The Terra Avia Boeing 747-400 that flew in the eight African cheetahs from Windhoek, Namibia to Gwalior on Saturday was on a special mission, but the aircraft itself had been the flagship of another conservation campaign much earlier.
The jet’s striking paint scheme — the image of a tiger — was planned in 2015 when the aircraft was with the Russian carrier, Transaero Airlines, now defunct. The plane, first owned by Singapore Airlines in 2001, was acquired by an American bank in 2012. It was later leased to Transaero.
As a part of the project, known as the ‘Striped Flight’, the visual was to run across parts of the fuselage, with the nose to sport the head of one of the world’s largest big cats, the endangered Russian Amur tiger.
