June 8, 2026.   Endurance Test.

In all the talk about liveries (see posts below), a reader posed an interesting question: What airline has the longest-running unchanged color scheme?

This is hard, because many carriers wear schemes that are similar to, but not identical to, their prior ones. For instance Air France, Singapore Airlines, and others.

My first thought was Air China, who get bonus kudos for still employing a so-called cheatline — that nose-to-tail horizontal striping that was once so common and today is vanishingly rare.

The reader who brought this up puts his money on All Nippon Airways, whose current livery goes back to 1985. That would seem a pretty strong contender.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash.