Flying taxis kitted out with First Class seats, blinged-up airplanes with swimming pools, and a food delivery service that delivers international cuisine direct from its home country have all April Fools’ pranks pulled on passengers by the Dubai-based mega airline Emirates.
This year, however, the airline’s joke of turning its double-deck Airbus A380 superjumbos into massive cargo planes able to deliver online shopping orders straight to your door turned out to be grounded in reality.
On April 1, 2025, Emirates teased its ‘Courier Express’ service with a bold livery painted on one of its double-deck A380s, showing the plane covered in brown wrapping paper. This was, though, no joke.
Although photos of the eye-catching livery might look like they have been created by artificial intelligence, Emirates really has replicated the paint job on a real Airbus A380 to promote its very real Courier Express business.
Completed in-house at the airline’s engineering hangars at Dubai International House, a dedicated team completed a nose-to-tail repaint of the massive airplane n the design inspired by brown paper packages.
Unlike Emirates’ April Fools’ prank, however, the airline hasn’t transformed the entire plane into a cargo service. Instead, the plane took off last week for its first flight after getting the striking livery for a regularly scheduled passenger flight to Johannesburg, South Africa.
Soft launched late last year, Emirates Courier Express. has already transported several thousand packages from key markets in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, South Africa, and the UK.
The average time for parcels to get delivered to their destination is just 48 hours.
A legacy of special liveries
Emirates is well known for its special liveries that adorn its flagship fleet of Airbus A380s – perhaps one of the boldest was a bright blue paint job applied to one aircraft to promote the Dubai Expo in late 2021.
Most of the airline’s special liveries are, however, used to promote Emirates’ extensive sports partnerships, including a Real Madrid livery that was applied to the side of a Boeing 777.
Other special liveries include a ‘United for Wildlife’ paint job that highlights the airline’s commitment to fighting the illegal wildlife trade, as well as a livery that celebrated the founding father of the United Arab Emirates, the late HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.
In March 2023, Emirates unveiled a refreshed standard livery, marking only the third time in the airline’s history that its livery has undergone a change.
The tailfin now features a dynamic and flowing 3D effect artwork of the national flag of the United Arab Emirates, while the signature gold Emirates lettering adorning the fuselage has also been made bolder and supersized by 32.5%.
Emirates revealed its first-ever livery in 1985, and it has only been changed once before–back in 1999 to celebrate the introduction of the Boeing 777-300 to the airline’s fleet.
Love this livery! This world needs a good laugh to calm us down for a few hours. Please bring the paper bag 380 to YYZ and let us know in advance via social media…we want pictures.