I live close to LAX, and have gotten pretty good at identifying aircraft models and company paint jobs.
My question is, who paints the aircraft when it’s new? Is it the manufacturer or the company that owns the plane?
Also, what kind of paint is used, and how is it applied?
I’m pretty sure the manufacturer paints them. I remember seeing a documentary about Boeing on one of the educational cable channels that showed a 747 taxiing over a freeway to the paint shop. Of course, small aircraft makers (Cessna, Raytheon (Beechcraft), Maule, etc.) paint their own planes.
DuPont (?) “Imron” paint is popular for aircraft, but my dad’s first plane, a Cessna was said to be painted with the same stuff Ford used. Never bothered to confirm it.
The paint is applied with rollers. 
Oh, okay. (Jeez, I never get to have any fun!) It’s sprayed on.
I’ve seen pictures of unfinished airliners in the factory and the rudder (not the whole vertical stabilizer, just the rudder) is already painted. If you have a good memory for logos you can tell which airline the plane is being built for.
Someone told me once that when Boeing built their new 747 factory, it didn’t have a painting facility right away. So they’d fly the unpainted planes to the old, narrow-body factory (Renton, Wash., I took flying lessons there). Trouble was, the Renton runway was barely a mile long. After a 747 was painted they had to wait for a strong enough headwind to take off again. It sounds a bit urban-legendary, a multi-billion dollar company planning its delivery schedule around a good, stiff breeze, but it could be true.
American Airlines doesn’t paint their airplanes. They save a bunch of money that way.
OK, OK, SOME of their aircraft are painted, but most of them are unpainted and buffed to a highly polished shine.
Gulfstream has a plant here in Savannah and recently a new company opened that does custom paint jobs on them (and other planes). An average job can cost upwards of $350,000. Of course, if you can afford $35,000,000 for the G5, you can certainly afford the paint job.
Hell, it costs $15,000 nowadays to paint a Cessna 172.
Painting aircraft is expensive because you typically have to remove the control surfaces, strip all the old paint (either with chemicals, or with a bead blower), repaint the thing, making sure that you don’t gum anything up, Re-balance all the moving surfaces, replace any hardware that looks worn or corroded, and put it all back together again.
That’s why you see so many ratty looking small airplanes. The paint job can cost more than the airplane is worth.
Couldn’t a typical commericial airliner carry more passengers and/or cargo if it was left mostly unpainted (except for identifying marks, etc.)? Consider how much a gallon of paint weighs, and then consider how many gallons are required to completely cover an object as large as a 747! (With, I might add, enough coats to last.)
I was under the impression that was why American Airlines left their planes mostly unpainted – less paint means less weight OUTSIDE and the capacity for more weight INSIDE, where the revenue comes from.
Thoughts?
MrWhipple
Yep. That’s exactly true. I don’t remember exactly how much the paint on an airliner weighs, but it’s a significant amount. Hundreds of pounds at least.
The wings on airliners are typically left unpainted to save weight. I heard the same thing abour American Airlines.
Hmmm…you raise a valid point, but maybe your conclusion is a bit overexuberant. A large proportion of the weight of a gallon of paint is in the solvent. That’s not to say the weight of paint is insignificant; it [I}is* significant. NASA stopped painting the fuel tank on the space shuttle a few years into the program because it didn’t make sense to heft all that (dry) paint so high.
Anthros
Not painting an aircraft increases performance, not by a huge degree but it does.
During WWII many US fighter aircraft were not painted giving an extra few knots of airspeed and saving on fuel, very important on long range missions over Germany as you could escort the Bombers for a longer time, protecting them from German fighters. I can also recall seeing pictures of unpainted bombers.
Weight is a major factor to consider when painting an airplane. When applying a full paint job to a C-5 my crew and I added up the total amount of paint. It came out to 134 gal. A gallon of hardened paint weighs about 12 lbs. So we added over 1,600 lbs. to the aircraft. The paint we use in the AF is polyurethane and I assume this is the same on a civilian airliner. Poly doesn’t dry so much as it hardens, there are some volatile that evaporate (about 30% of the actual volume).
As for the O.P. either the aircraft is painted by the manufacturer or a subcontractor prior to delivery.
It’s also cheaper. They painted the bombers in camo up until mid-1944…in June '44, Allied air superiority was established, and since they no longer had to hide from enemy fighters, they left the bombers unpainted to save money.