Northeast-Pointing Airplane refers to a proposed directional variant of the airplane emoji discussed informally during the mid‑2010s wave of emoji expansion. The idea was to show a jet angled up and to the right to indicate takeoff, heading out, or a flight path toward the northeast on maps. It was floated in community wishlists and design mockups, and occasionally mentioned in broader Unicode discussions about directional variants, but it was never approved as an official emoji. Supporters argued it could capture the feeling of departure, momentum, or “onwards and upwards” better than the neutral right-facing airplane. It also fit internet and meme contexts where “up and to the right” symbolizes growth, success, or bullish energy.
In concept art, a likely rendering would resemble the existing platform airplanes—white or light gray fuselage, blue tailfin, dark cockpit windows—rotated roughly 45 degrees with a slight nose-up attitude and maybe a faint contrail. On iOS-style mockups, designers pictured a clean, lightly shaded silhouette to match Apple’s emoji set, while Android-style sketches leaned flatter with bold outlines to keep the diagonal readable at small sizes. The concept did not advance largely because Unicode tends to avoid encoding rotated or directional duplicates that would balloon the set, expecting authors to convey direction with context, arrows, or animation instead. As a result, users kept relying on the regular airplane emoji alongside arrow emojis, stickers, or rotated artwork to suggest takeoff, NE routes, or that classic “graph going up” vibe.
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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.
