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Flying Colors 1/144 Midwest Express MD-80

By Chris Banyai-Riepl

Midwest Express might not make it to every airport, but since it first started flying in 1984 it has become renowned for its quality of service. While most of its dozen or so aircraft are MD-81/82/83s with the pointy tailcone, Midwest Express also flies three MD-88s with the chisel tailcone.  Their attractive yet sedate livery consists of a blue upper fuselage with a white lower, separated by gold and red cheatlines.  The tail logos and fuselage titles are in white and the horizontal tailplanes are in the upper surface blue.

This decal sheet is another great release from Flying Colors and is well printed.  You get lots of stuff in white on this sheet and the people at Flying Colors have provided it all twice to make sure there’s no opacity problems going over the dark blue upper fuselage.  The red and gold cheatlines are split into three pieces on each side.  Details included on the sheet are door outlines, some stenciling including overwing exit pathways, and a complete set of windows.

With the very nice Minicraft 1/144 MD-80 kit I am expecting we’ll be seeing many great aftermarket sheets for the MD-80 and this ranks right up there.  The conservative livery is still attractive and will look great on the kit, and with Midwest Express flying both types of tailcones you can have some variety to choose from.  If you’ve got a stack of MD-80 kits piling up, pull one down and grab this sheet.

My thanks to Flying Colors for the review sample.  Check out their website for other great liveries in several scales.