N3N Paint Schemes

I have been going through the fleet photos and thinking about paint schemes.

I would categorize aircraft three ways: civilian, “sorta” military and historic military. The challenge is where to draw the line between the kinda-military and the historic military.

I was surprised that there are so few civilian paint schemes in the N3N family. The vast majority have at least some pretention of being military. There seems to be a real “warbird” draw to the “N”.

I would define civilian as having a significant amount of color that is not Orange-Yellow and none of the following markings: military stars (or later period Annapolis stars-and-bars), branch logos (Navy, Marines, Coast Guard) or buzz numbers. A simple “N3N” on the vertical stabilizer doesn’t get me to “military” (as always, your mileage may vary). I count eight civilian birds in the fleet as follows (in no particular order):

As I said at the top of the post, there is some disagreement on what is historic and what is not (please don’t anyone start a blog-war), but I think we can all agree that the El-Toro bird is NOT a historic Marine paint scheme:

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