[aviation news]
You haven’t shopped for an aircraft paint job in the past decade, you’ll be surprised by the eye-watering price quotes for finishing even the most basic piston single. While high-quality aircraft paint projects have always been premium priced, these days there’s almost no end to what you can do to spiff up an aging bird—and that means a big investment, long downtime, a lot of disassembly, and a critical planning process.
Plan It Right
That might seem like basic advice, but in the current world of interesting modern paint schemes, shortchanging the planning is a setup for remorse. You have one shot at it. Thankfully, there are professionals who can help get you started in the right direction—and even step up your ideas to a higher level.
One well-respected source for planning since 1997 comes from New Jersey-based Scheme Designers. Company CEO Craig Barnett brings years of paint scheme design planning and aircraft ownership experience. Scheme Designers has racked up thousands of projects on aircraft of all types and boasts a staff of creative artists and engineers who have developed a variety of paint scheme trends. Many of these one-of-a-kind paint schemes have won best-of-show awards. Thanks to the firm’s large library of projects, preparation of a new design is usually based on one from a similar aircraft type.
Each project includes unlimited design changes within the framework of the direction selected, as well as assistance with picking colors and a full set of dimensioned drawings and written specifications. There’s a 3D photo-realistic rendering option that can be added to the project. Instead of working with 2D side and top-view renderings, you can work with an online model in three dimensions so the aircraft can be seen from any angle against different lighting and/or backgrounds.
While Scheme Designers and other creative third-party planners are a huge resource, especially if you don’t know what you want in a new paint job, it’s some of the OEMs that have been a real shot in the arm when it comes to creativity and trend setting. The result is new and vogue design approaches yielding attractive and interesting paint schemes that go a long way to attracting their customers’ attention.
If you haven’t noticed, manufacturers like Cirrus, Daher, Pilatus, and Diamond have worked hard to create designs that are edgier, more modern, and far more interesting than in the past. They have also led a strong movement away from the typical white base color—even on composite models from Cirrus and others. It used to be that with composite models, buyers had one color choice—white—partly because of limitations on composite structures. Not anymore. Bold colors, unusual color combinations, and more aggressive styling have emerged that lean more toward a new Porsche feel than the family economy car. That can boost resale, but keep in mind that what might be attractive to you might be hideous to others, and that can make the aircraft difficult to sell. Pick something in between.
Another excellent planning source comes from Sherwin-Williams Aerospace Coatings with an aircraft color visualizer utility. With it you can experiment with different base and accent colors using the built-in database of airframes and available paint colors. Moreover, the Sherwin-Williams SKYscapes base/clear colors have more intense shading than ever.
But use caution. Scheme Designers advised that when choosing a metallic or pearl color these days, it is not a matter of simply picking the shade you like. Colors must be studied from all angles and in a variety of lights, as new pearl/metallic effects create finishes that drastically change shades depending on viewing angles and ambient lighting. Ultimately, the colors yield more interesting finishes, and sometimes their color variability surprises owners when looking at the aircraft in different environments.
Think Long-Term Upkeep
Go to any experienced paint shop for a proposal and you’ll likely start with the basics, which includes Matterhorn white and two-stripe colors. However, more owners are moving to other base colors. The most common variation is metallic or pearl silvers and pearl whites in place of the typical white base. In the past few years, owners have taken it further, choosing reds, pearl yellows, golds, metallic charcoals, greens, and other bold colors as the base color of the aircraft. But there’s also the challenge of upkeep.
Matte paints have always been problematic on an aircraft because fingerprints and stains from oil blow-by, fuel, and exhaust residue quickly mar a matte finish. Matte aircraft are also notoriously challenging to clean. However, following trends from the automobile industry, more aircraft owners have been drawn to implementing matte elements in their design—or an overall matte finish over the entire aircraft.
The good news is that aerospace paint manufacturers have responded by developing clear coats for matte and semigloss that protect the finish from fingerprints, oil, and soot, and are much easier to keep clean. But they aren’t necessarily easy to maintain as the finish wears, compared to gloss finishes. Julie Voisin from Sherwin-Williams pointed out that you can put a buffer with compound to a glossy paint job and make it look good again as areas wear and fade. You won’t be able to do that with a semigloss or matte finish because you don’t want it to buff out glossy. Voisin also noted that the tech support team has developed new techniques and tricks to better care for these new finishes, but consumers should still consider long-term upkeep with any matte or semigloss finish.
More owners are implementing designs that include matte and eggshell finishes. It is now common to see a matte black spinner on a new aircraft in place of the more typical polished aluminum aircraft, a trend that owners are emulating when repainting their entire aircraft. Some owners reproduce the custom paint job on their luxury vehicles. Still, don’t underestimate the cost of the project—from planning it to finishing it to protecting it. In the latest paint shop satisfaction survey conducted by The Aviation Consumer, typical prices ranged from $15,000 to well north of $100,000.
Remember to choose a shop with a lot of experience with your aircraft model because there will be a lot of disassembly, which increases the risk when flying the airplane away. There have been ugly wrecks where control surfaces have failed because the paint shop didn’t reinstall them properly. Paint work is major maintenance and should be treated as such.
Clear Coat Finishes
Clear coat paint jobs have obviously been the standard in the automotive world, but why has the process been a slow adoption in the lower-end aircraft restoration world? After talking with some industry pros, we couldn’t find any good reasons other than some shops are set in their ways, sticking with the single-stage process that has worked for them for years. That really shortchanges the customer. Still, for metallic finishes, there’s no other option than basecoat/clear coat systems. Regardless, there are plenty of reasons to cover any paint work in a clear coat.
Barnett at Scheme Designers, who specifically noted the Sherwin-Williams SKYscapes product, told us that a base coat/clear coat affords an opportunity to use less paint because there is better coverage. Better yet, if the final clear coat layer covers the entire aircraft, it reduces the so-called tape-edge appearance/feel of stripes. A SKYscapes base coat/clear coat also has a short drying time between color applications, which reduces the time the aircraft must be in the paint shop. The shop can apply multiple colors in one day, instead of it taking multiple days per color application. Voisin at Sherwin-Williams reiterated the fact that a clear coat simply reduces upkeep.
“Without a sharp edge on a stripe, for example, there are less chances of adhesion issues since the entire paint job is wrapped in the clear coat,” said Voisin, noting that repairing damage to the clear coat is a heck of a lot easier than repairing the paint surface. “In many cases you won’t have to get a custom color mixed for the damaged area. That protecting clear coat surface is a sizable advantage when it comes to upkeep.”
She said there’s also better UV protection. Since weight is a concern, the typical clear coat thickness is roughly 35-50 microns. Some shops and buyers are lukewarm to the idea mainly because of cost. And based on the paint shop satisfaction surveys we’ve conducted at The Aviation Consumer, you’ll pay more.
“I got three quotes for a base coat/clear coat project on my old D-model Baron, and the cheapest was $25,500 and the highest was $32,800,” one owner told us.
But for many, the idea of a clear coat finish might sound attractive until they get an eye-watering quote for the job. We talked with several paint shops that concur, including Master Aircraft Services in Arizona. It consistently receives high marks in The Aviation Consumer paint shop surveys.
“As an experiment, we have used the types of paints where, by their nature, you spray them on and then clear coat the whole airplane,” the company said. “It’s quicker and helps make the edges of the design less abrupt, but for many we don’t see the tremendous cost increase as a sufficient incentive.”
Ceramic Coating: Pricey but Effective
An excellent way to maintain that high-end paint job is treating it with a professionally applied ceramic finish. We’ve been evaluating the process at The Aviation Consumer, and long-term testing has proved that it’s a worthy investment. And a big investment it is, with shop labor and supplies totaling as much as $7,000 for big piston and twin models and close to $20,000 for professionally coating a business jet.
The main component of ceramic coatings is silicon dioxide (SiO2), which is also a major component in glass—hence the glass-like appearance. With its nonporous cure, filling properties, and high resilience, ceramics offer protection from surface oxidation, parasitic drag, and UV damage. It creates a slick finish as a bonus, and while we can’t advise utilizing it for such purposes, it might be useful for shedding ice from leading edges.
We used both the Sapphire V1 Nano and System X Diamond/Renegade products, which for a typical small piston might cost at least $600 (wholesale) just for the stuff itself. A little goes a long way, but at $150 per bottle of the Sapphire, it was a big invoice to coat a big turboprop single.
We brought one of The Aviation Consumer’s testbeds—a clear coat-finished Grumman—back to NuAero Detailing in Pennsylvania for Dan Lightner to evaluate the finish by first giving it a cleaning. The plane had flown over 800 hours since he applied the original coating, and it didn’t take long for Lightner to recognize there wasn’t a lot of breakdown.
On the other hand, Lightner pointed out that the best results start with a quality paint job like the clear coat finish on this one. The areas that broke down the most are the ones you’d expect, including the leading edges, front cowling, and the windshield. Still, no abrasive cleaners were needed on these areas, and by using light pressure with a mild cleaner, unwanted dirt, bugs, and debris easily came off (including the belly)—a huge benefit of the coating.
Ceramic is best applied by hand, and since it has a flash period, you wait a short amount of time and remove it, so it doesn’t smear and harden. This application stage is one of the critical steps because you can damage the paint surface when applied incorrectly, especially if the temperature isn’t right for curing. A climate-controlled hangar is a must for the job.
As ceramic coating continues to gain popularity in the automotive world, you want to select a product that’s made for aircraft and generally approved by major manufacturers. Auto parts store spray bottle products don’t count. The System X originally used on our test Grumman and a turboprop single has been upgraded by more coatings, offering different levels of protection.
But use caution—most OEMs advise not to use ceramic coating on composite aircraft.
This column first appeared in the June Ultimate Issue 959 of the FLYING print edition.
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