new POTUS redesigned 747 shown

[Alan_A 1,650]

8 hours ago, Camsdad13 said:

I was actually being sarcastic. I love the current livery.

Sorry, I missed that - not the first time my irony detection loop has gone INOP... 😎

[BillCusick 75]

Wouldn't that paint job look better on an a380 ?

Regards

Bill

[ZLA Steve 370]

It feels like we are starting to veer into the territory Charlie so swiftly cautioned us about. Maybe we should stick to pondering paint and leave constitutional law to the experts instead.

 

[Mace 1,902]

9 hours ago, BillCusick said:

Wouldn't that paint job look better on an a380 ?

Regards

Bill

Or perhaps a 377 Stratocruiser?

The Connie was nice though.  Can't get much better looking than Lockheed Constellation.

[Alan_A 1,650]

You know, looking again at the current "classic" scheme, I found myself wondering whether it didn't look better on the original 707/VC-137 than it does on the 747/VC-25.  All that blue on the front fuselage adds a bit of weight when you apply it to the 747's hump.  A number of airlines changed their liveries when the 747 came into service, in order to get at something that worked well for that much bigger airframe.  So it's possible that something different could work better on the current or near-future aircraft.

[HighBypass 2,339]

34 minutes ago, Alan_A said:

....So it's possible that something different could work better on the current or near-future aircraft....

Perhaps Alan, but not the boring horizontal split. 

The A380 already has a giant turtle paint scheme (Flying Honu), not a lot can top that, even from a head of state!  

Actually.. back to my pondering of a livery similar to the old Flying Tigers line... "Flying Pres!" (...maybe a bit too relaxed and not reverential enough for the position) 

[John_Cillis 2,406]

22 hours ago, Camsdad13 said:

.....I wouldn’t have a problem with our President wearing a polo. The aircraft or clothes don’t make the person. 

I think foreign leaders should "let their hair down" and learn to be seen dressed casually, I think it would allow them to relate to their citizens better vs. military uniforms, or suits and jackets.  LOL, since I worked in Information Technology, IT is notorious for business casual, even to jeans and in some workplaces, long shorts although I would never allow myself to be seen to that state of undress with my hairy legs, lol.  Whenever I showed up to interview for my IT roles since about 2000 onward, I'd embarrass my potential employers by showing up in a suit and tie, and I loved to interview that way because I have a "lucky tie" purplish in color, that I bought in Kentucky and was wearing when I met my fiance for the first time. 

For some reason, every time I wore it to an interview, I was offered a job.  When I became a contract worker, my interviews were done at a distance, using Skype, and I still wore my suit and tie for the video interview and again, with that one tie, I always nailed the interview and got the job, up until my early retirement. 

But at work unless I was doing business systems training, I'd be business casual, when doing training I always wore a suit and tie to respect my students and my clients, a trait I picked up during the three years I worked with IBM on their Holiday Inn business systems rollout, at that time the largest business software rollout in world history, and it took 100 of us to implement those systems at Holiday Inns worldwide between 93-95. 

Again I kind of like the new AF1 livery but it is hard to envision it fully from the model shown.  I like the Canadian livery a lot that was shown in this thread.

John

[Paraffin 2,197]

1 hour ago, Alan_A said:

You know, looking again at the current "classic" scheme, I found myself wondering whether it didn't look better on the original 707/VC-137 than it does on the 747/VC-25.  All that blue on the front fuselage adds a bit of weight when you apply it to the 747's hump.  A number of airlines changed their liveries when the 747 came into service, in order to get at something that worked well for that much bigger airframe.  So it's possible that something different could work better on the current or near-future aircraft.

From a purely design perspective, I agree with you. I worked as a graphic designer as well as photographer before I retired, and yeah; that much of a darker color on the forward fuselage feels heavy and unbalanced.

From a historical perspective though, I don't like messing with things that have achieved an iconic status. It's like deciding that the green verdigis of the Statue of Liberty should be stripped to bare copper, so it doesn't look so old and tarnished. Or deciding that the Capitol Dome in DC would look better if it was covered with gold leaf.

Once something has been around long enough to reach "iconic" status, it shouldn't be messed, with unless there's a reason for it. And I suspect in this case, the reasons aren't good ones.

[Alan_A 1,650]

2 hours ago, HighBypass said:

Perhaps Alan, but not the boring horizontal split. 

Absolutely.

I might be up for something new - but not that particular something new.

2 hours ago, Paraffin said:

From a historical perspective though, I don't like messing with things that have achieved an iconic status.

Overall I'm inclined to agree - especially in this case, when the "look" has such a long history.  Was mainly trying to register, though, that I'm not reflexively against change, even if I don't like the proposed change.  Today's classic was new once.  I'm old enough to remember when American's red/white/blue livery first appeared - and what a shock it was, because American had *always* used the International Orange lightning bolt.  But the red/white/blue lasted even longer - over 40 years, by rough count, to the point where there was a lot of resistance when they changed over.

About the Statue of Liberty - "patination" is the technical term for that green oxidation.  William Gibson talks about it more generally in his Blue Ant trilogy - as a mark of something that's authentic, because it acquired that look slowly and naturally over time.  He contrasts it with "distressing" - the technique by which you take a knife to, say, a pair of jeans to make them look instant-old. 

I'm not sure what the term would be for a a gold-leaf Capitol dome - there's gotta be a word for it... 😎

[John_Cillis 2,406]

48 minutes ago, Alan_A said:

.....About the Statue of Liberty - "patination" is the technical term for that green oxidation......

 

I was so bummed in '99 when I was in NYC for a month.  I made it atop the twin towers but when me and my colleagues went to the Statue of Liberty, the top was closed so I was not able to summit that monument.  But I have summit-ed the Space Needle in Seattle, and the tallest skyscraper in Seattle, the Washington Monument, the Sears Tower, and the TransAmerica Pyramid and Bank of America Building in San Francisco, then the tallest buildings in what we called "The City" no matter what city we lived in in the SF Bay Area.

In Europe I have gone to the top of the Eiffel Tower in 1984, Mid Deck in 2017 (liked the view better from Mid Deck), and I went atop the Munich Olympic Tower in 1982 and saw them playing a soccer game way down below in the Olympic Stadium.   In Bruge Belgium I summit-ed the main tower made infamous in the movie "In Bruges", I've been atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 1984 before they closed it temporarily to keep it from falling after my weight was upon it, lol, and I climbed atop the Washington National Cathedral, the Cathedral in Milan, the Venice tower and the top of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, and finally the tallest tower in everyone's favorite flightsim alpine city, Innsbruck, right near my hotel where Mozart had stayed long before I did.

These personal memes make up for my not making it atop the Statue of Liberty in '99.  They also are the "Ground Force One's" of the states or countries they are in, architectural ambassadors for their locations and those that made them...

John

[n4gix 4,947]

Bob and I; not me and Bob...  

[Paraffin 2,197]

Bunch of geezers in here. 😄

My personal favorite memory involving airliners and liveries is back when I was a salaried photographer working for an outfit in Miami. They had the contract for local PR and corporate work with Pan Am based in Miami. I got to see a lot of cool behind-the-scenes stuff at MIA on those Pan Am jobs. 

There very best one was when Pan Am was working up a new livery design, and apparently the bigwigs couldn't decide between two versions. So they painted a 747 with the two versions, one on each side. Sent me out to photograph it outside a maintenance hangar at MIA. This was before computer modeling, remember. They needed to see what it really looked like, in daylight, not just drawings. And Pan Am  had a lot of money to spend, back then.

It was the largest "prop" I ever photographed in my career. And what a blast, talking on the radio to the ground crew... "Can you move it so it's angled just a little more that way for the light? Thanks!" "Okay, now let's turn it around!!" Tons of fun, but of course in those days, you had to make sure that you actually had the shot on film, or you were screwed. No preview on the back screen, no Photoshop. 

That job was a highlight in what was otherwise an often boring and stressful job. I went freelance on my own into advertising after that.

[Alan_A 1,650]

6 hours ago, John_Cillis said:

the top was closed so I was not able to summit that monument.

I have a standing rule when I travel - I don't climb anything.  For me it's almost never worth the aggravation.  Buy a postcard of the view and save the energy for walking around the city.  I did once get to the top of the Statue of Liberty, though - I was writing a story about an FDNY Marine Company (aka a fireboat) and we went out there on inspection just before it reopened - this was in 1984, before the 1986 centenary, and they'd just done a major renovation.  It was a very small uncomfortable space and I was happy to get back down...

5 hours ago, Paraffin said:

Bunch of geezers in here. 😄

I'd rather think of myself as having gotten a really early start... 😎

I'm wondering if I didn't read somewhere about that double-logo Pan Am 747.  MC Huhne, who wrote Airline Visual Identity, did an equally spectacular book about Pan Am (there's a deluxe one, too).  I'll have to dig it out and see if there's a reference to it.  But I get the feeling I've seen your photos somewhere.

I'm also a photographer - sometimes, that is, I'm really more of a writer - and in one of my early jobs had to do PR setup shots like that (though not at that scale).  I hated it - didn't like directing the scene and the logistics were just a bunch of stuff waiting to go wrong.  I'm a street photographer by temperament - I thrive on chaos, so you can see the disconnect.

That must have been an enormous feeling of power, getting them to tow a 747 around for you!

[John_Cillis 2,406]

17 minutes ago, Alan_A said:

I have a standing rule when I travel - I don't climb anything......

There was a great book I read that my Dad gave me to read, I always followed in my Dad's footsteps in any book he had, called "Seven Summits", about a couple of rich guys doing a bucket list type of thing by climbing the seven highest mountains for represented by each continent of the world. 

However, they did not climb the seven tallest mountains.  Most people do not know for instance, that Mt. Everest is not the world's tallest mountain.  It is the tallest peak above sea level, but the most distant peak from the center of the earth is Chimborazo, which is almost 6800 feet further from the center of the earth than Everest. 

Everyone has been misled that the earth is round.

No, I am not a flatlander or flat earth dude....

As most pilots know, the earth is slightly oblong, though it cannot be seen that way from a distance.  That is why gps systems are so complicated, I made one way back when in visual basic to calculate the distance between two coordinates of the globe, and I had to factor in the fact that the earth was oblong to get accurate distances between the coordinates, because using purely spherical coordinates were way, way off distance why when I'd try to calc distances between cities like New York and Frankfurt.

John

[HighBypass 2,339]

20 hours ago, Alan_A said:

... But the red/white/blue lasted even longer - over 40 years, by rough count, to the point where there was a lot of resistance when they changed over...

and yet I for one like the newer livery with the "flag" on the tail and stylised eagle head between the red & blue shapes. I wonder if they tried a variant of that on aircraft in their fleet which could have polished fuselages rather than the silvery grey paint?