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Airbus is Developing An Inkjet Printer for Airplanes
Cost of plane: $50 million. Cost of ink: $100 million. Ryanair ink levy: £10
By Simon Sharwood,Plane-maker Airbus is working on an inkjet printer, Currently undergoing testing, the device is intended to paint planes.
Today, airlines' logos and the designs they favour are usually painted onto planes. If the designs are complex, they are built up layer by layer in a time-consuming process. Designs too complex to be painted are printed onto colossal stickers, then slapped onto planes. The stickers work well , but add weight to a plane and degrade over time. That adds up to costs that airlines are keen to avoid.
Those problems with the painting and printing processes are behind Airbus' plans to create an inkjet printer capable of scrawling straight onto a new plane. That inkjets can also create more detailed images than is possible with other methods is also welcome.
Airbus says the still-experimental printer “… functions much like a traditional model, using an inkjet head with nozzles that spray three basic colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) and black.”
Just like that ink-guzzler on your desk the printer “prints a design line by line, from top to bottom”. Unlike your printer, this one needs “a seven-square-metre bench”.
If this all sounds silly, stop tittering because there's demand for pretty planes. The craft pictured below is a new 777 that Taiwan's EVA Air has painted in Hello Kitty livery. EVA has half a dozen "Hello Kitty Jets", each with a unique design, and markets them aggressively.
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