Cathay Pacific aeroplane gets new paint job, complete with massive spelling mistake
Airline sees the funny side, posting: ‘Oops this special livery won’t last long! She’s going back to the shop!’
If you’ve ever been refused boarding to a flight because your name was spelled wrong on the ticket, you might take comfort from this fairly glaring error on the side of a Cathay Pacific plane. Or should that be “Cathay Paciic”?
On Wednesday morning, photos emerged of a plane for the Hong Kong carrier, with its distinctive green livery missing an “F”.
Taking the fuselage foul-up with good grace, Cathay Pacific posted on its Facebook page: “Oops this special livery won’t last long! She’s going back to the shop!”
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Shown the typo, an engineer for Haeco, a sister company of the airline, was baffled by how such a mistake could have happened.
“The spacing is too on-point for a mishap. We have stencils. Should be a blank gap in between letters if it was a real mistake I think,” the engineer said.
The error was likely to be expensive, costing several thousand dollars to fix.
It was unclear whether a Cathay Pacific engineer or someone from Haeco was to blame.
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Suleman Siddiqui, posting on the Hong Kong Aviation Discussion Board Facebook forum, was unamused.
“Maybe have your painters be literate in English. That would be a good idea,” he wrote.
It is not the first time the airline has stumbled over a paint job. A few years ago, one of the earliest planes to be painted in the airline’s current branding had its green “brushwing” logo – just behind the cockpit, on the outside of the plane – painted back to front.
