Originally Posted by
Littlegirl
Well, at one point BA decided with the help of an ad agency that it would be a great idea to paint the aircraft tails in designs from across the world.
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These were very unpopular ...
It was a bit more complex than that, both at the beginning and the end.
The original idea was not just for the aircraft fins. The artwork was used across a great deal of the corporate branding. For example, each baggage tag would have (in addition to the British Airways name and speedmarque) a small panel showing one of the artworks. Likewise, a lot of signs had a decorative panel.
The art came from all over the world, and much of it was chosen to be distinctively recognisable in origin. The idea was to show that although BA has British origins and a British base, it also welcomes the rest of the world, which should not see BA as wholly foreign or insular. That idea isn't a bad one, either commercially or socially.
However, the aircraft fins were most prominent and most controversial. They tended to give the fleet a motley appearance, when branding relies so much on uniformity. Of course, some people just didn't like the fact that the designs were foreign.
In addition, they also caused some operating problems - for example, air traffic control had difficulties when telling other airlines' crews to follow the Speedbird, because often they wouldn't recognise the aircraft as a BA. When one BA aircraft was leased to Qantas, it flew to LAX from time to time, where there was an incident because it was misidentified as a BA instead of a Qantas despite the Qantas markings on the fuselage - and the tail was hurriedly painted over in white almost immediately to prevent that recurring.
So there were a number of reasons for getting rid of the fins. Unfortunately, in my personal view, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. The idea of using real art (not just corporate logo-making) in a high-profile and public way was, I think, a good one. There should have been no need to get rid of the artwork from other locations, even if the fins were standardised to one (British) design - Chatham Dockyard, which had appeared on the Concorde fins. But they went because they were irredeemably tarnished with the same brush, and irretrievably associated with the unpopular CEO who introduced the project.