Painting the town red , and the aircraft – Part 1

Outside of the cabin selections, one of the biggest single expenditure of customisation is the application of the aircraft livery. It is also a very up to date topic as the UK Prime Minister is purported to be planning repaint an Airbus A330 Voyager in a Union Flag, at around £1Million Pounds. We explore some of the intricacies and practicalities of the aircraft exterior paint.

The exterior livery of an aircraft is likely to be the biggest advertisement hoarding of any operator, any image of the airline typically involves a shot of the aircraft so making it look at it best is all important. Many operators consider there aircraft livery as a core fundamental of its brand for example, take a look at any of the airline within the Virgin Group family and you see the logos have the shape of an aircraft tail, that red on the Boeing and Airbus aircraft is synonymous with the brand. For other airlines an airline livery is the shop window for a nation or country with the flag and national image intrinsically tied to the specific operator.

Depending on the utilisation and environment most operators re-apply their livery every 5-8 years. If an airline using a specialist paint product they go even longer with some commercial aircraft paint applications lasting greater than 12 years. Ensuring the application is robust is essential for the airline but also the OEM on a new aircraft delivery for the following reasons:

• ·While it is an image of the airline but also a good paint scheme is a good image for the manufacturer as well, the last thing they need is images of paint peeling off a new A350 or a B787, shortly after delivery. Some years ago I was inspecting a regional jet where the operator had painted 1 metre round the passenger door and the inboard engine cowls, the rest had little paint coverage as that was all the passengers could see while boarding, emphasising that image is everything.

• Should an aircraft need a premature re-paint the costs can be sizeable. To sand and repaint a wide body aircraft you can expect to pay more than $250,000 US Dollars and that will be just a plain white livery, so once you add on any branding or custom markings the number continues to rise. Does the UK Air Force One jet sound like a bargain?

• In addition to the cost you have the downtime and operational impact. Every day an aircraft is not available it is a significant cost and impacts the airline operation greatly, with many operators use an estimate of $100,000 per day of cost due to maintenance downtime so when an aircraft re-paint of a large aircraft can take at least 10 days, resulting in an additional cost of around a $1Million in lost revenue.

• We should remember the underlying purpose of the exterior paint, to provide protection the exterior surface and structure of the aircraft. When the paint finish is compromised it allows the underlying structure to deteriorate, potentially decreasing safety and increasing maintenance actions to resolve issues such as corrosion on metal surfaces or erosion on composite panels. An example, I saw some years ago was an aircraft under10 years old had very little paint on the wings resulting in heavy pitting corrosion around the main spar fasteners along the length of each wing.

• If an aircraft shows visible paint issues in its early years it is likely that a warranty claim will be submitted by the operator to the manufacturer. There is an obvious impact to the operator but also any warranty claim of that size ultimately eats into the manufacturer’s profit margin from new aircraft sale. For operators it does pay to inspect the aircraft paint condition on a regular basis, even if its immediately prior to expiry of the warranty period to ensure that any cost exposure is effectively managed.

On a new aircraft the livery discussion starts shortly after the initial aircraft purchase agreement. The specification starts with the catalogue options deciding how complex you livery you wish to have. Adding complexity, adds costs and as such some liveries are large aircraft can be more than ½ million US Dollars. While a repaint can be achieved for a small proportion of the cost on a new aircraft the costs may have to include qualification of the product.

In our next post we will explore what goes into the choice of paint, the qualification process the product and some of the catalogue livery options to consider, including which colour white you would like!