first began flying - in 1946! At that point it was pretty rare to see airlines have any livery at all aside from their name painted on bare metal. This was actually above and beyond for the time.

image: towpilot

It didn't look half bad on the DC-3, either. This was a consistently nice style and for its era I would say it was pretty good. But are we judging by the standards of the time? No.

So, for the time I would probably have given it a high grade. But it is not the time.

So I am giving it a C-.

There are still things to like about the longship design, don't get me wrong. But there is just literally nothing else going on, and it's not enough to have the only piece of your livery that's actually identifiable be so small and easy to miss.

1983 - Belly Stripes

image: Lars Wahlstrom

In 1983 they swapped to this livery, commonly known as “belly stripes”, designed by the iconic Landor Associates, prolific purveyors of liveries. It’s a pretty abrupt change, isn’t it? I like this livery, actually. It’s nice, if understated. The stripes are specifically the colors of the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish flags. Apparently they worried the figurehead would be hard to understand (fair) and the association with Vikings might be bad optics (yet they continued to name their planes this way). 

Like I said, it’s nice. It’s fine.

This, like the original livery, is something that can be evaluated by modern standards or by those of its time. In 1983 majority-white liveries weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now and planes still frequently had cheatlines and all-over color and even bare metal fuselages so the bare white plane with the tiny bit of color and the nice font was actually something of a statement. Even by modern standards it’s executed a lot nicer than many similar liveries, but the market is just so saturated that it only really works in the context of its time, I think. Having a plane be nearly all white is no longer an artistic choice. It's a non-choice. And that's the world I live in, and that has to color how I look at this. But all the same...I can't tear myself away from it. In photographs from the time it is as pristine as newly fallen snow.

So I'm giving it a B.

I like the belly stripes livery. It's a neat and unique way of showcasing the flags. It's cleanly executed. I like that the stripes are diagonal instead of straight and that they're aligned with the letters, which are also in a very nice typeface. I just wish it existed in a less Eurowhite-saturated environment where it could shine to its fullest.

I somehow never noticed how adorably stubby the pre -30 DC-9 models were. Thankfully this has been remedied. Just look at her. Like a really round bird hopping through the air.

I think it’s interesting how, while Lufthansa slowly lost creative interest but only ever became a different design altogether in a sort of Ship of Theseus way, SAS fully overhauled their livery multiple times. They’re definitely trying to find something that works for them, regardless of the cost. They refuse to rest on their laurels. I admire that mindset, and it’s not ended badly so far. 

And then it was 1998. 

If you look very closely you can see something horrible in the distance.

No, okay. It can't be as bad as you're making it out to be, you say. And you are a fool for saying this.

Oh no. Oh no. Sweetheart, what happened to you? 

So, this is really really bad. Really really really bad. This looks like it was designed with the same philosophy I used to design original characters in middle school - oh, I like this color, let me add it without considering the overall balance or composition. This design was made by people who were paid to make it. 

This has almost all the features I hate most in a livery, all the way up to the abrupt color transition at the tailfin, but an additional one: that absolute atrocity right at the front. If you’re confused what I’m referring to, I don’t blame you - they made it nearly invisible. If you squint very hard, though, you can see ‘SCANDINAVIAN’ above the windows and ‘AIRLINES’ below it, completely illegible due to being painted in a silver color barely darker than the main fuselage itself. 

It looks amazingly funny with rear-mounted engines, though. That's her fanny pack.

All I can really say is: why. Why did you do this? Why.  

I am actually somewhat ashamed of how little I noticed this when out in the wild. It’s a testament to the sheer saturation of mostly plain liveries with a hint of red and/or blue that this monstrosity blended into the background and evaded my notice. (And in my defense I’ve never been to one of their focus cities so sightings have only been in passing.)

This might sound harsh, but I'm about to say this and stand by it. Here is a better SAS livery from the same time period.

With the engine covers on it looks like one of those plastic tips they put on toy pistols. Also, doesn't keeping the red engine caps defeat the purpose if you also have red engines, since they're meant to be clearly visible so you don't accidentally try to use the plane with them on? Do they not have a different color available for red engined freaks? Many questions.

That's right, SAS's 1998-2019 livery fails the Star Alliance Test!

What is the Star Alliance Test, you ask? It's very simple. Star Alliance is an airline alliance - basically a club for the world's most elite carriers to hang out in and codeshare. The three major alliances all have special liveries that they might have a couple planes from each of their members wear.

I hate alliance liveries. I think airline alliances should be represented by a little symbol on the airline's standard livery, not the other way around. I would like to know what airline this plane is from before I know if it's a member of OneWorld or SkyTeam. And if I need to know that they usually have a symbol for the alliance somewhere on the plane anyway.

The Star Alliance logo on a SAS ATR 72, directly behind the cockpit window and in front of the door. If you really squint you can even see the words 'Star Alliance' written underneath it.

Star Alliance is my least favorite. SkyTeam's livery actually looks pretty good. OneWorld's is the ugliest at base, but it lets the airline keep some of its branding at the back of the plane, which makes me hate it less. So Star Alliance loses by default. (Let me know if you'd like a full review for these, though.)

The Star Alliance Test has exactly one question. Would I prefer that all this airline's planes were forcibly repainted into Star Alliance liveries instead of allowed to remain in their current state?

In this case, yes. I very much would. And that means there's only one grade I can give to this livery.

F. See me after class.

That's right. Fly away. Ideally to get repainted in something more presentable.

The 2019 Overhaul

(To clarify, when I compared Lufthansa to SAS in my post about them I did not want to imply that they literally copied SAS - their revised livery obviously came out a year earlier, and they were definitely developed privately around the same time to keep up with modernized trends surrounding livery - they’re just similar safe, non-revolutionary concepts that SAS executes a lot better.)

I don’t normally buy the whole ‘the darkness must come before the light’ line of thinking, but SAS clearly does. Because even here, in this abomination, are the building blocks for what would become something reasonably decent. And, in 2019, SAS made that happen. 

Those are engine covers, by the way. There's no red on the engines. There's actually a tasteful silver trim under there.

So, this is what we've achieved. At first glance, it looks pretty similar to Lufthansa, but the closer you examine it the clearer the differences become. 

First, the white fuselage. Well, actually, that’s not the case for SAS. It looks white in bright sunlight, but it’s actually an off-white beige (Pantone 9083C). You can see that in this picture of an SAS plane parked next to a SWISS plane, and when you put a bunch of Scandinavians in crisp white shirts in front of it. 

image source (left): Daniel Ross | image source (right): SAS

I mean, no, it’s not exactly neon pink or anything, but it’s still a noticeable change in tone relative to other planes, and that means it’s a decision someone made. And that makes me happy. 

I think the world has begun to somewhat agree with me on the whole non-integrated-tail-colorblock being bad to look at, because SAS has also extended the stripe of blue down to loop under the rest of the fuselage. Honestly, if I were them I would have made it wider so it covered the full empennage on t-tail models, but that might make it look weird in its own way - I’m not here to design liveries, I’m here to complain about them. I just think it's still a bit too small to make the jet look fully balanced with the big SAS at the front.

The awful red engines have been replaced with a far more tasteful alternative - silver with a blue stripe at the front and silver trim on the very front edge. I like that a lot. No criticisms. 

The silver text has been kept, but it’s been reduced from a bunch of small letters to just a very large SAS, which is a lot clearer even when in low contrast. It’s difficult to nail down my thoughts on this. Obviously it’s an improvement, and I wouldn’t want it to be removed entirely, and I’m not sure if a more solid, emphatic version, maybe in the same blue as the rest of the livery, would actually be better or not. I think I overall like the silver wordmark? As long as it’s not a really bad angle it’s visible enough, and it adds something a bit interesting. Even if it is illegible at least they also have the name on the tail. It probably helps that it’s only three letters long. Still, nobody is going to be confused about what airline this plane belongs to. 

I think the wordmark looks its best on turboprops wearing the livery. I honestly feel like most good jet liveries look awkward on props and vice versa, but this transitions very well. Not many major airlines still fly props, and almost none of them adapt their liveries well to them, but the wordmark fills the space really nicely on the shorter fuselage of the ATR and the high wings break up the line in a way that looks pretty darn nice to me. More airlines need to fly props, and they need to take notes on how to make a livery work for them. 

Aside from the too-small amount of blue, my one real outright complaint is the very small Noto Sans(?, unsure) ‘Scandinavian’ written on the engine nacelles. It feels pointless and looks out of place. It looks extra out of place because the rest of their livery is in Rotis semi-serif, and the combination really clashes. It’s a little baffling, because they certainly have the option of just using the SAS logo again - the only other place they use the full ‘Scandinavian’ is on the belly. My personal suggestion would be bringing back the longship figurehead for the engines, but that’s just me. It just looks more like a watermark than a design feature. 

Look, I never said I loved the SAS livery, but someone clearly designed it. The implementation is still a little shaky in parts, as if the airline is regaining its footing after the red engine years, but it’s stumbling towards being good and it’s just short of the point where it can sit down and rest and reflect on its progress. 

SAS gets an overall grade of C. Which is also what the GPA of the other three came out to, I think! My calculations are admittedly a bit improvised.