How much would this Boeing 737 paint job cost?

The big cost of painting your aircraft with a beach scene (as shown in the question) is not the initial paint job; it’s everything else…

• Colors on aircraft fade quickly…

The aircraft fly at high altitudes and get bombarded with UV light that makes colors look faded. However, plain white paint doesn’t “look faded.” So the parts of an aircraft with colored paint need to be repainted more frequently. In this case, the whole plane would need to be repainted frequently.

• Paint chips….

The skin of the aircraft expands and contracts during a flight. This causes the paint to crack and chip off. It doesn’t show much with white paint because the aircraft is white. However, it shows a lot when the aircraft is painted a non-white color. This means getting more touch ups to fix the obvious chips.

• You get less money when you sell…

Like someone buying a house knowing they’ll have to renovate, buyers pay less for painted aircraft because they know they’ll have to re-paint the whole thing (because most airlines fly planes that are mostly white).

• The Highest Cost of All: Opportunity Cost….

There’s a reason they don’t close a factory to paint it; lots of potential revenue is lost. With an airline, the planes are the factory, and the planes are only making money when they’re in the air. Every time you stop flying a plane to paint (or re-paint) it the airline is losing far more money than the cost of the paint job; they’re losing the money they would have made by selling tickets if the plane was still flying.