Livery of the Week: JAL Celebrates ‘Gundam’ at the 2025 Expo in Osaka

Editor’s Note: AirlineGeeks is proud to present our ‘Livery of the Week’ series. Every Friday, a team member will share an airline livery, which can be from the past, present, or even a special scheme. Some airline liveries are works of art. The complexity associated with painting around critical flight components and the added weight requires outside-the-box thinking from designers. The average airliner can cost upwards of $200,000 to repaint, creating a separate aircraft repainting industry as a result. 

Have an idea for a livery that we should highlight? Drop us a line. 

Anime and science fiction series are an important part of Japanese culture and their most popular characters have been regularly featured on the fuselage of the most important Japanese carriers.

In celebration of the World Expo scheduled to take place between April and October in Kansai, the location just outside Osaka that is also home to the Osaka International Airport, Japan Airlines has decided to paint one of its Boeing 737-800 aircraft in a livery depicting Gundam, the famous robot starring in a military science fiction media franchise. In fact, one of the pavilions at the Expo 2025 is named “Gundam Next Future Pavilion: Life Spreading into the Future” and celebrates a hypothetical world where Gundam robots exist with the help of an 18-meter (59 feet) life-sized moving Gundam created in Yokohama in 2020.

Japan Airlines Boeing 737-846 in a “Gundam Next Future Pavilion” livery for the 2025 Expo in Osaka, Japan (Photo | X Japan Airlines Boeing 737-846 in a “Gundam Next Future Pavilion” livery for the 2025 Expo in Osaka, Japan (Photo: @JAL_Official_jp)

The aircraft chosen to sport this new livery is a Boeing 737-846 with registration JA342J in a 165-seat configuration mainly operating domestic flights within Japan. It is powered by two CFM56 engines and it performed its first flight on Apr. 6, 2012 as a JAL Express aircraft, being later “promoted” to the mainline fleet in October 2014.

Looking for a new airplane model? Head over to our friends at the Midwest Model Store for a wide selection of airlines and liveries.

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Vanni Gibertini

Vanni fell in love with commercial aviation during his undergraduate studies in Statistics at the University of Bologna, when he prepared his thesis on the effects of deregulation on the U.S. and European aviation markets. Then he pursued his passion further by obtaining a Master’s Degree in Air Transport Management at Cranfield University in the U.K. followed by holding several management positions at various start-up carriers in Europe (Jet2, SkyEurope, Silverjet). After moving to Canada, he was Business Development Manager for IATA for nine years before turning to his other passion: sports writing.

Latest posts by Vanni Gibertini (see all)

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