Today is a sad day for Italian frequent flyers, farewell to AirOne: he was the last of the Mohicans
If you are over 30 years old, you probably have a memory to share aboard an airplane with a painted heron [...]
ITA Airways
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If you are over 30 years old, you probably have a memory to share aboard an airplane with the heron painted on the tail and the huge AirOne sign on the fuselage.
Mine is dated 1998, when there were still lira and Ryanair was unknown to most. I was a greenhorn coming back from London to Italy, missing his first flight. The world of aviation, however, was still that of the good old days, and I still remember how I was re-routed, free of charge, aboard a Lufthansa flight. I remember the AirOne staff telling me not to worry and that they would get me back (for free).
AirOne ceased to exist in 2008, the year the brave captains took the reins of Alitalia "saving" it from the foreign hands of Air France. An operation that in the books of Italian industrial history today is recounted as one of the most sensational, controversial and mistaken ever engineered. From the marriage between Alitalia and AirOne, Alitalia Cai was born.
AirOne ceased to exist, but not to fly. There is an EI-DSZ aircraft, an Airbus A320 that entered service just in December 2008, which in recent years has gone through all the phases of the Italian national airline: that of the brave captains, Etihad, the commissioner, and then also flew through the ITA blue liveries.
The three liveries. The new, the old, the celebratory
In these 15 years, the heron has been all over Europe. and in recent months was "sought after" as a talisman by aviation enthusiasts, or perhaps it would be better to call them nostalgic, the last survivor in the many liveries that now make up the ITA Airways fleet.
Irony, today on the eve of the sale to Lufthansa, the Heron has taken off on its final journey. It is now in Ostrava, where it will be repainted in the official blue uniform like the rest of the Ita Airways fleet, and all of us old frequent flyers will be a little bit sadder at not being able to spot the iconic livery around Italian airports anymore.
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