Culture took to the skies this month with Lift Airlines’ birthday celebrations.
LIFT Airline celebrated its fifth birthday and invited the country to do something unusual: design the tail of one of its planes. The competition, called “Design Our Tail,” asked South Africans to imagine what a flying piece of art might look like.
Thousands responded.
When the public vote was counted, the winning design came from 24-year-old graphic designer Alyssa Reyersbach, from KZN in South Africa.
A moving cultural canvas
Her artwork — vibrant, joyful, and distinctly South African — now appears on the tail of an Airbus A320 flying routes across the country. What began as a digital illustration is now something far bigger: a moving cultural canvas carried through the skies.
For Reyersbach, the moment carries an even deeper meaning. When she was just ten years old, she once entered a childhood aircraft-design competition with a drawing of a plane. Years later, watching her own design on a real aircraft was a full-circle moment — proof that dreams sometimes take the long route before landing.
In a country where creativity is everywhere — from township murals to high fashion — this story feels familiar.
In my culture, imagination is never small.
Sometimes it lives in a young designer’s laptop.
Sometimes it lives in the stories we tell.
And sometimes, it lives in the sky.
The airline also shared images of the other designs from the compation.
