Why Are American Airlines Planes Not Painted
For decades, American Airlines operated one of aviation's most instantly recognizable liveries: a polished, bare-metal fuselage with simple red, white, and blue striping-no heavy paint, no overcomplicated design-just the natural shine of aluminum under the sun. It wasn't just a stylistic choice. Leaving the aircraft unpainted saved hundreds of pounds per plane, reducing weight and.
American Airlines is done painting planes - updating the old bare metal legacy American Airlines livery, and repainting US Airways planes to say American. MD80s, slated for retirement, haven't been painted. The livery was hugely controversial, many customers, critics and employees didn't like it.
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With the merger they'd be repainting even more planes, adding 299 legacy US Airways. American Airlines does not. Fun fact: When the CEO (or whomever) at AA made the decision to go with the plain metal, one of the arguments was how much money would be saved: No spending millions on paint, and saving money on fuel (indirectly) because the plane would not be carrying the extra weight of all that paint.
For decades, American Airlines didn't need flashy paint to stand out. Its bare metal jets turned heads just by shining. The look came in the 1960s - red, white, and blue stripes, polished aluminum.
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Why are American Airlines planes not painted? Former American Chief Executive Robert Crandall famously decided to keep planes polished and unpainted in order to save fuel. Painting a plane can add a couple hundred pounds of weight, and that means more fuel will be burned with each flight. Q: Do metal-colored aircraft, such as older American Airlines models, weigh less than painted aircraft? Do they use some kind of metal preservative instead of colored paint? While there was debate over why airplanes are painted white and a question about how much a new paint job costed, what hasn't been asked is why airplanes are painted at all.
I remember one airline company sent out a press release in the 1980s or 1990s that keeping its planes unpainted (i.e, a nice silver) saved several hundred gallons of paint as well as considerable cost savings because the. American Airlines AAdvantage (Pre-Consolidation with USAir) - If paint costs so much, why is AA one of the few that goes paintless? - I remember hearing how much the maintenance is for airline paint, and I remember when Eastern Airlines ditched it for the tin fuselage look. At that time, the Douglas DC-3 - developed specifically for American - was the workhorse of our fleet, and the original decision not to paint that aircraft was mostly about looks.
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While other carriers' planes sported fancy, painted-on designs, American's leaders preferred the elegant look of the DC-3's unadorned aluminum skin. A very long time ago, a friend painted a P-51C on his aircraft and everything that was not P-51C was painted light blue (sides and bottom of the wings and forest green around the outside of the "wings" on top, complete with pilot in the "cockpit".
