I would guess that the average person looking out an airplane window at the Alitalia plane pictured would indeed not know that it was Alitalia after it'd been painted. If it's been a few days since news coverage, I suspect a large number of people wouldn't know much more than "oh yeah, a plane crashed" and couldn't identify what carrier it was on memory, so hiding the name would indeed help prevent people from associating the image of a wrecked plane sitting out there with the company. Obviously, any news coverage is going to continue to mention who it was regardless of whether the plane is painted, but it's that person sitting in a plane about to take off, or the person driving by the airport that they're aiming to hide it from.

I think part of the issue here is that it's important for people to remember that the average person looking at that is probably *not* really up on airplanes as a hobby, and unlike a lot of people here, couldn't tell you much more than it was a crashed plane (while a lot of people here I'm sure could tell you what type of plane it was immediately after looking at the picture). These are exactly the types of people that they're targeting with this.

Now, whether this still works as well today as it would have 10+ years ago? That's probably more up in the air. Obviously in this era of social media and smartphones, information is far more at peoples fingertips than it used to be. There also seems to be a far larger inherent distrust in corporations these days then there was even just a decade ago, which could cause this type of behaviour to stand out far more amongst the general public than it it would have.

So I'd guess that until recently, it probably was a fairly effective tactic. Nowadays, it might be more likely to backfire on a company as people immediately scream "cover-up".