Since the utterly gorgeous British Airways Boeing 747-400 painted in BOAC colours made such a splash recently, it is good to know that there are more retro liveries on the way.
With such a rich history, there are many different schemes for the airline to choose from. Pleasingly, there are three more due to arrive within the next month.
The BEA “Red Square” Livery
First up will be an Airbus A319 painted in the 1959 to 1968 British European Airways colours. The aircraft, G-EUPJ, arrived at the paint shop in Shannon, Ireland this weekend.
Above is the image from the British Airways press release, showing how it is going to look when it rolls out next month. You can see it’s quite faithful to the original, which is displayed on a Comet 4B at the top of this article.
Negus & Negus
Introduced in 1974 when British Airways was formed with the merger of BOAC and BEA, the Negus & Negus livery is very striking. The tail is designed to remind you of the Union Jack.
Whether it will have the titles as above or just say “British” like some of them did in the 1980s remains to be seen. This is due to be painted in Dublin on G-BNLY with a debut around 9 March 2019.
Rounding Out The Retro Liveries With Landor
The last one of the retro liveries is the elegant scheme introduced in 1985 and designed by Landor. While it looked great on Concorde, it also looks excellent on a Boeing 747-400.
Of all the liveries, this one is actually what the aircraft wore when it entered service with British Airways. G-CIVB will sport its original colour scheme after repainting in Dublin sometime around 20 March 2019.
Overall Thoughts
Purists will lament the fact the BEA Airbus A319 won’t have its red upper wings as in the original livery. This is due to “current wing paint reflectivity requirements” according to the airline.
Even so, if the BOAC aircraft is anything to go by, these new retro liveries are going to look stunning in real life. All of this free publicity must be making the marketing team at British Airways very happy indeed!
What do you think of the planned retro liveries? Perhaps you remember them from the first time around? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Ralf Manteufel via Wikimedia Commons.
BEA A319 image via British Airways.
Negus & Negus image by Richard Silagi via Wikimedia Commons.
Landor image by Aero Icarus via Wikimedia Commons.
Well, now it proved to be wrong.
G-BNLY wears now the Landor livery and G-CIVB will wear the Negus livery
Yes, these things do change – my information was from a little while ago. Thanks for pointing that out, I appreciate it!
I got to fly Northeast (formerly BKS) LHR-NCL-LHR in the early 70’s. Tridents both ways. Hope they do a Northeast, that yellow livery was SHARP at the time.
That would be something to see on an Airbus A319 or A320 woudn’t it? I can’t see it happening, unfortunately. Apparently there are only going to be four retro jets in total, so these are they.
I’m a big fan of retro liveries but these are particularly good.
I was really surprised at how well the BOAC 747-400 looked. It looks spectacular really!
Can you think of a reason not to use the British Caledonian livery? I didn’t follow BCal closely; was it not a consequential acquisition?
I think they’re ignoring any airline they acquired… it’s why there is no British Caledonian and no Dan-Air London. Therefore it’s the two predecessor companies (BEA and BOAC) and then the old British Airways liveries I guess it makes sense, as really there would be a bunch of others to use, like BMI and the original jet colours, Imperial Airways and so on. I guess it’s just for simplicity.