Photo: Cathay Pacific

Hong Kong airliner Cathay Pacific told on itself today after publishing photos to Twitter of a paint job gone wrong on one of its planes, with the fuselage mistakenly reading ā€œCathay Paciic,ā€ leading all of the internet to joke about not giving an ā€œF.ā€

On the surface, it’s just a situation like all of those soul-crushing times you only caught a spelling mistake on a school project while in front of the teacher, your classmates, and God. Except it’s an airline with a Twitter account and no shame. Here’s the tweet with the images:

But some were suspicious and asked around, thinking this sort of mistake is a little too ā€œspacificā€ to be genuine, and that the airline was a little too quick to laugh it off. From the South China Morning Post (via the BBC):

Shown the typo, an engineer for Haeco, a sister company of the airline, was baffled by how such a mistake could have happened.

ā€œThe spacing is too on-point for a mishap. We have stencils. Should be a blank gap in between letters if it was a real mistake I think,ā€ the engineer said.

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Considering livery paint jobs for aircraft reportedly go for anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000, it seems like they would take a little more care in getting it right, especially with stencils. Considering just respraying the name on the plane would likely cost a bit less, the mistake may have been more of a deceptive promotional move.

And here we are, so it worked! But how would I trust Cathay Pacific’s flight engineers and pilots if I can’t even trust them to get the name right with a stencil?

Then again, I once bubbled in my name wrong on a high school scantron test and had to retake it, so who am I to judge.