Reasons for aircraft paint colors?

"Craig" schrieb im Newsbeitrag news: snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net...

I would think that it is not the color for itself, it is more some VIPs in the military deciding to take this or that color for some reason.

Remember: in WWI, von Richthofen choosed *RED* for his Fokker Dr.I, so that everybody can see and identify him at once !

Some aircrafts have no color at all and show poolished metal, in order to save weight or for reasons of - pride.

Some carmouflage reasons are there of course: how to minimize contrast to the heaven -> gray or blue is both good for undersides how to minimize contrast to the ground -> green or other carmouflage schemes in most uppersides.

But is has no strong logic: or why did the old green-brown BUFFs had a WHITE nose ?

Just my thoughts, Jan

Hello Craig:

the military thought these were the most effective colors for their planes.

during the begining of the war, the USA used olive drab and grey, the Germans used muliples of greens, greys and so fourth.

Each country had their own colors they thought were effective, but later in the war a lot of aircraft were'nt camo'ed anymore, B-17's , B-24's, and most of your fighter planes.

while places like Germany, France, Japan, England and so fourth still used camo on their planes.

there is a lot of helpful books on this subject, what sucks is trying to paint some of them,

drop me a line if you ever need any modeling help

take care George

There are some real compromises here, and many countries painted planes depending on what theatre of operations the planes were going to.

For bottom, the idea was, what color would best match the sky. Actually, since sky is pretty bright, it is hard to match brightness when sun is higher than plane.

For top of plane, the idea is to hide it from higher flying planes, so it should blend in with ground. For planes in desert theatres this called for lighter colors (sand-like colors) than for planes in other theatres seen against a lot of vegetation. Of course, naval planes flying over water should look like water from above.

Actually, a LOT of research went >

As to what color was chosen depended alot on what different thought or thesies were bantered about. This was a period of experimentation and a new area of study really. As for the natural metal finish, this came later only after air supremecy when camoflauge was no longer necessary. As Jan mentioned, this save weight, and even more so, time/ cost/ practicality.....

There was a "camouflage" scheme called "Project Yehudi" in which extremely bright lights were attached to the leading edges of the wings. The idea was that antisubmarine planes would come out of the sun while attacking U-boats on the surface. The U-boats wouldn't see them until it was too late to crash-dive.

Yes, and similar schemes were being worked on in seventies and eighties- I worked on one. Jet intakes look very black against sky, and some jets of the era had very large intakes, such as F-4. AF looked at adding lights in intakes to make incoming attack planes less visible.

While stealth is important, >