The All Black front row recently winged its way to the 1999 Rugby World Cup on the outside of Air New Zealand's newest Boeing 747 as part of a giant graphic to celebrate Air New Zealand's All Black sponsorship.

Players Anton Oliver, Carl Hoeft and Kees Meeuws featured on the 652 square metre graphic, which includes two 11 metre by 26 metre panels, thought to form the world's largest airborne billboard.

The image was printed by Hamilton-based firm, Admark Visual Imaging, on 3M(TM)Aircraft Marking Film using a 3M™ Scotchprint(TM)Electrostatic printer.

Admark Visual Imaging Managing Director, Laurie Pilling says 3M products are the best in the world for this type of work.

"There are very severe requirements for aircraft graphics - materials need to be able to withstand speeds of up to 1000 kilometres per hour and extreme temperatures of between +50 degrees and - 60 degrees centigrade," he says.

The actual files for printing were a massive 84.6 gigabytes, or equivalent to 58,000 floppy diskettes, and if each roll of 3M(TM)Aircraft Marking Film was laid out end-to-end, it would be the length of five rugby fields.

The graphics were printed onto 262 panels of film which took a team of eight, six days to apply, working 12 hours a day.

Admark Visual Imaging have developed many large format graphics for planes using 3M(TM)Aircraft Marking Film. These include the world's first full wrap image for the Ansett Stars plane and the Air New Zealand Millennium plane 'Dawning of the Sun' graphic.

The graphics remained on the plane for the duration of the Rugby World Cup competition during which the aircraft flew as the Rugby World Cup ended last November.