Flights of Fancy

I hadn't known that some airlines bestowed names on individual planes until I chanced upon FlyerTalk, "the world's most popular frequent flyer community." A while back the forums were full of posts about JetBlue plane names; as it happens, all of that airline's 134 planes are named, mostly using "blue" in some playful way. Some of my favorites:

Bada Bing, Bada Blue

Bippity Boppity Blue (anyone else recognize the misspelled song title from the Disney Cinderella movie?)

Blue Kid in Town

Mo' Better Blue

Wild Blue Yonder

And later researched on Wikipedia:

The Name Is Blue, Jet Blue

Sacre Bleu!

Whole Lotta Blue

Absolute Blue

Also according to Wikipedia, there are two exceptions to the blue-name rule: tail number N190JB is "Luiz F. Kahl", named for the former chairman of the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, and tail number N533JB is "Usto Schulz", named for JetBlue's former VP of safety.

Plane names are selected from employee suggestions; winners of past years' contests have received trips to Toulouse, France, to tour the Airbus hangar. And each gets to fly home in his or her namesake plane.

My favorite plane name, however, isn't in the JetBlue fleet. It's the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 that recently made it onto a list of top 10 ugliest commercial airplanes. "Sporting the glimmering image of a wild Alaska king salmon," the plane, is naturally, called the Salmon Thirty Salmon. Brilliant. (Hat tip to Sore Eyes.)

Comments

[Mark Gunnion]

Nancy, if you liked those paint jobs, you'd probably enjoy seeing some images from the annual NATO Tiger Meet.

http://www.natotigers.org/

Go to Google, click on "images" and enter NATO Tiger Meet

http://www.rcaf.com/439squadron/TIGER/1977-1.jpg
http://www.avsim.com/pages/0303/tornado/german_tiger_meet.jpg

[John Russell]

Here in the UK, one transport company, with a very run-of-the-mill livery, has acquired a cult following. 'Eddie Stobart Ltd', though they only started in 1970, had the idea of naming every one of their fleet with a girl's name. The first was 'Twiggy', the 60's fashion icon. Today they are one of the biggest carriers in the UK and fans have set up several sites in honour of them.

www.clubstobart.co.uk/

'Eddie Spotters' are a menace as, having overtaken a truck, they strain their necks to read the name written under the windscreen (sorry, 'windshield'). It goes further because now you can join the club and propose names to adorn new vehicles. They claim even Americans have joined.