Most airlines mark an anniversary with a commemorative decal near the boarding door and a press release nobody reads. All Nippon Airways paints cartoon monsters across an entire Boeing 787 and sends it to another continent.

On Monday, ANA confirmed the launch date for the second jet in its Pokemon 30th-anniversary trio. The Green Pokemon Jet, a Boeing 787-9 registered JA923A, enters service on international routes on Friday 18 September, and stays in the schedule until 27 March 2027.

It is a small announcement with an unusually long history behind it. ANA has been flying Pokemon on the outside of its aeroplanes, on and off, since 1998, which makes this one of the longest-running special liveries in commercial aviation.

Three jets, three colours

ANA announced the anniversary programme back in February: three aircraft, three schemes, named after the colours of the original Game Boy titles. A 787-8 wears Red and a 737-800 wears Blue, both on domestic routes. The 787-9 in Green is the one that leaves Japan.

Red was confirmed at the start of July. Green now has its date. Route assignments will not be locked until the morning of each flight, which is ANA politely warning enthusiasts that chasing a specific tail number is a gamble.

There is also a practical note buried in the release that tells you how seriously Japanese spotters take this: cabin crew have been instructed not to sign logbooks. Somebody, at some point, asked enough times that it became a policy.

Twenty-eight years of flying Pikachu

The first ANA Pokemon Jets appeared on 1 July 1998, timed to the release of the first Pokemon film. Two aircraft launched the scheme, a Boeing 747-400 and a 767-300, each covered in the 151 creatures that existed at the time. A third 767 followed within weeks because the first two were so popular.

A 747-400 went to North America in February 1999, flying into New York JFK. Later that year ANA ran a design contest for children aged six to twelve, and the winning artwork went onto a 747-400D rolled out at Osaka.

Then it stopped. The last Pokemon aircraft was stripped back to standard ANA colours in April 2016, and for seven years the airline flew nothing but plain jets. The scheme returned in March 2023 with the Pikachu Jet NH, a 787-9, followed by an Eevee-liveried 777-300ER that June.

The bit that happens on the ground

Alongside the aircraft, ANA is switching on the second phase of a Pokemon GO tie-in from the same date. Branded PokeStops and Gyms appear at fourteen Japanese airports, among them Fukuoka, Naha, Kumamoto, Kagoshima, Nagasaki and Ishigaki, with raid battles and timed research attached.

It is a neat piece of commercial thinking. The livery sells the airline to people watching from the fence. The game sells the airline to people already inside the terminal with forty minutes to kill.

ANA started in 1952 with two helicopters. It is now Japan's largest airline and the only Japanese carrier to hold a five-star Skytrax rating every year since 2013. It is also, unmistakably, the airline most willing to put a Pikachu on a widebody and fly it across an ocean.

For a sense of what goes into one of these paint jobs, ANA filmed the process on the Pikachu Jet NH.

Sources: ANA Holdings press release, 24 August 2026; ANA Holdings press releases, 26 February 2026 and 1 July 2026; Pokemon GO official site; contemporary reporting and archive material on ANA Pokemon Jet liveries.