They Painted Their Planes. Business Jumped 80%

In 1965 Braniff was a quiet regional airline with red and blue planes, just like everyone else. Then an ad agency from New York told it to paint every jet a different bright color. Orange, turquoise, lemon yellow, baby blue. Business grew by 80 percent. The airline kept going. It dressed its flight attendants in Pucci, put Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol in its ads, hired the sculptor Alexander Calder to paint its planes, and even flew the Concorde to Dallas. For a few years Braniff was the most talked about airline in the world. Then the rules changed, and the same boldness that made Braniff famous turned against it. When airline deregulation arrived, Braniff tried to grab half the country overnight: 16 new cities and 32 new routes in a single day. Fuel prices exploded, the debt piled up, and on May 12 1982 the whole airline stopped flying in one afternoon. Chapters 0:00 The afternoon an airline vanished 1:01 Oklahoma 2:34 The End of the Plain Plane 4:44 Flaunt It 6:30 Concorde 7:41 The Land Grab 9:44 The Last Day 11:37 Epilogue Air & Ambition tells the true business stories behind aviation history. Subscribe for a new story every day. Photo credits (Wikimedia Commons): Piergiuliano Chesi (CC BY 3.0 / CC BY-SA 3.0) · Steve Williams (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Daniel Tanner (CC BY-SA 4.0) · clipperarctic (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Michael Bernhard (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Simon Butler (CC BY 2.0) · Bill Larkins (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Sailko (CC BY 3.0) · Richard Vandervord (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Aero Icarus (CC BY-SA 2.0) · The World Baker (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wells Rich Greene (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Michael Barera (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Renelibrary (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Josepclopesbosc (CC BY 3.0) · Mmb777e (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Braniff Airways (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Alan Wilson (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Singoloua225 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Tequask (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Ken Fielding (CC BY-SA 3.0) · RuthAS (CC BY 3.0) · Kambui (CC BY 2.0). Public domain and CC0: Braniff Airways, Jack Kightlinger, Lockheed Aircraft Company, L'Air magazine, Robert Yarnall Richie, Tichnor Brothers, San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive, National Park Service, Revista Boom (Rosario, Argentina), Roger Higgins, World Telegram, Warren K. Leffler, Siyuan He. Licenses: creativecommons.org/licenses #aviation #history #braniff