I believe in dressing for success. If you look the part of your profession—be it pilot, banker, or rodeo clown—you’ll feel professional. If you feel professional, you’ll act professional. If you act professional, you’ll succeed. It’s partly how the world judges you, but I think it’s largely internal.

The same can be said for airplanes. You don’t believe me? Consider how the P-40 Warhawk dressed for its job with the Flying Tigers. Tell me that iconic shark’s mouth didn’t make that plane look like the Zero-eater it became.

Image and product: Hayneedle.com

Of course, for those of us who own planes on the lower end of the airplane ecosystem, dressing an airplane for success was historically a problem. Because back in the day, ya’ pretty much had to dress an airplane with paint, and there aren’t any $89.95 Earl Scheib paint jobs in the aviation world. A paint job, even a simple one, can cost half again as much as the damn airplane did in the first place; and a real show-stopper of a paint job could easily cost more than the damn plane did in the first place.

A rip off? Paint shops taking advantage of us “rich” airplane owners?

Maybe to a small degree, but painting an airplane isn’t like painting a car. For one thing, you need to paint the bottom, as well as the top and the sides; and there are a lot of moving parts that have to be removed by a licensed mechanic before painting and then correctly reinstalled after painting by a licensed mechanic.

But we can still take a page from the Tigers. After all, they really didn’t re-paint their tan-and-green army planes to dress them for success. They just dressed them up by adding the shark’s mouth. And doing something like that today is even easier thanks to vinyl, which is sort of like a stick-on version of paint—which makes it faster, far cheaper. And has the added benefit of being easy to remove if you change your mind, or your plane changes jobs and needs a new wardrobe. You can purchase this durable, relatively easy to install material on eBay in a dizzying array of designs.

Including shark’s mouths.

But a shark’s mouth on an Ercoupe would be just… wrong. I’m sorry, I know someone out there at some point probably put a shark’s mouth on a ‘Coupe, but I think most of us agree that a smiley face would be a better fit. Oh, but speaking of Ercoupes, our Tessie has been having a wardrobe problem herself. Two giant swaths of Tessie’s skin were removed and replaced with naked aluminum during her recent repairs. As was her crumbling nose bowl. Of course, the shop claimed they could paint all the new parts to match their progenitors. We’d never be able to tell that the parts were replaced, I was assured. The colors would be an exact match.

Color me skeptical.

Because past use of densitometers for color matching has given us some very pretty paint indeed, but not anything that matches any of the 50 shades of blue on the plane. Nor has the local paint guy even been able to match her white in past repairs. On small items, it hardly matters, but these are big panels, plus the whole nose of the plane, and on top of all of that, painting them came with a big price tag. I tried to decide which would bother me more: Cheap naked aluminum or expensive piss-poor matching paint.

I went for the cheap aluminum.

But of course, I knew I had the option of dressing up the panels a little bit.

As I’ve said, shark’s mouths were out. They never even entered the running. Beside which, the part of the plane where a shark’s mouth would go was not the part of the plane that was replaced. The part that was replaced, on both sides, was the area directly behind where a shark’s mouth would go.

I kicked around a couple of options. I could have moved our race number gum ball forward. I considered some sort of race-themed nose art, as Tessie’s current day job is that of Air Race Airplane. Race flags or perhaps a racy pinup. But in the end, in a nod to her hot rod little-engine-that-could soul, I decided on classic race car flames. This was doubly appropriate, as the new naked panels are located right where the engine cowl comes across the body, which on an Ercoupe flexs outward on each side like gills—to let the hot air vent from the engine compartment in flight. Flames on the new panels would look like flames coming out of the engine compartment.

Very cool.

Very cool so long as the fames are art, not real. Real flames on any part of an airplane are bad news indeed. Not cool at all.

My first vision was for blue flames. Blue flames, of course, are the hottest. And the plane, as I’ve said, has about 50 shades of blue on her. I haunted eBay where I found literally hundreds of different flame designs. One looked like photos of real flames. Another was so stylized as to be almost Picasso-like. But it was the tribal tattoo-esque flames that set my heart on fire. They looked just right.

Of course, even within this genre, the options were nearly unlimited. I attempted using my limited photoshop skills to take an old photo of Tess, wipe out the paint, try to make it look like naked aluminum, then graft on downloaded images of the flame designs.

I guess I neglected to dress like a graphic designer. The results were a disaster. I had to stick with visualization.

Of course, as regular readers know, I needed to have some buy-in on decisions like this from he-who-will-own-the-plane next. Reminder: “My” plane is really my mother’s plane, which she willed to my son, I’m just the lucky caretaker. And as my son’s not beenthe most supportive of the race look in the past, I had some trepidation about bringing up my plans.

Surprisingly, he was on board with the blue flame concept, and we camped happily in front of the computer and scrolled through endless designs together until we finally found one we thought had the right look for our flying hot rod.

Our next problem was the color. The seller had two different blue shades to choose from. One was called blue, the other was called light blue. Neither shade of blue was one of the 50 shades of blue on Tess.

At first, I thought the light blue was the better bet. Rio thought the dark blue. As we tried to persuade each other of our cases, he won me over to the dark blue. Unfortunately, at the same time, I had succeeded in wining him over to the light blue.

The real problem was that we both knew that neither shade was quite right, so we were trying to figure out which was the lesser of evils. Actually, it was a matter or prominence. How subtle or how dramatic did we want the flames to be? I didn’t want them to be the only thing anyone noticed, nor did I want them so subtle that no one noticed them at all.

As we couldn’t make up our minds, there was only one thing to do. We called for his mother to join us.

She looked at the flames. Looked at the colors. Patiently listened to our over-thought-out arguments on both of the blues, and then she declared that white was the best way to go, not blue at all.

White. White hot white.