Because it would be all but impossible to handle a single stencil that large! Painting masks are always arranged out of manageable sized pieces assembled into the pattern on the object. Consider the money and effort wasted if a single large sencil is stretched out of proportion or torn in application and the whole thing needs to be scrapped and cut again.
This is the first large case of a ‘typographical’ error on an aircraft witnessed in a long time, clearly the existing systems work in nearly every case.
Suppose you as an English speaker/reader worked in the aircraft engineering field.
Now you would likely perform engineering to an exceptional standard.
Now suppose you worked in decoration and were asked for example to apply the Arabic writing to an Emirates, Qatar or Etihad aircraft, or the Chinese characters to a Chinese airline or any other aircraft requiring words from a language you don’t speak, let alone read or write... The likelyhood of you making what seems an ‘obvious’ error to someone who does read those words is massively increased.
The other thing you need to understand is that a word written in any language in a four foot tall font does not look even look like that word when you are one foot away. Couple that with the fact that you’re actually looking at the word in the form of parts of a character spanned across multiple pieces of a stencil and you’ll certainly not notice the error.
Correct, it's the same where I work, so much money gets wasted on a project 'because it's what the customer wants' and so often I have to look at it and say 'yes, but do we get any return on this?' and invariably the answer is no, so I tell the customer to go elsewhere.
