ANA painted an Airbus A380 to look like a sea turtle. Not a subtle accent. A full-wrap, nose-to-tail **Hawaiian green sea turtle** across every surface of a 72-metre airframe. It required **930 stencils, 16 shades of paint, and 21 days in Hamburg.** The **Flying Honu** series — three A380s serving the Tokyo–Honolulu route — each wear a different turtle. Ka La in blue. Lani in green. La in orange. The design came from an **open public competition** won by Hawaiian artist Chihiro Masuoka. ANA selected the **honu**, a creature sacred in Hawaiian culture, as the identity for its entire A380 programme. Each aircraft seats **520 passengers** across four classes. The livery is spray-painted, not vinyl-wrapped — every colour boundary hand-masked with stencils across compound fuselage curves. A standard A380 paint job weighs roughly **650 kilograms**. The Honu adds an estimated **600 kilograms more**. That's 1,250 kilograms of paint on a single aircraft. Measurable in fuel burn across every Honolulu rotation. ANA accepts the cost because the numbers justify it. Themed aircraft generate **significantly higher load factors** on deployed routes. The Honu A380s to Honolulu consistently sell out. Planespotters track them in real time. Social media does the marketing for free. But the Honu isn't where this started. **Pokémon jets** have flown ANA liveries since 1998 — over a dozen variants across 747s, 767s, and 777s. Each one a full repaint requiring removal of the previous scheme, primer application, and multi-layer colour work. A Pikachu 777-300 repaint takes **14 days** out of revenue service. Two weeks grounded. Zero passengers. Maximum visibility. In a market where JAL matches ANA seat for seat, route for route, fare for fare, the aircraft you remember is the one with the turtle. Nine hundred thirty stencils. That's not a livery. That's a conviction.