In the 1970s, United came up with a new livery for their planes with a stylized ‘U’ on the tail, and I think it picked up ‘tulip’ as a nickname.
I knew a Delta pilot back in the '80s who referred to their logo as “the widget”.
Southwest got their start at Love Field in Dallas and has used “love” and hearts as a subtle part of their corporate branding for years. The SkyCards trophy for them is “Heart”.
I assume there’s a similar story for “Astrojet” and American Airlines.
I do kinda enjoy finding the planes in throwback liveries. Some of them are reminders of various buyouts that have occurred in the industry over the yeras. I’ve seen United planes in an old, pre-tulip logo, and one in an old Continental logo; and American planes painted as US Airways and (I think) PSA.
Back in the 707 era, all AA jets were styled “Astrojets” and had that trademark term painted near the tail.
Nowadays in addition to the current livery, they have one each jet painted like Astrojet 1970s AA, 1990s polished aluminum silver jet w scissors AA logo, AirCal, Reno, TWA, PSA, Piedmont, America West, & USAir.
Which pretty well replays their post deregulation merger / acquisition history.
Oh, now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure I did catch the retro TWA livery. It’s their red-and-white log they used in the '80s (called “twin stripe” on this page.)
I grew up near Seattle and remember a time when not every national airline flew there. Northwest (“Northwest Orient”, as it was once called) was one of the two big tenants, and they’re long gone. I can’t remember if I ever saw planes from TWA, Eastern, or Pan Am in the flesh. That’s kind of how I came to hear the term “widget”. A pilot friend of my dad’s got hired by Delta at a time when they didn’t have service to Seattle. I remember him coming for a visit years later and saying it was good to see the widget in Seattle.
I like the retro liveries, and there are still a lot that are left out. United has gone through three complete rebrandings that I can remember. I remember pictures of the TWA twin-globe logo. Northwest I already mentioned. There were Western and Hughes Airwest, and a bunch of others. I think the rights to Pan Am are owned by a railroad these days.
One of today’s missions is to catch a trans-Pacific flight. I’ve not been to Seoul before, so I went there and competed the airport tasks in a few minutes. Saw a few flights to Europe, but nothing across the ocean. Just now I caught Kalitta Air to Anchorage.
Sometimes I skip the daily missions if I think they will be too much trouble. I definitely skipped that day when one of the items was a 600+ kt flight LOL. Aside from the Citation X, there are a couple of Gulfstreams and the Bombardier Global 8000 that can do it. It’s not the most efficient part of their flight envelope, though, so I didn’t even bother looking.
I might skip today’s as well - How many non-military Saabs are even still flying? I’ve never seen a Gripen or Globaleye flying around with ADSB on. Maybe a T-7 if they show up on Skycards with Saab as the manufacturer instead of Boeing.
I’m not a player so I don’t know the details of today’s mission. As to seeking non-military Saabs, does it have to be an ex-military model IOW warbird?
Reason I ask is they made a bunch of Saab 340 - Wikipedia regional turboprops and later variants. There’s probably still a hundred-plus in use worldwide.
No, it can be any Saab aircraft. I had forgotten about Saab 340, one of those are probably your best bet as there are a couple hundred still flying as you said.
Useful! I also found this site which shows you the stats of what you have found so far. I think there’s also a way to view a live tracker map that shows you only the aircraft you have yet to capture, but you have to join the Discord for that and it feels too much like cheating to me: https://skystats.win/
They’re pretty frequent in Australia. They must use special cameras to take the pictures, though, since none of the ones I’ve seen so far were upside-down.
Nice! I think I’ll try for that trophy next. Seems like a fun one and it will have a lot of new stuff.
I finally got the Maple trophy after camping out in Anchorage for a week, picking up Yellowknife and then immediately Whitehorse. Anchorage is a much busier airport than is realized (and I’ve been there a couple of times).
I got the states trophy last week. Vermont was the hold-out for me; no idea when I got West Virginia.
I have Johannesburg free for the rest of the week. Last night, before bed, I decided to see if there was anything interesting to catch. There were only 4 or 5 planes within range, but I caught flights to Botswana and Lesotho. I checked again this morning and caught a flight to Eswatini. Those were 3 new countries, with a total of 7 airports among them, so there can’t be a whole lot of traffic. Also caught a DC-8 over Haiti.
Meanwhile, I’m having no luck finding flights to Nicaragua, Belize, Suriname, and French Guiana.
I got the Dragon trophy just from a combo of Shanghai and Xi’An airports. It’s interesting how homogeneous Chinese airspace is – no small planes and almost entirely Common and Uncommon.
The weekly mission in Xi’An was interesting because the hardest tasks were:
catch 10 different aircraft
catch 2 international flights
My app has been in a bugged state for awhile. Every time I earn a trophy and get the pop-up, I get a second pop-up for a trophy I haven’t earned; usually Platinum which I’m nowhere near.
Same thing was happening to me for a while. I recently got my first Cyber card, and it was the first time in a while I didn’t get two trophies - one of which I had not earned.
What did happen to me yesterday that was extra weird was having 10 pictures in my camera. Usually, the cut-off is five, but somehow - maybe a trick of timing - I was able to have twice as many as normal. Haven’t been able to repeat the feat since.
I had already taken two photographs by the time it occurred to me to grab a screenshot.
I did at some point claim my five free pictures for the reward, but I’m not sure if that was part of the trigger or not. I imagine this is such a rare bug because it comes down to a really small window of timing. I’m not sure exactly which event doubled my photograph capacity, but once I expended all ten, it was over and done with. I’m back down to max of five as normal.
I’ve had situations where I watch an ad* for 2 photos, and during the 30 seconds of advert my 20 minute timer was up and gave me 5; when the ad finished I had 7 photos. I suspect there are circumstances where they try to retain photos you’ve “earned”.
‘* at home my router blocks ads so I just get a static screen
The daily tasks are a continual source of frustration. There was a brief period where I thought they had changed things up to make achieving them less of a POTA, but they’ve been pretty dumb this week I think, so IDK.
