runwayrunway

[runwayrunway]

In this trying period of posting very infrequently, I have made a bluesky account. It will contain, for lack of a better term, tweets, things too trivial to post on the blog itself, and also little reviewlets of random planes I see wherever I see planes, just whatever random airplanes I see that have a livery I can't not comment on but don't want to devote a post to. I think it'll be fun.

[runwayrunway]

Some Short-Term Plan(e)s

So it's been a while since I've uploaded a proper post, but I just want to make it clear that things aren't silent behind the scenes. I spent the first two weeks back from Arizona dealing with something of an...acute medical impediment (thankfully now resolved), but I want to at least mention what I'm working on, a sort of roadmap of sorts. Whatever the air equivalent.

Under a cut for length. I will never beat the yapping allegations, though the 'too many bulleted lists' allegations are nearly as dire.

Here is a list of currently started reviews (as in, I have finished research and outlining and begun actually writing) in rough order of when I think you can expect to see them:

Contour Airlines

British Airways, parts 2 and 3

(the first of) three logojet liveries, the identities of which I will leave surprises

A certain freshly unveiled livery overhaul

American Airlines

Jetstar Airways

Olympic Air(ways/lines)

The miserable, tormented, long-suffering Lauda Air post draft that has just reached its second birthday and is still not finished.

That said, I think I'll probably insert some others in here, because this sequence might end up somewhat stale if left unaltered. None of these liveries are being discussed because they'd stick out to a random person (except the logojets) and several very strongly resemble each other. My queue system has always been somewhat loose where it exists at all - if something catches my eye or I get a particularly compelling request other stuff may well slot in here.

In fact, I'll leave this open: if you see anything that catches your eye on the request list, let me know, and feel free to add to said list. There are so many airlines out there that I'm frequently overcome by decision paralysis, so requests can actually help hugely. (I've been considering also making public my personal shortlist so people can let me know if there's anything on there they want to see. ...let me know if you want to see that.)

Beyond that, in the time I've been spending languishing on the border between life and death and/or working and/or attending classes the world has continued to move and change. Liveries have been debuted, events have occurred, and I have more to say on certain topics. So expect to see revisits for:

jetBlue 2023

Riyadh Air

Alaska Airlines

BermudAir (not a livery update...just an update)

I also hope to do 'revisits' in a different sense, by expanding Project Runway Runway past just the one entry. Potential subjects for this are:

JAL

Hawaiian Airlines

Discover Airlines

Finnair

FedEx Express

SriLankan Airlines

Copa Airlines (a Frankensteinian undertaking, this one)

Riyadh Air here also

Let me know if there's any of these in particular you'd like to see. I will say, though, that these are the one thing I'm unlikely to ever take open requests for. These are all using aspects already found in their liveries, altered and rearranged but fundamentally building on what's there, so I'm only interested in doing them when I can see a clear path forward already. Otherwise that's just designing a new livery from the ground up. I'm a critic, not a designer, so I won't be doing that.

These do, however, require quite a lot of time and effort and I generally have to learn a handful of new skills each time I attempt to make the images required actually happen, so these will be sparse. (On a related note, if anyone has access to some sort of repository of royalty-free CSP-compatible transparent vectors of various models of airliner that they'd give me access to, I would greatly appreciate it, because I did have to trace an entire Dash 8 by hand last time.)

So that's the core material, but I do also put other things on this blog from time to time, so there's some of that on the way too. The following is in the works, and I'm excited for it:

More airframe features! I love talking about history's weirdest and most charming airplanes.

A series of 'bestiary' posts outlining common features of archetypes that I often reference (both established ones like Eurowhite and my own personal taxonomies like the Deltalike), essentially approaching them as groups rather than individuals.

A very long historically-oriented post that has nothing to do with liveries, actually, and covers a segment of commercial aviation that isn't airlines, but I think it's quite interesting and I'm very proud of how it's shaping up.

But enough about posts. There's more to blogging than posts. I am very slowly attempting to give this blog an actual visual identity and cleaning up its appearance and function, so I can stop insulting airlines' branding while my own is rock bottom. This process includes but will probably not be limited to:

Fixing the desktop theme to not be insanely crunchy and awful and horrible and bad seriously what was I even doing

Designing an actual logo for myself (I love the grinningbird icon, but that could be any aviation blog.)

Fixing the currently broken navigation page

Filling in the glossary properly

Ideally, creating a mirror for long/"main series" posts off tumblr, for reasons such as navigation (tumblr will stop 'counting' tags on posts for even on-blog browsing at a certain point), accessibility to people without a tumblr account, and just plain preservation in the case of a failure on tumblr's end - I have most content saved to my own computer, obviously, but better safe than sorry when it comes to these things. I am currently leaning towards either Wordpress, which I more or less know how to use, or attempting to wrangle together something using Neocities, which I...well, I know how to google tutorials.

Somewhat related to this - not only am I just one person, I am just one person with the incorrect skillset for this. I can at best tweak existing HTML and perform very rudimentary actions in image editors, limited to things like removing a monocolor background or splicing an image onto another - everything else I've ever done is googled as I actually do it. If any followers are proficient in coding and/or photo editing and are willing to help with bits and bobs, that would be huge for me. Absolutely no pressure, however. I currently am not in a position to pay someone for their skills, and I do not like asking people to work for free. (...that said, I would be very eager to find someone who could help me edit a video for one specific post.)

All of this - from the main posts to the web design (or lack thereof) - takes quite a bit of time. I'm just one person, one person who deals with both serious chronic illness and the whims of episodic mood disorder. I am also a student and make most of my money freelancing - plus, I write other things, too, and I've been actively working on a fiction project for years that I hope to publish serially in the not-too-distant future.

That is all to say, my old bimonthly rate is definitely not sustainable. We will probably be looking at one post per month, with months skipped, in terms of actual reviews. (Other stuff just gets shoved in wherever, I don't care about defining a schedule for it.) This is torturous for me - I have literally hundreds of liveries I would very much like to talk about, and I do want to intersperse the longer posts I've become used to writing with content that doesn't require me to go through research, outlines, and multiple drafts in order to expedite this, but the fact of the matter is that I want to write every post at once and instead most of them will be in the agonizing future, or never. I hope I can at least return to something resembling a steady output. But please bear with me as I attempt to bear with myself. I hope it'll be worth the wait.

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would you ever review the livery of MY fictional airline(s)?

I think I'd be open to that.

[runwayrunway]

Nope, Ryanair was once named one of the ten least ethical companies in the world for a good reason and they absolutely earned their reputation for poor customer service. Other ultra-low-cost carriers are generally Not Like That.

That said it's nice to be able to get anything at all for a Ryanair budget and they're uncomfortable but not dangerous. They've earned being made fun of but they're also fine. Everyone talks about the hard landings but I've never noticed them. I just won't pass up an opportunity to make fun of a company that forbade employees to charge their devices from office electric sockets.

Have you ever seen the livery of Buzz? I'm haunted by those eyes... what have they seen.. what do they know

Yeah, it's a little frightening. They definitely went a bit too hard on the cartoon factor here, almost like they were trying to overcompensate for some sort of horror.

Now, take a look at that livery. Ignore the bee, the wordmark, the colors, the (admittedly cute touch of) the stripes on the inner winglets. Sure, it's flattened, but does that bit of Deltalike underline look familiar?

Yeah, I have a guess as to what the horrors are.

I mean, ultimately, B- for Buzz.

Points off for being haunting in the same way a bad composite sketch of a murder victim is, but definitely exactly what I'd expect when I hear there's an airline called 'Buzz'. It does the job, though the job's ugly work.

It makes sense they'd lean as far away from being visibly a Ryanair subsidiary as possible, but that's what they are. Their callsign, 'MAGIC SUN', and their IATA and ICAO identifiers, RR/RYS, are vestigial from their prior identity as Ryanair Sun. So as if the words 'Polish ultra-low-cost airline' weren't already bad enough...yeah, it's Polish Ryanair.

Although I'm not sure what they tried to cover it up with is any better.

[runwayrunway]

I wrote this post kind of quickly and while jet-lagged and I think I have to question my judgment. That bee is way, way too horrific for this to get a normal grade, especially one that high.

I am revising Buzz to a buzZ+.

The plus because, as I've said, it's an entirely competent design that does its job very well. Even if it gets there heavily off Ryanair's coattails, they're decent coattails. Just...perplexing coattails. Coattails now made haunted.

Have you ever seen the livery of Buzz? I'm haunted by those eyes... what have they seen.. what do they know

Yeah, it's a little frightening. They definitely went a bit too hard on the cartoon factor here, almost like they were trying to overcompensate for some sort of horror.

Now, take a look at that livery. Ignore the bee, the wordmark, the colors, the (admittedly cute touch of) the stripes on the inner winglets. Sure, it's flattened, but does that bit of Deltalike underline look familiar?

Yeah, I have a guess as to what the horrors are.

I mean, ultimately, Bee- for Buzz.

Points off for being haunting in the same way a bad composite sketch of a murder victim is, but definitely exactly what I'd expect when I hear there's an airline called 'Buzz'. It does the job, though the job's ugly work.

It makes sense they'd lean as far away from being visibly a Ryanair subsidiary as possible, but that's what they are. Their callsign, 'MAGIC SUN', and their IATA and ICAO identifiers, RR/RYS, are vestigial from their prior identity as Ryanair Sun. So as if the words 'Polish ultra-low-cost airline' weren't already bad enough...yeah, it's Polish Ryanair.

Although I'm not sure what they tried to cover it up with is any better.

[runwayrunway]

would you ever review the livery of a fictional airline?

Absolutely, and in fact I have in the past - though it was a very long time ago right at the start of this blog. I'd be happy to do it again though.

[runwayrunway]

Have you ever seen the livery of Buzz? I'm haunted by those eyes... what have they seen.. what do they know

Yeah, it's a little frightening. They definitely went a bit too hard on the cartoon factor here, almost like they were trying to overcompensate for some sort of horror.

Now, take a look at that livery. Ignore the bee, the wordmark, the colors, the (admittedly cute touch of) the stripes on the inner winglets. Sure, it's flattened, but does that bit of Deltalike underline look familiar?

Yeah, I have a guess as to what the horrors are.

I mean, ultimately, Bee- for Buzz.

Points off for being haunting in the same way a bad composite sketch of a murder victim is, but definitely exactly what I'd expect when I hear there's an airline called 'Buzz'. It does the job, though the job's ugly work.

It makes sense they'd lean as far away from being visibly a Ryanair subsidiary as possible, but that's what they are. Their callsign, 'MAGIC SUN', and their IATA and ICAO identifiers, RR/RYS, are vestigial from their prior identity as Ryanair Sun. So as if the words 'Polish ultra-low-cost airline' weren't already bad enough...yeah, it's Polish Ryanair.

Although I'm not sure what they tried to cover it up with is any better.

[runwayrunway]

God she's so powerful. I love her

[runwayrunway]

I want to hold it

[runwayrunway]

Popping in on my 20 minutes of free American Airlines in-flight wifi to say that while I'm aware this is explicitly facilitated they really need to make it against the law to recline your seat on an airplane unless you're in the very last row

[runwayrunway]

My A321neo looks like she's holding hands with the 737-800 at the next gate...two households both alike in dignity

[runwayrunway]

[unintelligible muffled greeting]

Hi

[runwayrunway]

Why is she so cutesy though

[runwayrunway]

What airport is this and why didn't the pilot tell us we were diverting because there is no way I'm at Sky Harbor and can only see airlines that aren't American out the window

[runwayrunway]

...hey

Hi

[runwayrunway]

...they still think I'm one of them...

I might be totally out of line, but I'm getting...like the vibe this airport is giving is really American Airlines. It's kind of got an American Airlines flavor to it.

[runwayrunway]

I might be totally out of line, but I'm getting...like the vibe this airport is giving is really American Airlines. It's kind of got an American Airlines flavor to it.