About
 As a young spotter in the 1990s I was always thrilled to see a colourful aircraft show up on final... since then the interest slowly shifted to special liveries, and I've been collecting pictures and data on this matter for years now. This website aims at sharing that data and illustrating it with the help of friends and fellow spotters from all over the world. With the number of special schemes unveiled every year reaching all-time highs, the idea is to build a reference database where they are documented, so we can keep track of them all, compare old and new designs, monitor which schemes have been retired and remember beautiful designs from the past. You probably think the task is huge, and it is... there are already 3,000+ schemes which comply with my criteria! Reaching an almost exhaustive database will take time but it is a long-running project I'm commited to! The philosophy: special means unique and opposes to standard; special means there is a particular intention behind it. All in all the special part needs to stand out from a distance, and my threshold for that is nothing smaller than the size of a door of the aircraft. In order to keep the database at a reasonable size for the website to be readable and relevant I also decided to apply the following restrictions: It has to be in the general public transport business, which means: - no military or governement-owned aircraft - no historic aircraft - no private aircraft - no aircraft flown by operators for individuals - no aircraft flying as demonstrators for a manufacturer Note that for some airlines, standard does not mean identical: Braniff and their Solid Colors, Norwegian and their unique tails... however interesting these may be, they won't be included here because their uniqueness is... the standard! ^^ - no aircraft with less than 20 seats in the cabin - no aircraft used exclusively as a testbed - no inactive aircraft - no partial/incomplete liveries - no hybrid schemes between two or more airline liveries (either intentional or accidental) - no experimental liveries (which aim at becoming the new standard...) - no virtual airline liveries (like the Smartwings livery on a Travel Service 737) - no alliance liveries (sorry, too many, might add these at a later stage) - no common additions (internet addresses, phone numbers, airline mottos) - if the special livery is related to a specific aircraft type, it has to be mentionned clearly in the livery - no aircraft chartered by organisations: UN (United Nations), Red Cross and so on - no aircraft chartered for election campaigns - no aircraft specifically chartered by a tour operator for a certain period of time - in all other cases there has to be at least a graphic element (more than just a logo) |