Who's That? Part 11- Wild Kingdom

This week was, with one exception, exclusively Frontier Airlines. Frontier apparently has a different critter on each airplane, and they all have names. As a fleet, these are endangered creatures: Frontier is currently operating under bankruptcy protection, although a court is expected to rule on a buyer later this month. As I write this, the two major contenders are Republic Airways (owner of Midwest, among others) and Southwest Airlines. Under Republic, Frontier will probably continue to exist in some form. If Southwest prevails, Frontier's future is not so rosy: Southwest wants to strengthen their Denver operation, and Frontier has been the major obstacle. Southwest also covets Frontier's prime Concourse A location in Denver. For a while, Frontier had other destinations out of LAX, but nowadays all we get are flights to their Denver hub. The tails shown were: Spike (North American porcupine); Grace (swan); Dale (Dall sheep ram); Charlie (cougar); Jim, Joe, Jay, and Gary (Emperor penguins- and how can they tell which is which?); Larry (lynx); Sarge (bald eagle); Holly (blue heron); Stan (ram); Carmen (blue crowned conure); Lola & Max ( lioness and cub); Flip (bottlenose dolphin); L.J. (lynx cub); and Trixie (red fox). Since then, I've caught a few more:

Domino (black tail deer fawn) on the A319 in the opening shot.

Stu (eastern cottontail), seen above on the A318 pulling into the gate. Frontier was the launch customer for the 120-seat A318.

Erma, the ermine

Foxy (another red fox)

Maya (jaguar)

Wally (gray wolf)

To see all of Frontier's animal tails, go here Animal Tales.

The last photo was one of Alaska Airlines' Disney specials:

'Spirit of Disneyland' debuted in 2004 and was the first Alaska airplane to not have an eskimo on the tail.

As a bonus, here's another Alaska Airlines: the Salmon-Thirty-Salmon!

Like the 'Spirit of Disneyland', the 'Salmom-Thirty-Salmon' is a B737-400. This paint took a team of 30 painters over three weeks to complete. The Alaska king salmon is considered to be "the most elaborate design ever painted on a commercial jet", according to this press release.