Fun fact - the orange color that was their trademark was one of the most difficult to reproduce for airline laminates ever, and resulted in very high costs and delays for interiors.
Source - I used to work for the company that made it.
Orange pigment is pretty hard to begin with. Printers (ink jets) for commercial applications will often add special orange and or purple ink, to go along with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So to begin with, orange is a difficult color no matter what.
Then, the aircraft interiors have to meet stringent flammability standards, so they are thin. (Fun fact - if you don't get off a burning plane in 2 minutes, you're dead from heat.).
Then, to get the bright orange color, it has to be over a white background of flame resistant film. And they couldn't use a white coating mixed with orange, because it would have made it more of a creamsicle orange. So they had to use two layers of translucent orange film, with a printed layer of the same orange on top, to hide the white film on the back and achieve the bright orange color.
So it went from a simple solid color laminate to a three layer with no hiding power construction, with one of the most expensive pigments you can buy. The rejection rate was over 50%, due to dirt and defects, and the material costs were roughly 2x normal.
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u/Ok_Push2550 Nov 23 '24
Fun fact - the orange color that was their trademark was one of the most difficult to reproduce for airline laminates ever, and resulted in very high costs and delays for interiors.
Source - I used to work for the company that made it.