After an airline accident why does the airline operator white out the titles?

After an airline accident where the aircraft is still intact, why do the airline operators white the titles out? My first reaction is that they don't want other people to see the "distressed" aircraft but I wanted to know if there was any other reason or if they were required to do it. Just recently with the British Airways 777, they whited the titles out but they left the paint on the tail.

As bad as it is for any airline to have a crash or accident, often for days and weeks the aircraft has to sit at the site during the investigation. It's like a huge negative billboard sitting at or near the airport. It's no surprise that the airline would choose to "white tail" the aircraft to avoid as much as possible any negative publicity.

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http://www.airdisaster.com/photos/ci642/1.jpg

What would you think if you were a passenger sitting on the right side of the plane?

Ive seen them all do this for image is the main reason to keep press and people from worrying and getting bad publicity,,, and when they are put out in mothballs in the desrt they will do the same,,, U was looking at some 727,s for sale and even thought the tiles were gone i could still tell by the paint scheme it was a delta

Seemed pretty pointless to white out the name on the 777 at Heathrow because it was in all the newspapers and on the TV.

Because it gives the airline a bad image if there is a crashed aircraft with their name on it.

It's simply a question of ethics. Anonymizing the subject of your investigations makes sure that you can control information leaking out to 'public opinion', before the results are released.

This way, you protect your 'subject' (all the stakeholders involved in the accident) from public opinion which most of the time tends to be biased anyway.

But as you saw, its very hard to correctly anonymize something as salient as an aircraft, namely with all the leaks common to any real-world setting.