Aircraft Livery in GTAO

At its most basic of definitions, Aircraft Livery is a paint scheme that is applied to an aircraft, generally to its fuselage, wings, empennage, and jet engines (as appropriate) for the purposes of differentiating between airframes -- particularly when an airline or company has more than one example of that particulars airframe in its fleet.

In the case of airlines -- and especially when an airline performs a christening ceremony for each of the aircraft in its fleet giving each its own formal identity -- for example early in the history of Pan American Airlines it was a common practice to name each aircraft based on a combination of the class of service and the route that the aircraft flew.

For example due to the nature of the routes to Asia and the Pacific in the early days of commercial aviation Pan Am celebrated the “romance” of air travel on their “clippers of the airways” giving each of its “flying boats” the sort of name and personality that traditionally applied to ships.

Bear in mind that Pan American started out with a single Fokker F-7 float plane and a US Federal Mail contract (the Fokker F-7 was purchased as military surplus for the tidy sum of US$145.50). Examples of the traditional naming system that Pan Am used includes the following:

As you can see in the table above the company adopted the newest models of popular and successful commercial airliners, each new aircraft taking the name of the airliner it replaced.

Bearing in mind that each of the airlines had a standard paint scheme for their aircraft fleet, usually prominently displaying the airline logo or name, as well as the prominent display of the name each was christened with usually near the nose or just below the cockpit windows.

Starting in the 1980s airlines began to deploy custom-designed livery to mark Special Events, cultural Events, and though it was rare in the 80s by the mid-90s custom-livery for the purpose of paid product advertising (for example movies and video games) grew in popularity.

Very early examples of famous artists designing custom livery to celebrate the cultural icons of their home country (the nation-flag under which they flew) saw airliners from the fleets of QUANTAS and Southwest Airlines establishing the trend that would later spread throughout the industry.

In Grand Theft Auto: online the practice of Custom Livery is largely restricted to livery representing the function of the aircraft (like police or rescue services) or advertising livery, which gives each aircraft a unique look to it making it easier to pick out in let's play and quest videos.

The following tables present all of the aircraft in the game, and their available livery...

Fixed Wing

Fixed wing aircraft are basically aeroplanes -- the sort of flying machine with two (or more) wings and an engine or two, a tail, and a daring pilot (that'd be you) at the stick!

The fixed wing aeroplanes in GTAO include the following alternate Livery options:

Lighter Than Air / Gas

A blimp, or non-rigid airship, is a floating airship without an internal supporting framework, or a keel. Modern era Blimps are most often used for their advertising value -- using helium as their lifting gas and sometimes generating extra income by offering paid-rides to a limited number of passengers.

A number of corporations operate Blimps at major sporting Events as their preferred advertising platforms, like Goodyear, who has three Blimps in its fleet: Spirit of Goodyear, based in Suffield Township, Ohio near Akron, Spirit of America, based in Carson, California, and Spirit of Innovation, based in Pompano Beach, Florida.

Rotary Wing

A helicopter is a rotary-wing aircraft whose rotors are driven by the engine throughout the flight, to allow the helicopter to take off vertically, to hover, fly forwards, fly backwards, and fly laterally, as well as to land vertically. That pretty much describes the copters in the game.