SAS, a domestic carrier and a merger in 1988.

Thai Airways International, known in its branding as THAI, is the flag carrier of Thailand, based in Bangkok. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 1960 as a joint venture between Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) and Thailand’s domestic carrier, the Thai Airways Company. SAS supplied operational, managerial and marketing expertise, with training intended to build a fully independent national airline as quickly as possible.

The Scandinavian partnership lasted seventeen years. English Wikipedia says that on 1 April 1977 the Thai government bought out the remaining SAS-owned shares, and the airline became a state enterprise of the Thai government. Just over a decade later, on 1 April 1988, the government of Prime Minister Prem Tinsulanonda merged the international and domestic operations of the two companies to form the present Thai Airways International as a single national carrier, according to the same article.

The company has since moved partly into private hands. English Wikipedia records that its shares were listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand on 25 June 1991, and that as of 22 May 2020 the Thai Ministry of Finance reduced its holding below a majority. The airline then went through a court-supervised rehabilitation process; English Wikipedia says that on 16 June 2025 the Central Bankruptcy Court allowed Thai Airways to exit the programme after it met the plan’s conditions.

The airline’s original visual identity came from within Thailand. The French-language expatriate newspaper Le Petit Journal Bangkok, in an article by Raymond Vergé originally published on 16 February 2006 and republished on 12 March 2024, says the original logo was a dancing man, designed by Prince Kraisingh Vudhijaya. The same article says the prince also designed the silk uniform worn by the cabin crew, an early sign of how closely the airline would tie itself to Thai silk.

Silk and the orchid run through the airline’s names for its services. English Wikipedia lists its lounges under two brands, Royal Orchid Lounge and Royal Silk Lounge, and its frequent-flyer programme as Royal Orchid Plus. The airline’s slogan, as Le Petit Journal Bangkok quotes it, is “Smooth as Silk.”

Walter Landor and the orchid of 1975.

The symbol that still sits on THAI’s tails dates to 1975. Le Petit Journal Bangkok reports that in that year the airline decided to change its look and commissioned a new logo from the industrial design firm Walter Landor Associates of San Francisco. According to the article, the brief for the design team was a mark that combined legibility with visual impact and clearly reflected Thailand and the richness of its culture.

The colours were given explicit meanings. Le Petit Journal Bangkok says the gleam of gold recalls the opulence of Thai temples, the pink-magenta stands for the shimmering reflections of silk, and the violet-purple refers to the shades of the orchid. English Wikipedia gives a slightly different reading of the middle colour: gold for the colour of Thai temples, magenta for the magnolia blossom, and purple for the Thai orchid, a colour it says is used throughout the airline.

The shape carries more than one image. Le Petit Journal Bangkok says the drawing suggests the petals of an orchid, a flower that it describes as having become part of the country’s image abroad, while also evoking elements of Thai mythology and traditional architecture, and using “aerodynamic” forms that allude to flight. English Wikipedia describes the tail logo as showing the traditional Thai greeting gesture, the wai, with curves that represent the lamyong, the decorative structure common on temple roofs that marks the different tiers of the building.

The 1975 mark has been revised rather than replaced. Le Petit Journal Bangkok notes that THAI has changed its logo twice since the prince’s dancing man. English Wikipedia describes a brand renewal in the mid-2000s that coincided with new aircraft and with the airline’s move to the new Suvarnabhumi Airport in 2006, bringing a new aircraft livery, new seating and revamped ground and air service, while the orchid-like symbol stayed on the tail.

Special schemes have drawn on court tradition. English Wikipedia says that in 1999 THAI painted a Boeing 747-400 in a livery based on the Royal Barge Suphannahong for the sixth-cycle birthday of King Rama IX, applied the same design to a second 747-400, and later used the Suphannahong design on a Boeing 777-300 to mark the coronation of King Rama X.

Asian airlines and their marks.

Airline identities work on a scale few other brands face. A mark has to read on a tail fin seen from a terminal window, on a boarding pass, on a seat-back headrest and on a phone screen, and it has to do so in many languages at once. Carriers often lean on a single strong symbol rather than a wordmark alone.

National symbols are a common answer. Flowers, birds, kites, animals and stylised suns or stars appear on tails because they can be drawn simply, coloured boldly and recognised without reading a word. A symbol of this kind also lets an airline speak for a place, which matters when the carrier is, or once was, a state enterprise.

Mascots form a second tradition. A painted character can travel across posters, menus and advertising for decades, and can be retired, revived or redrawn as tastes change.

Livery refreshes tend to arrive with change of ownership, new aircraft types or a merger. Privatisation in particular often brings a renaming, a new typeface and a reworked tail, while the core symbol is kept so that travellers still recognise the brand at the gate.

Three colours with three meanings.

THAI’s identity is built from three colours, each tied by the airline’s own explanation to something Thai. In the account given by Le Petit Journal Bangkok, gold stands for temples, magenta for silk and purple for the orchid. English Wikipedia keeps gold for temples and purple for the orchid but reads magenta as magnolia.

The symbol works on several levels at once. Le Petit Journal Bangkok reads it as orchid petals, with echoes of mythology, traditional architecture and the shapes of flight. English Wikipedia reads it as the wai greeting, framed by the tiered curves of the lamyong on a temple roof.

The words around the mark repeat the same themes. The slogan “Smooth as Silk,” the Royal Silk and Royal Orchid lounges and the Royal Orchid Plus programme all return to the two motifs that the 1975 colours were chosen to express. The silk link goes back further still, to the cabin crew uniform that Le Petit Journal Bangkok says Prince Kraisingh Vudhijaya designed alongside the airline’s original logo.

Continuity has been the pattern since 1975. The mid-2000s brand renewal, as English Wikipedia describes it, changed the livery, the cabins and the service, but the Landor symbol and its three colours stayed in place on the tail. Special liveries such as the Royal Barge Suphannahong designs have been painted as additions to the fleet, not as replacements for the standard scheme.

For a design guide, Thai Airways shows how a palette can carry meaning on its own, with each of three colours assigned to a national image, and how one abstract shape can hold several readings at once. Compare Singapore Airlines, another Southeast Asian carrier with a stylised symbol on the tail, and Malaysia Airlines, another Southeast Asian flag carrier. For this guide we use gold, magenta and purple with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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