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Comment by Larry Ludwig on December 6, 2012 at 4:09pm

I saw your comment about seeing the Shamu aircraft for SouthWest the first time when you were 5...  I was flying for DHL at the time and was coming into SAT on a saturday morning and saw traffic about to pass underneath us. A lot of professional pilots pride themselves on knowing the models and markings of the planes around them and are always eager to learn about new machines and markings... and I looked out and saw this SWA tail and some WEIRD paintscheme and without thinking I keyed the mike and asked the tower what was passing under us... (and WHY was it down there because we were coming in to land) and the controller reported back... "That's SHAMU the killer whale!"  Once he said that it made sense when I looked at it again. They actually had the mayor and the city council and other VIP's and they went out to SEAWORLD in SAT and flew a low pass over the park. The really incredible part of the story was that Boeing was able to keep the plane under wraps while it was being painted and then they flew it down to SAT at night so no one could see it, and this was the unveiling.  I rode jumpseat on SWA all the time, and noticed that I was seeing Shamu all over the place...  I think that there ended up being 3 of them because they told me the reservation agents were getting calls from people that were calling in and wanted to fly on Shamu, and didn't care so much, they just wanted to ride on that plane. It was so popular they added a couple more. They were giving away Shamu gifts and Seaworld stuff inflight and the people really went after it.