Talk about painting equipment
Hello everyone. I’m Sasapiyo, MGR of the Maintenance Department. I’m also the MGR of the Administration Division, but this time I’d like to talk about painting as the Maintenance Department.
The paint job in flight simulators is called a “repaint”, and volunteers have prepared a variety of paint jobs for different airlines.
Some of them are real airlines, of course, and you can use them to fly around the virtual world as if you were a pilot for a certain company.
In this article, I’d like to talk about the actual paint job of the aircraft, and introduce the first Stay Home Airlines aircraft, and the meaning behind the paint job.
Paint the actual machine
Before we talk about repainting, let’s first talk about painting the actual machine.
How long it takes to paint
Do you know how long it takes to paint an airplane that you can actually fly in?
It may have changed now, but at the time I heard it, it took one month to remove the existing paint, one month to polish it, and one month to repaint it. It seems to me that this is a long time because it seems to involve maintenance, but now that I’ve looked into it again, I’ve found some stories that say it takes about 30 people about 20 days to paint.
20 days of work for about a school class…. If you have to repaint your car for maintenance, you are stripping and repainting it all year round. That’s a lot of work.
Amount of paint required for painting
The amount of paint needed to paint a typical jetliner is 600 liters. This is about 200kg, so you can see that it is quite heavy. Moreover, since the plane is a huge body with severe air resistance, even the slightest unevenness in the paint is not tolerated. This is a tough job.
We don’t see this anymore, but at one time American Airlines and JAL CARGO used to have minimal silver paint on their aircraft. This has the advantage of reducing the weight of the aircraft, which of course can save on fuel costs. It can also be simply dazzling… I wonder how it was received among pilots…?
By the way, I’ve heard that the Boeing 787 series, which is the most advanced aircraft, is completely black when the paint is removed, partly because it is made of carbon fiber. I can’t say for sure, as I can’t find any images of the repainting process where the paint has been completely removed, but an unpainted, pitch-black aircraft might be a bit scary due to its presence.
What it means to paint your equipment
While painting equipment is obviously intended to “present the brand and make it look attractive”, it also has a strong meaning of “protecting the equipment from corrosion”.
No matter how non-corrosive metals are used, they are not completely corrosion-free. Carbon fiber does not mean that it is impervious to water. Therefore, it is very important to paint the aircraft to protect it.
What? I’m not sure if the aforementioned silver equipment is prone to corrosion because it’s not painted? But don’t worry about that. There is no need to worry about that. It’s just that they don’t have any colored paint on them, but they do have coatings on the outside. In the past, I heard that if you put them all together, it would be about one ton of paint, but when I heard that 600 liters of paint weighs 200 kg, I guess things have changed a lot.
What is the most white?
Why is there so much white paint? If you look into it, there are several reasons.
Good visibility
First of all, it’s bright, so visibility is good. If there are clouds, it might be a little different, but if it’s white, it’s easy to find in the dark, or when looking down from above. When looking up from below in bright light… You may not be able to tell if it is white or black because of the shadows, but if it is white, you can get the advantage in the dark.
Easy to express cleanliness
It seems that a sense of cleanliness is also easy to express with white. It is true that pure white is sometimes used in wedding dresses, etc., and there seems to be no doubt about such a reason.
They would paint it eventually…
There are other design reasons for this as well. The reason is that you will end up using white as the base color. If you think about it simply in terms of printed materials, you can see that if you put a color on top of white, the color will be vivid, but if you put a color on top of black or any other color, the color will be muddy, and you will not get the color you expected. For this reason, when painting any color, white is almost always applied behind it. So, to reduce the amount of paint that needs to be applied in layers, I would make it all white… This makes sense when you combine it with the earlier discussion of weight.
Benefits to maintenance
The other advantage of white is that mechanics can easily notice corrosion and oil leaks due to the color change. This also makes sense to me. This may be the reason why many aircraft are painted in various colors, but the belly of the fuselage, which requires a lot of maintenance, is white.
Easy way to paint
Recently, “wrapping” has become a popular method for buses and trains running in the city.
The technique has actually come to be used in airplanes. It was not introduced until its practicality was verified because of its seriousness in terms of aerodynamic drag, but now it is being actively used. When they are used on airplanes, they are often called “decals. The advantage of decals is that it is easy to express detailed designs since printed materials are sometimes pasted on. They are sometimes used for painting in collaboration with companies, or for temporary promotions.
Thanks to decals, you can see a variety of aircraft, and when you go to the airport, they all look different, even though they are from the same airline… What a surprise!
By the way, among enthusiasts, special painted aircraft are sometimes called “Spe-ma”, which is short for “special marking”. I don’t use this expression very often because I always say “special marking”… I have registered this “Spe-ma” aircraft in FlightRadar 24 so that they can see where they are. I don’t do this because I know I’ll run out of time. (Although I’d like to know…) I’ll talk about FlightRadar24 later.
Painting the flight simulator world
As I mentioned at the beginning, this painting is also done in the flight sim world. We’ll get into the specifics later, but for now, let’s talk about what it looks like.
Repainting isn’t a whole lot of equipment!
The repainting is not done at the level of equipment, as you might think, but at the level of the manufacturer.
What do you mean? While the actual aircraft are produced by Airbus, Boeing, and other companies, the aircraft for the simulator are produced by many different manufacturers. So even if you have the same Boeing 737-800, you’ll have to make it separately because different manufacturers make repaint data differently.
This is a tricky problem, because if the simulator software changes, the equipment manufacturer also changes, so you have to recreate it. This is a tricky problem.
Stay Home Airlines repaints
Here is the current repaint of Stay Home Airlines, its first aircraft, JA801S. (Photo taken by Tripp LeShan.)
By the way, the letter “S” is never used in the actual aircraft number. The reason for this is to avoid misidentification as a “5”, but Stay Home Airlines currently uses it because it has the advantage of not overlapping with the actual aircraft.
I know this is off topic, but I created this first plane. This aircraft is QualityWings. The Boeing 787-8 is sold by a company called “QualityWings”. It was the first aircraft add-on I ever purchased, and the only one I could work with, so I created it on this aircraft.
I thought I’d take the opportunity to look at some photos of this aircraft and talk about the design implications of the Stay Home Airlines paint job.
About each logo
The horizontal logo on the side of the fuselage and the circular logo on the tail were both created from rough drafts written by Mr. Flyto. I was also the one who converted them into data. It brings back memories.
It was very difficult because there were so many parts, but the underlying theme was “house” and “sky”, so I tried to create a color scheme with “ground” and “sky” in mind. So we decided to use brown for the ground, light blue for the sky, green for the nature base, and pink for the heart as an accent. It all started with the premise that there was such a logo to begin with.
Side representation
In order to represent the ground and sky on the plane, I thought it was necessary to represent the ground. For this reason, I extended the ground line and stretched it to both ends of the plane, at the very front and at the very back.
Because the tail is supposed to look like a mountain, we shifted the plane of the logo to the back to secure the height of the logo and to make it look like it is flying over the mountain. The tail, which looks like a mountain, is naturally painted green to resemble a lush green mountain, with a gentle curve leading from the ground to the top. In the photo, it looks like there is an angle in the tail section because it is looking up from a little below, but in reality, it continues gently down the tail.
Expression of the tail wing
I used a circular logo for the tail, following the example of a real company. However, it looked boring and motionless on its own, so I decided to add some decoration.
The black, white, and blue diagonal lines in the background of the circular logo come from the image of the standby screen that was initially used on YouTube by Mr. Fruito. The reason why I left it like this is because I wanted to leave the “source” of the logo here, knowing that this screen will change soon. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I’m sure the tail will be discontinued at some point, but at least for now, it’s a nice accent and a hidden message.
Tip Expressions
The tip of the nose is pink. This was also made possible by the representative, Mr. Fraito, who said, “Would it be cute if I made the tip of my nose pink? This was made possible by a suggestion from Mr. Furite. Without this, the brown ground line would have extended to the tip of the nose, and it would have looked a little strange.
By the way, this pink is the part of the fuselage with the radar. It can be removed for painting, which is convenient. (Of course, you won’t be able to remove it in the virtual world, though.
From the second machine onwards…
Some of the repaints are actually different from the first one, because of the hurdles raised by the paint of the first plane. I hope to introduce them again soon.
Repainting is fun
So, it’s been a long time coming, but I’d like to introduce you to the first Stay Home Airlines aircraft as an organization. I hope you can understand that it was made with a surprising amount of thought.
This may seem difficult, but once you get used to the tool, it is surprisingly easy… But it also depends on the data (repaint kit) you use to create the repaint. This time, QualityWings provided a very easy to use repaint kit, so I was able to create it easily even though it was my first time.
Once you learn to repaint, you can fly your own original airplane at will! If you would like to try repainting, please apply to join us from the Employee Recruitment page. The maintenance department is in desperate need of help! We are looking forward to working with you!