US Military in Aer Lingus Disguise?

national | miscellaneous | news report Tuesday December 03, 2002 20:28 by Tim Hourigan - Green Party, Refuelingpeace, L4C, Gluaiseacht tim_hourigan at hotmail dot com c/o The Peace HQ, 19 Inis Ealga, Shannon Co Clare 086-3784780

The Red, white and Blue painted in Green and white?

While doing the regular planespotting at Shannon airport I saw this aircraft landing. It came in at 6:40, so it was still dark. I recognised it as WORLD but was surprised that it wasn't in the standard white colour scheme of WORLD airways, (the charter airline with a huge contract to transport troops and cargo for the US military). When I got up to the terminal it had got brighter and I was very surprised to see the new paint job on this plane.

I phoned Aer Lingus in Dublin to ask if they knew anything about this aircraft using their colours.
I described the aircraft (an MD-11) and the detailed paint job.
Dark Green on top, with a lighter green box around the windows, and a blue line underneath the windows. registration N272WA.
No one in Aer Lingus Dublin seemed to know anything about it.

While out planespotting at Shannon, Conor and I got chatting a guy claiming to be from Aer Rianta.
He tried to downplay all aspects of military use of the airport, and when asked about the "WORLD LINGUS" flight, he said that Aer Lingus must have hired the plane for the summer.
I said that was odd to get an MD-11, especially from WORLD, considering that Aer Lingus uses Airbus aircraft and had a spare A330 lying idle.
I asked why they wouldn't have put the Shamrock on it, when they painted it. He said that they had finished re-painting it.

Now, it costs money to take a plane out of circulation, and have it sitting in a painting shed. It doesn't seem at all likely that a plane would only be half-repainted.

Yesterday I went to talk to the Aer Lingus ops manager for Shannon, but he was in a meeting.
some of the staff repeated the claim that they had only temporarily leased this plane.

There's something not quite right about this.
Dublin seems not to know about this plane, the explanation of some people in Shannon doesn't seem particularly credible.
Even if it is true, the explanation received so far is that the shamrock was removed and the WORLd Logos replaced on the plane when the lease ended, but that the plane was still in Aer Lingus colours when it 'resumed' transporting hundreds of US troops through Shannon.

Either way, we would still seem to have a military flight using the colours of the national airline of a neutral country.

All we need now is for some short-sighted terrorist to get the wrong idea, and where does that leave ordinary Aer Lingus passengers and crew? Hoping that no-one whips out a rocket launcher to target them with a SAM-7 Strella missile.