Red versus Blue

Original Air Canada pilots and ex-Canadian pilots are still divided, and the conflict might lead to a strike this summer. I'm not even going to comment.

The "Original Air Canada" and ex-Canadian factions at Air Canada are also known as "red" and "blue", after the colours of the airline livery before rebranding ran amok. Air Canada still has the red maple leaf, but for a while the tails were blue and red. Now they've gone to a kind of minty green all over, which doesn't show up that well in a photograph.

By the way, when we talk about the colour of an airplane, we talk about the parts that aren't white. Often that's just stripes, the nacelles and the tail. Most airplanes are mostly white. I guess I absorbed that fairly earlier on, as I learned to fly in a nominally orange airplane, that was really a white airplane with a couple of orange stripes. I often confused friends by telling them "I fly the orange one" while I pointed at a predominately white airplane.

Back when Canadian Airlines was Canadian Pacific Airlines they had real orange airplanes, but I think the orange-to-blue transition is mourned by no one.

In other news, Boeing has selected James McNerney Jr. as its new President and CEO, as the old one was having sex with another executive. It isn't immediately clear why this relationship was grounds for dismissal, as she didn't report to him and there has been no implication of intimidation. I think it's just the usual American paranoia about anything remotely related to sex (link not worksafe).