Indiantelevision.com Team

(8 May 2007 9:25 pm)

MUMBAI: Delta Air Lines gets a new brand logo, which is a striking three-dimensional, red "Widget" icon flying across a blue background.

The logo unveiled in Atlanta will appear on a fleet of more than 1,000 Delta and Delta Connection aircraft, more than 300 airports, delta.com web site and in all advertising and printed material.

With the new logo, Delta aims to trim paint costs, reduce aircraft weight and subsequently achieve additional fuel savings as there is less paint layering on the new livery. The new livery also will save Delta approximately one day in each paint cycle and reduce by 20 per cent the number of man-hours and out-of-service time needed to paint all of Delta's aircraft, including Boeing 737s, 757s, 767s and 777s, says an official release.

The previous "flowing fabric" design introduced in 2000 required eight different colors when applied to aircraft - four shades of blue, two shades of red, one white and a clear coat - whereas the new livery requires only four.

A group of employees representing diverse customer-facing and corporate support divisions from Europe, Latin America and the United States called the Delta Brand Council designed the brand new logo.

In 78 years, Delta has had 19 brand logos. A "delta-shaped" triangle was incorporated in all of them except the "Flying D" logos from 1945-1959. Early logos also featured the Norse god Thor and the Roman god Mercury. The first red, white and navy blue triangle emblem - affectionately know to Delta employees as the "Widget" was introduced in 1959, when Delta entered the jet era with the introduction of the DC-8. Its shape resembles the swept wing appearance of a jet seen overhead.

The Delta Boeing 777 aircraft that flies the Mumbai-JFK route will also be transformed to feature the new look, in line with Delta's re-branding strategy.