To celebrate the 50,000th customer on an aircraft with heritage livery, British Airways brought them together at London Heathrow for a special photo-op.
The aircraft were all parked near BA’s maintained base at LHR for scheduled downtime. Positioning the planes for the photos below took a good two hours. A current A319 with Chatham Dockyard livery was also added to the mix:
all images courtesy of British Airways
CEO Alex Cruz underscored how these retro-liveries have been well-received:
The excitement and pride that we’ve witnessed from customers and colleagues as these heritage liveries, which we painted to mark our centenary, have flown around the globe has been unparalleled.
Social media has been fired up with images from travellers all over the world when they’ve spotted the aircraft and as some 50,000 people have now flown on them since they arrived back in the fleet we wanted to capture a special photo to share with them.
Why I Love Heritage Liveries
I like writing about heritage liveries because I find them to be linked to many happy memories. While I have only flown BA in the Chatham Dockyard era, as that livery evolves over the years and decades I may well look back affectionally upon it in the same way so many look back on the liveries pictured above.
Which is your favorite BA livery?
I’m rather disappointed the mid-90s Commonwealth Colours (as I call the tail markings from that period) livery was ignored. It was said Margaret Thatcher complained to Lird King that they were a travesty for removing the Union Jack from the aircraft tails and he killed the program and the current design was brought in.
Still I agree it’s great to see such liveries that harken back to the origins of the airlines we know today. One of the few good things to come from theAA/US merger was the painting of several aircraft in the colours of the many airlines that preceded the two “survivors”. AC and LH also have a few legacy liveries plying the sky.
Mrs Thatcher when shown models of the planes with the ‘World Tails’ opened her handbag, took out a large handkerchief and covered the tails as she said the images shamed Britain.
They were also unpopular with ATC around the world as they were not easily identifiable as BA causing confusion.
They were either loved or hated and mostly hated but the current ‘Chatam Dockyard’ livery is one of them but it was reserved to Concorde but ultimately was applied to the whole fleet.
There should be better angle amd background for these kind of photos….
My favorite is the final BOAC livery, which looked so elegant on the carrier’s aircraft of that era; the VC10 and stretched Super VC10, the 707, and finally the 747. IMHO this was one of the best-ever airline liveries.
My favourite (currently) is the BOAC. That aircraft flew me to PHL this week.
The BOAC and current livery are the best. The Landry (?) one with the red tail is ok. The next one was very good except the top should be white, not grey.
I’m old enough to have flown with BEA, BOAC and British Airways so have flown their planes in all of the liveries.
My favourite is the Landor livery which also speaks of the day when BA was an excellent and cutting edge airline – billed at the time as ‘the world’s favourite airline’, it’s been downhill ever since!
I also have a soft spot for BEA which I remember clearly as a boy and back in the day flying was very exciting – you get dressed in your best clothes back then because it was for almost all, a very special occasion.