6,000 Man Hours Later, an Airbus A380 is Re-Painted, the Timelapse is So Satisfying
If you have ever had the privilege of riding along a commercial airliner, you might notice that the exterior is always nice and shiny, maintaining a clean coat of paint to properly represent the airline for which the plane belongs to. While you might think that airliners are liquid enough to buy new airplanes every couple of years or maybe think that they simply keep a nice coat of wax on the paint of their planes to keep them looking new, neither of these theories exactly covers the whole story. Instead, every seven or eight years, airliners will repaint their machines so that they keep up that nice and clean sheen on them, making them look like more legitimate and well-branded air taxis.
As you might be able to imagine with such a massive surface area, the planes aren’t simply painted like you would see with a car. After stripping down the entire surface and readying it for paint, an ordeal that takes quite a while, seven coats of paint are applied that weigh in somewhere in the ballpark of 2500 pounds. That’s right, you would need an entire truck and trailer to be able to deliver fresh paint for such an aircraft and it’s all in the name of making sure that these things resist the weather and keep their best look when it’s time for them to be pushed into the sky and represent the company well.
When all is said and done, the process will take about 6000 hours, and no that wasn’t a typo, along with 33 people to accomplish the task from top to bottom. After hearing all about what goes into keeping the shine on your favorite airliners. Follow along in the video down below that takes the liberty of constructing a time lapse that shows exactly how this paint is applied to an Airbus A380.
When all said and done, this is just the beginning of thousands of miles that will take place at hundreds of miles per hour, spanning from sea to shining sea. As you could imagine, all of that can really create some abuse on the outer surface of such machines.
