Saturday is the perfect moment for a lighter post, even if this could start some discussions… Let us talk aircraft liveries, and especially changing them. Let’s start with a little experiment. Do you know the current Lufthansa livery? White and dark blue… right. Do you remember the previous one? Pretty similar but with yellow and lighter blue. Do you remember how Swissair looked like before becoming Swiss? What about Continental and United, and the shiny “raw metal” American Airlines?
Let’s face it, airlines are rather conservative when it comes to liveries, and for good reason. Changing comes at a cost and dramatic changes can be risky, even in our age of focus groups and A/B testing. But every now and then, a rule-breaker come along, an exception that leaves a dent in the universe.
If you frequent German airports or any sunny destination where Germans fly, you’ve probably seen this…
Condor, the German airlines focusing on sunny destinations made a real change in livery. Do you remember the old one? I hardly can, so I googled it and it is plain boring. One point to note: this livery is more a pattern than a livery, as it comes in many different colours. The change to the new livery started in April 2022 and it triggered a lot of discussion, debate and criticism. Ask two persons interested in aviation around here if they like it or not and you’ll probably get at least three opinions.
If you ask me, I hate it. Okay, this is a bit of a gut reaction but at least it is honest. Hate is probably a bit too strong of a word, especially for something as “light” and “irrelevant” as an aircraft livery. And this is the whole point of this post.
This livery creates a strong enough reaction for me to post about. A Reddit post about this livery got close to 200 comments. Everybody online posted about it, from Simple Flying to Airline Geeks and Runway Girl Network qualified it as “controversial” and mentioned reasons as deep as the rightfulness of reserving sun beds at popular beaches to explain their reactions to it.
Ask google for “analysis of Condor new livery” and you get about 184.000 results. Not bad for a self-proclaimed “leisure airline”.
So like it or not, Condor’s team made a great decision. All press is good press, and this new livery definitely got Condor a lot of press, so congrats on it.
Nowadays, the now infamous stripes can even be seen on tramways through the streets of Frankfurt. And yes, to me, it is ugly on a tramway as well.
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