An Extraordinary Journey
Green and blue Northern Lights sweeping above an Icelandic winter landscape: Hekla Aurora was a Boeing 757 you could recognise before reading the airline’s name. But how did TF-FIU become Icelandair’s flying invitation to explore its home country? From a paint hangar in Norwich to unexpected assignments and a farewell over Iceland, its story reaches well beyond the famous livery. Today, parts of that original artwork continue their journey through the Aviationtag × Icelandair Edition.
A Spanish Beginning
Before the Aurora
By the time Icelandair painted the Northern Lights onto TF-FIU, the aircraft had already spent twenty years carrying passengers. It had flown for Spanish airlines, appeared in different colours and moved north to Iceland. The part of its life that would make it famous was only just beginning.
The future Hekla Aurora first flew on 8 April 1994. A Boeing 757-256 with manufacturer serial number 26243, it was delivered to Iberia that July. Service with Air Europa and a return to Iberia followed before the aircraft entered the Icelandair group in 2004, receiving its Icelandic registration, TF-FIU.
There were further changes along the way. Its early Icelandic years included operations with Loftleiðir Icelandic and a spell flying for Italy’s Volareweb. Historical photographs record these less familiar identities, long before green auroras swept across the fuselage.
Eventually, the aircraft became a familiar part of Icelandair’s fleet under the name Hekla. Both a traditional Icelandic girl’s name and the name of a volcano, it connected the Boeing to its adopted home. In late 2014, that connection became considerably more visible.
Aviationtag x Icelandair
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Painting the Night
Iceland Before Arrival
To understand the transformation, it helps to look at the journey Icelandair was selling. A passenger flying between Europe and North America could change planes in Iceland and continue onwards. But what if they stayed a little longer?
The airline had encouraged stopovers since the early 1960s. Its global #MyStopover campaign, introduced in 2014, brought fresh attention to the opportunity: up to seven nights in Iceland without additional airfare. A connection between flights could become a holiday in its own right.
Hekla Aurora gave that idea a presence at airports far from Iceland. In December 2014, artists in Norwich, England, transformed TF-FIU with a Northern Lights livery. Airbrush techniques softened the transitions between green, turquoise and blue, while a dark Icelandic winter landscape stretched beneath them. The design depended on those flowing transitions: the light needed to appear to move across the aircraft rather than sit in separate blocks of colour.
Passengers encountered the same idea after boarding. LED mood lighting brought the aurora borealis into the cabin, carrying the exterior’s theme through the flight.
THE MAKING OF VIDEO
The aircraft was already wearing its new colours in December, but its official presentation followed on 4 February 2015. Hekla Aurora flew over Reykjavík and the illuminated Hallgrímskirkja, the church overlooking the city, before landing at the domestic airport. Visitors were then invited aboard. For that evening, the landscape on the fuselage, the lights in the cabin and the city below all belonged to the same story.
A Flying Landscape
Ice and National Colours
Hekla Aurora established an idea that Icelandair would revisit: an aircraft could introduce passengers to Iceland before they reached it.
In 2017, Vatnajökull joined the fleet’s special-livery family to mark the airline’s 80th anniversary. Its hand-painted glacier stretched across the exterior, with ice-blue lighting and glacier-inspired details inside. Even the service trolleys carried the theme, becoming small rolling glacier caves. Where Hekla Aurora evoked the night sky, Vatnajökull brought passengers closer to the ice below it.
A year later, Þingvellir appeared in the blue, white and red of Iceland’s flag. It celebrated a century of Icelandic sovereignty and the men’s national football team’s first World Cup appearance. Its first flight in that role carried supporters to Moscow.
These aircraft became recognisable through very different designs. Yet behind the photographs and public appearances, they still had passengers to carry and schedules to keep.
An Unexpected Week
Beyond the Timetable
For Hekla Aurora, that working life occasionally took an unusual turn. In October 2023, the aircraft was called upon for two very different assignments within days of each other.
Following the attacks of 7 October, the Icelandic government chartered it for a repatriation operation. The destination was Amman, Jordan, where passengers arrived after travelling overland from Israel. Hekla Aurora then brought them back to Iceland. Among those returning were 126 Icelanders, alongside passengers from other countries.
On 15 October, the Boeing appeared on the much shorter route between Reykjavík and Akureyri. A Q400 technical problem had disrupted domestic services. With Hekla Aurora available, Icelandair combined two planned rotations and used the larger aircraft to get passengers to their destinations. An airline spokesperson confirmed how unusual it was to use these jets on domestic services under normal circumstances.
The familiar Northern Lights aircraft had become a replacement for a regional turboprop. Such assignments rarely define an aircraft’s public image, but they belong to its history just as much as the carefully planned celebrations.
Saying Goodbye
Two years later, passengers boarded Hekla Aurora for a journey arranged specifically around the aircraft itself. On 12 October 2025, around 140 people joined a farewell sightseeing flight over Iceland. After years of carrying a painted Icelandic landscape abroad, the Boeing was being celebrated above its own home scenery.
That flight became the public goodbye, although TF-FIU still had work ahead. Its final scheduled passenger service followed on 14 October, from Copenhagen to Keflavík. Then, on 6 November, it departed for Lleida–Alguaire in Spain. The celebration, the last passenger flight and the final ferry journey were separate moments in the closing weeks of its career.
The aircraft arrived in Spain with its Northern Lights livery still in place. Months later, that paintwork would be central to our visit.
A Closer Look
The Colours Remain
In July 2026, our team travelled to Lleida and personally recovered sections of TF-FIU’s original aircraft material in temperatures above 40°C. Those sections returned to our Cologne workshop, where we process them by hand for the official Aviationtag × Icelandair Edition.
Working with smaller pieces changes how you see the livery. From an airport window, the colours form a complete landscape. Up close, a single transition from blue to green or a pale section of painted terrain becomes a composition of its own.
That is what makes this our most varied edition yet. Each Aviationtag preserves a different part of the original paintwork, so colour categories and product photographs can only offer guidance. Individual pieces may look noticeably different from the examples shown.
Through aircraft upcycling, those details become aviation collectibles that can be kept on display or used as a keychain or luggage tag. Each carries original material from the same Boeing 757, but a different view of the artwork that made it Hekla Aurora.
Did you ever fly on Hekla Aurora or spot it at an airport? Tell us where and when in the comments, and share a photo if you have one.
We’d love to hear the passenger stories behind this aircraft’s many journeys.
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