The Pepsi Concorde was one of the most iconic aircrafts of the 1990s

Back in the 1990s, British Airways and Air France decided to give Concorde a Pepsi livery.

Believe it or not, this actually happened.

And you’ll never guess the reason why they painted the aircraft with Pepsi colors.

Unfortunately, it was also a pretty bad idea.

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Why British Airways and Air France repainted Concorde

Today, we gaze at the sky through our windowpane with tears streaming down our cheeks because we miss Concorde.

But in the mid-1990s, very few people were flying Concorde apart from celebrities who could afford it.

Maybe it was because it was too expensive, or because you always take things for granted when they’re available, but whichever, this was a problem because Concorde wasn’t taking off.

Pun intended.

In a last-ditch attempt to save the ‘brand’, Air France and British Airways decided to invest a huge amount of cash in what today you’d call a marketing campaign to repaint one of the aircraft with a Pepsi livery.

It looked unreal, but it was real.

The aircraft selected for this experiment was F-BTSD, one of Air France’s Concordes, which first flew in 1978 and was retired in 2003 after 12,974 hours of flight time.

Today, the aircraft lives in the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget, France, but the Pepsi livery is no longer visible.

The problem with repainting this aircraft

Ironically – as we know, when it rains, it pours – this campaign actually did more damage than good.

All Concordes were painted white, not because it was stylish but because the aircraft was subjected to extremely high temperatures, and white was the best color to help deflect the heat.

So the blue livery actually stopped protecting the supersonic plane from the extremely high temperatures, and this meant that it only cruised at its iconic Mach 2 speeds for 20 minutes at a time.

After briefly existing as ‘Pepsi’ Concorde, Air France decided to return to its original condition.

The collaboration was short-lived.

But not as short-lived as the even more absurd collaboration between Pepsi and McDonnell Douglas.

In the 1990s, Pepsi made a commercial in which it told people they could collect ‘Pepsi Points’ with each purchase they made and win prizes, including a fighter jet.