Cathay Pacific has shown it has a sense of humour after a paint shop error went viral. The most important part of an airline’s brand is its name and getting that wrong would seem to be impossible.

However this has happened with one of the airline’s Boeing 777’s arriving back in Hong Kong with a rather glaring error. A picture is presented below.

Paint Shop Error

Can you spot the paint shop error below? It’s pretty hard to miss. Clearly someone in the paint shop did not follow the specifications exactly to the letter.


Needless to say, the airline is going to be correcting that immediately. When human beings are added to a process, errors are bound to happen and this is an unusual one.

Cathay’s Social Media Response

Rather than issue a terse press release stating, for example, that an investigation will commence to prevent this happening again, Cathay Pacific have gone down a more customer friendly route. You can see an example from their Facebook page below.


The same message also appeared on Twitter. What I particularly enjoyed is the fact that Cathay Pacific included the three pictures of the incorrect paint as well. Smooth, real smooth!

Overall Thoughts

Comments on the social media pages from the public are overwhelmingly positive. Many have poked fun at the error, while others have complimented the airline for its sense of humour.

This shows how to turn what could be a groaning PR disaster into something fun. It’s also a whole bag of free publicity for Cathay Pacific, so perhaps this paint shop error will turn out to be a good thing after all.

Have you ever seen an error like this before? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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Images via Cathay Pacific.