I’ve always been interested in what I call interim color schemes.  These are when one airline acquires an aircraft from another and then operates the airplane while it is wearing the original livery with only a few changes.  Enthusiast photographers value shots of aircraft in interim liveries because they are so temporary.  My own intrigue with the subject began as a child when I flew on a Convair 240 that Continental leased from American.  The Continental name and falcon symbol was placed on the all-metal American livery.  When I worked at Delta after the Western merger, we flew former Western aircraft in with Western stripe and the Delta “widget” and name on the fuselage.  When Delta acquired Pan Am’s European routes, Delta kept the white Pan Am color and just added small Delta titles and a small widget.

Here at Southwest, we also have a rich history of interim color schemes both from merger and leasing/buying aircraft from other operators.  In a previous post, Gordon Guillory covered the 737-700s we acquired from the Ford Motor Company.  I am going to take a few Flashback Friday posts and look at some of the other interim liveries in which our aircraft have flown.  While digging through our archives, I found a poster featuring some of these liveries, and I will share that in a later post.  Today, however, I want to look back at the Morris Air merger at the end of 1994. 

Above is the standard Morris livery.  This is a 737-317 (msn 23174), and it was originally delivered to Canadian Pacific as C-FCPI, and then it served with VASP in Brazil as PP-SNR.  Morris Air acquired it in 1993 and reregistered the aircraft as N775MA.  When Southwest acquired Morris, it was reregistered as N693SW.

The next aircraft  (msn 23826) wears the interim Southwest scheme, with Southwest titles on the fuselage and the Morris Air emblem on the tail.  This was delivered to Guiness Peat Aviation (GPA) as a 737-3Y0 with the registration EI-BTM, and it also served with VASP as PP-SNV.  It was returned to GPA and leased to Morris with the registration EI-CHE.  When we repainted it into full Southwest colors, it became N699SW. 

In the future we will look at some of the old 737-200s in a variety of interim liveries.  But before that, next week, we will have some Valentine’s Day photos from the archives.