EVERETT – It took more than a magic wand and pixie dust to get this Tinker Bell to fly.
Workers at Goodrich Corp.’s jet maintenance facility in Everett worked double shifts for nearly two weeks to prepare the new paint job for Alaska Airline’s newly christened “Magic of Disneyland” jet. Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
The plane – a Boeing 737-400 sporting a smiling Tinker Bell character at the nose and trailing sparkling, Mylar-flecked “pixie dust” down the fuselage – was unveiled Wednesday in a ceremony at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
It flew to Sea-Tac from Goodrich’s Paine Field facility carrying Goodrich and Alaska employees and children from a Seattle-area YMCA.
The flight marked the end of months of planning and collaboration among Alaska Airlines, Walt Disney Co., industrial designers Walter Dorwin Teague of Seattle, Goodrich, and Associated Painters, the contractor that runs Goodrich’s Paine Field paint hangar.
The process was stressful, said Reed Friese, a manager for Associated Painters, but also exciting.
“It’s fun to see how exciting it is for the Alaska employees,” he said.
The plane is the second Disney-themed jet in Alaska’s fleet. It’s part of a promotional effort between the airline and the entertainment company marking the 50th anniversary of Disneyland.
Tinker Bell, the fairy from Disney’s classic animated movie “Peter Pan,” has been closely associated with the Southern California theme park since its opening in 1955.
The plane came to Goodrich for regular maintenance work in March. It was due to be repainted anyway, the airline said, so workers stripped the regular Alaska paint scheme and applied a bright blue base coat to the plane, then stenciled off the outline of the Tinker Bell character and the stream of star-shaped pixie dust on the fuselage, as well as a 50th-anniversary logo on the vertical stabilizer.
Disney airbrush artists then painted the images on the plane. They’ve got a different set of skills, Friese said. “We paint two-dimensional,” he said. “The artists made it 3-D.”
The artists used a newly developed Mylar paint more commonly used on custom cars.
“When the sun hits it, it’s just like a car,” said Kelly Christianson, one of the Associated painters.
Unlike most jet paint jobs, this one included a clear-coat layer intended to “make the artwork bulletproof, so when it goes into service they don’t have to keep touching it up,” Reese said.
Reese’s crew spent 12 days working on the plane, which would have taken seven days to repaint if it had received a normal paint job.
It was a nice break in the routine, Reese said. Otherwise, “it’s the same thing over and over again. It’s production painting. This keeps things fresh for all of us.”
Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or corliss@heraldnet.com.
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