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Of course, this wasn't the first time I'd seen a gray aircraft, but the A400M's paintwork is particularly striking. As I explained here nine years ago<\/a>, during the A400M's painting process, the aircraft is given an antistatic paint<\/strong> to dissipate electrostatic charges caused by friction from elements such as rain, snow, and dust. All non-conductive exterior surfaces of the aircraft are painted with an antistatic conductive coating<\/strong>, and a non-conductive coating of anti-corrosion paint is applied over this layer.<\/p>\n The A400M looks great thanks to this paint, but obviously even the best aviation paints eventually suffer wear from the aircraft's exposure to the elements<\/strong> and also from the extreme conditions found on many flights, with very low temperatures during the journey and then very high temperatures on some platforms and extreme cold on others<\/a>.<\/p>\n A few months ago I showed here the wear and tear of a French A400M<\/a>, the F-RBAE (above these lines), which made its first flight on May 12, 2014<\/strong> and was delivered to the French Air Force on September 8 of that year. Ten years in active service had already dulled its paintwork<\/strong>, even showing some curious stains next to its cockpit.<\/p>\n Until today I had not seen anything similar on a Spanish A400M.<\/strong> Yesterday, the Ministry of Defense published a series of photos<\/a> of a medical evacuation flight for children from Gaza. The flight took place from Torrej\u00f3n de Ardoz Air Base bound for Jordan. In the photos we see the A400M T.23-04 (MSN082, 10174, 31-24)<\/strong>, one of the aircraft of the 31st Wing equipped with Cobham 908E air refueling pods, despite the fact that its registration is not that of a tanker aircraft (TK), but only that of a transport aircraft (T). In May we saw this aircraft dropping paratroopers over Latvia here<\/a>, in an excellent series of photos published by the Latvian Army<\/a> and taken by Sergeant Major E. Grundstein.<\/p>\n In the photos published yesterday by the Ministry of Defense, we see this aircraft from the front, taxiing down a runway with some visible signs of wear on its paint.<\/strong> You can see the enlarged photo by clicking on the image. Unfortunately, these photos from the Ministry of Defense have much lower resolution than those published by the Latvian Army.<\/p>\n In this side photo, we see signs of paint wear on the fuselage.<\/strong> The paint has lightened on the fuselage and engine nacelles. The exceptions are the wing and the port wing refueling nacelle, which we see in this image.<\/p>\n In this photo of the tail, we can better see the signs of wear.<\/strong> The paint has lightened, especially on the upper part of the fuselage. It's as if rain or snow had fallen and degraded the paint.<\/p>\n In this photo we see the signs of wear even better,<\/strong> especially on the upper fuselage. Curiously, according to Defensa.com, the T.23-04 was delivered to the Spanish Air Force on December 3, 2018<\/a>. It has not yet completed seven years in service, and it already shows even worse wear than the ten-year-old French A400M we saw here a few months ago.<\/p>\n ---<\/p>\n Photos: Latvijas Armija - Virsser\u017eants E. Grund\u0161teins<\/a> \/ U.S. Air Force<\/a> \/ Arm\u00e9e fran\u00e7aise - Op\u00e9rations militaires<\/a> \/ Ministerio de Defensa<\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the things that caught my attention about the A400M Atlas the first time I saw it was the gray paint that covers its entire fuselage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[19534,11546],"tags":[8244,5923,11875,17940],"class_list":["post-61473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defense-portada-eng","category-military-aviation","tag-airbus-a400m-atlas","tag-ala-31","tag-spanish-air-force","tag-torrejon-de-ardoz-air-base"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-02 07:53:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/53205828111_7797a6266f_c.jpg\")
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