What Color is Visible

[rdsafe]

There was a recent post about polished planes not being visible in the air.

I'm interested as to what other members have about say is the most visible color to see in the air.
I'm getting ready to paint soon. What say you?

Thank you,

R. Stauffer

[Area 51%]

Hard to miss a white Cessna in the pattern. I wouldn't worry too much about it though, everyone is going to have their head down looking at their ADS-B screen anyway.

[Rynoth]

2 decades ago when I was in school at Embry-Riddle in Prescott, AZ, they came out with a new livery for the fleet of aircraft. I remember that there was a study done to determine how to get the best visibility and match that with a good looking(?) paint scheme. Prescott airport at the time was one of the busiest (if not the busiest) Class D NON-radar airports in the country largely due to the flight school operations, all the ATC was done visually. They settled on a dark blue-on-white paint job.

It seemed counter-intuitive to paint your plane the color of clouds/sky for best visibility in the sky but apparently it works.

[mike.smith]

Mine is polished and I've never heard of an issue. Looks like a dark "gray" in the sky.

[wolfpack3]

As a professional artist studying the the color spectrum for more than 50 years I would say the best, most visible color is a light lemon yellow.
On one occasion, many years ago, there was a flight of about 8 of us flying our RV's to a fly-in on a very hazy day.
There was one painted a bright orange, two with predominately white, one a bright red and last but not least was one that was painted a creamy lemon yellow. The lemon yellow was by far the most visible and stuck out like a sore thumb even on that very hazy day. I have flown with with this friend of mine for over 20 years. So far he has painted all of his RV builds (4) this color. His most recent was inspired by my 2005 Mini Cooper yellow which came out beautiful.

[peter anson]

My Sonex is bright orange, Polyfibre "Pumpkin", and I have been told it is easy to see in the air. On the ground on green grass it is obviously very easy to see but I have done a few flights over terrain that looked like this:

I suspect that if I did an out landing in this landscape it would be as good as camouflaged.

A few years ago I was at the Avalon air show and asked about the paint scheme on the BAE Hawk 127s that the air force uses as advanced jet trainers. The scheme is a light grey/dark grey combination which looks like they are trying to hide the aircraft in a black and white photo. I was told it was to increase visibility. I might have sounded skeptical at the time.

Peter

[GraemeSmith]

As a professional artist studying the the color spectrum for more than 50 years I would say the best, most visible color is a light lemon yellow.

And many Fire Department's would agree with you! Ever wondered why some fire trucks are yellow?

https://www.apa.org/action/resources/re ... ction/lime

[Msing48]

Dark on bottom and light on top. I fly a lot with Robert and almost always lose sight of him when he is below me at more than about 1/4 mile and have no trouble seeing him above me. For those that aren’t familiar with his plane (Sexy Hexy), it is dark blue with white hexagons.

[Area 51%]

I thought they started painting the fire trucks yellow so you could tell them apart from a Lamborghini.

[Spaceman]

I thought they started painting the fire trucks yellow so you could tell them apart from a Lamborghini.

We're talking about trucks used to extinguish fires, not vehicles which are currently ON fire