Originally Posted by
ATNotts
The 1-11 looked pretty dreadful in Court colours,
Well I thought the Court scheme was one of the best ever. It certainly was more sophisticated than the Braniff "end of the plain plane" colours, which were just a single overall colour, different for each aircraft, with a white tail.
Nice story about the Court scheme. A meeting was set up at the factory at Hurn to discuss the detailed application of the scheme. On one side were the key personnel from the very 1970 design house who devised it, their offices just off Carnaby Street in London. Apparently they went down to Bournemouth in a multi-coloured custom painted Mini, and entered the offices in trendy-for-the-era Afghan coats and John Lennon-style clothes. On the other side of the table was the old hand paint shop foreman, in brown work coat, long serving, probably in 1970 still ex-WW2 RAF. Moderating all this were the BAC sales team in office suits.
Despite all the mismatch, BAC did a great job in applying the scheme just so. The foreman asked for the British Standard BS.2660 colour numbers, and the design team just rolled them straight off the top of their head.