Back in late 2014, American Airlines announced that they would be painting new liveries on three 737-800s in the colors of TWA, RenoAir, and AirCal. Avgeeks everywhere rejoiced that the famous tails from three departed airlines would soon return to the skies.
Throughout 2015, American Airlines actually unveiled four unique heritage liveries honoring the four major acquisitions by the company over the years. This included 737-800s from TWA, RenoAir, and AirCal. A fourth Airbus A321 was painted in factory fresh US Airways colors with American titles to represent the heritage plane of US Airways for the ‘new’ American Airlines.
The TWA, RenoAir, and AirCal airplanes were met with excitement but also some criticism. All three aircraft had a primary gray (mica) color instead of the white background seen on the schemes they were meant to represent. The color of the jets were a disappointment to many avgeek purists who had hoped for completely accurate paint schemes.
The logic behind this move makes sense. There is nothing uglier than a mismatched nose or panel on a beautiful aircraft. As a follow up, we wanted to find out if the previous Heritage Liveries of Piedmont, PSA, Allegheny, and America West Airlines would be painted in mica as well as American finished repainting the US Airways fleet to the ‘new’ American scheme. American responded with: Based on the logic of American’s response, we wouldn’t be surprised if American’s other heritage aircraft eventually are painted in a mica scheme one day.
