During the 1960 period a major change came about with aircraft of the R.A.F Training commands which extended to the Home commands,how this came about was as follows-
With the increase in the numbers of training aircraft and also some low level flying accidents,which involved collisions between civil & military aircraft experiments were undertaken with a new revolutionery type of paint,this was a flourescent finish which glowed in daylight and gave a whole new meaning to bright aircraft finishes,initially the paint was used on aircraft of the Minisrty of Transport & civil aviation on their Percival Prince & Dove aircraft,it consisted of a white primer basecoat with a top coat of powerful flourescing ( in nature a flower glows at night and is said to flouresch ) orange paint,many technical problems had to be overcome initially in the application of this special paint which also had a drawback in being much heavier than normal paint finishes in use at that time,eventually after advice and the tests with the MTCA aircraft the R.A.F adopted a bright orange dayglo paint which was sprayed on the nose,tail and wingtips in panels.After a short while in servive the paint would fade very badly and looked very tatty as it showed the white undercoat as faded patches,to this end the 3M company developed a unique peel off film that could be applied in selected panels between the rivet lines of aircraft structures ( see the Varsity picture above ) this dayglo was called 'Scotchcowl' and was a brighter more reddish shade than the original yellow flourescent finish used.Whilst not fading quite as quickly it proved difficult to remove when required on major overhauls and became very brittle due to the suns rays drying out the plastic based finish. Whilst this finish was proved to be visible especially in poor weather conditions it was eventually phased out in favour of a bright red paint applied against a light aircraft grey ground on R.A.F training command aircraft,this again was abandoned and a all gloss black finish was used,further tests have proven that black is the most visible colour at any given distance,the theory behind this is that an aircraft quickly becomes all black anyway against many different backdrops.This idea has quickly spread to low flying civil helicopters,many of which are now painted overall black.
XM378 Jet Provost above has the painted dayglo finish,whilst the one below it XS186 has Scotchcowl stick on adhesive panels between the rivets.
The Air Navigation school Vickers Varsity below from R.A.F Gaydon in Warwickshire also has this type of finish applied in selected tedious panels,a job which proved unpopular with groundcrew given the task in hand !