From 1984, British Airways’ (BA) fleet of more than 200 aircraft spent 13 years connecting the UK with the world dressed in ‘Landor’.
It is arguably BA’s most easily recognisable livery – that famous fin poking up from the fuselage like a pocket square from the breast pocket of a Yuppie’s C&A pinstriped suit. It’s easy to imagine that back in the 1980s BA’s litany of Landor-liveried ‘liners had Filofaxes for flight logs and baggage trailers towed to the loading belt by Ford Escort XR3is.
Speaking to Airliner World in 2019, Peter Knapp, Landor group chairman, said that the key to the 1984-1997 livery’s enduring appeal was because it “stood for something special for that time and place. It was synonymous with a time when [the UK] was becoming a successful country again. BA’s success was seen to run in parallel with the country’s and so it became symbolic of that era.”
But by 1992, BA was starting to notice that the Landor-designed livery was losing relevance and echoing aggressive Thatcherite values – as well as its own underhand aggressiveness following the ‘dirty tricks’ scandal of the early 1990s, which saw BA facing Virgin in court. It had become a decade with a much softer, liberal feel. The ca…
