Originally Posted by
ucdtim17
People keep saying this, that they need to wait until there's a SOC before they can paint Chester on the tail. QX is a separate wholly owned by AAG airline, just like VX, and they have Chester on the tails. OO is an entirely separate airline that owns its own planes, with Chester on the tail. There may be a strategic reason to not paint the tails yet, but is there really some SOC-based legal hurdle?
There isn't anything in the FARs that would prevent Alaska from painting a VX Airbus aircraft in Alaska colors today; just needs to have a decal with "Operated by Virgin America" somewhere on it. Plenty of US Airways-operated aircraft were painted in AA colors before they received a single operating certificate—just from my random Googling, looks like the first US plane rolled out with AA paint in January 2014 and SOC arrived in April 2015. That being said, we're just a few weeks away from AS-VX SOC (should be early January) so this whole thing is about to be moot.
I'd be interested to see what the interior configuration of these new non-VX livery A321s is. If it's the standard VX config (8 F seats), then I guess it makes sense that they're not painted in the Alaska colors and we won't see that until aircraft begin to fly with the new AS configuration (12 F seats). But still, I'm scratching my head just as I do with almost every other branding decision that's being made during this acquisition.