Up-Pointing Airplane is a proposed emoji concept that appeared in community wishlists and informal discussions around the midβ2010s emoji expansion era but was never approved by Unicode. The idea was to provide a clear visual for ascent and takeoff by rotating the standard airplane symbol so the nose points upward. Unicode working groups have generally discouraged encoding orientation-only variants, and the presence of Airplane, Airplane Departure, and Airplane Arrival already covered most travel and aviation semantics, which likely reduced traction for this idea. As a result, Up-Pointing Airplane remained a suggestion rather than an officially standardized character.
Supporters imagined the emoji as a compact way to express βtaking off,β βgoing up,β or βon the riseβ in both literal and figurative contexts. It was seen as useful for aviation enthusiasts talking about climb rate or rotation on takeoff, travelers announcing departure, and internet culture using flight imagery to symbolize optimism, career promotion, or markets trending upward. During the finance and crypto meme boom, people often used π or π« to mean βto the moon,β and an Up-Pointing Airplane would have slotted neatly into that vocabulary. Some also noted it could contrast with a hypothetical down-pointing airplane to indicate descent or landing phases without including a runway.
In concept, the design would likely mirror Appleβs glossy βοΈ airplane style but tilted 30β45 degrees nose-up, with a light gray or white fuselage, blue tail, and simple wing and engine detailing. Enthusiast mockups tended to avoid a runway, differentiating it from π« while keeping the silhouette clean for small sizes; a faint contrail or motion lines were sometimes suggested to imply climb. On platforms with flatter iconography, it might have resembled a minimalist Noto-style jet rotated upward, prioritizing a bold nose and wing shape for legibility. Because no official artwork was commissioned, any such depictions remain conceptual rather than canonical.
Interest in this candidate often surfaced in forums, issue trackers, and social media threads asking for more directional or stateful versions of existing transport symbols. However, Unicodeβs preference to avoid encoding mere rotations, plus overlap with existing airplane emojis and common workarounds (like combining βοΈ with β¬οΈ, or using π«, π, and π), meant Up-Pointing Airplane never progressed into a formal addition. It persists as a βlost emojiβ idea that reflects how users sought compact visual metaphors for momentum, ascent, and fresh starts.
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Emoji History The emoji code/ image log of changes.
This emoji was one of the "suggested emojis" the Unicode group unveiled in June 2014 [article], however, it has been, and still is, up to the companies who support emoji in their operating systems to provide not only images but also an algorithm to replace the emoji code into the emoji image.
