Try to guess: What's the most popular specialty Florida license plate in Escambia County?

Blue Angels specialty license plates have been flying off the shelves.

The license plates featuring an image of soaring blue jets have been available for about a year, but in that relatively short stretch of time, they've been a hit.

At the Blue Angels Pensacola Beach Air Show this weekend, Escambia County Tax Collector Scott Lunsford said that as of Saturday, 5,947 Blue Angels license plates had been sold statewide since their release, making them the 74th most popular of the approximately 130 specialty plates in Florida.

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Locally, the plates climbed the charts even faster.

"We thought it was going to be a big seller in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties, because of the team being based here," Lunsford said.

In just one year, the Blue Angels plates became the No. 1 most common specialty license plate in Escambia County, decorating the tails of 2,656 vehicles.

Lunsford said the Blue Angels plate was the fourth most popular license plate in Santa Rosa County, with 996 having already been sold.

"Of course, the standard plates like FSU or the Gators, alumni are drawn to them, as well as the teams' supporters, but for the plates like the Blue Angels, I think you just have to have a pretty plate," Lunsford said. "I think they just hit a home run with this one."

What makes a Florida specialty license plate so popular?

For many motorists, the standard Florida plate picturing two oranges is a little too vanilla.

"One of the biggest things that sells these specialty plates is just the appeal of the plate visually, and that was one of the things that we talked about all the way through the process with the (Blue Angels) Foundation, is that we get one chance to make it visually appealing and draw people to it," Lunsford said. "We had the Blue Angel fan base, but we wanted it to appeal to other people as well."

The Blue Angels license plate features four of the team's jets souring over a coastline's surf, set against a bright blue sky.

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"There are a number of specialty license plates that sell simply because of their color — they match a car, they match a truck — a lot of them are just picked because of the color and the visional appeal," Lunsford said.

When the Blue Angels plates were released last summer, the Escambia County Tax Collector's office held two special Saturday events for the express purpose of selling the newly released plates, and demand met Lunsford's expectations for what he had assumed would be a popular license plate choice.

"We issued 600 the first Saturday and about a little over 500 the second Saturday," he said.

For most people, it costs about $66 to switch from a standard Florida license plate to one featuring the Blue Angels.

Starting during their second year of ownership, drivers who own a vehicle featuring a Blues plate are required to pay an annual fee of $30 to keep their specialty plate.

About $5 of that goes to the state for manufacturing charges and fees, Lunsford explained, and the other $25 goes to the supporting the Blue Angels Foundation, which uses the funds to support the National Naval Aviation Museum at Naval Air Station Pensacola.

Lunsford was on hand Saturday at the air show, along with his office's Florida License on Wheels Mobile, or "FLOW Mobile," to answer questions that spectators may have had about his office and its services.

The tax collector and his staff spoke with about 70 people at the air show who expressed interest in buying a Blue Angels plate.

"Some of them were like, well, we're buying a car in a month, we're doing this, we're doing that, so they weren't able to buy one on Saturday but are interested in a plate and will probably ask for it when they finish buying their car or whatever they were doing," Lunsford said.

He and his staff actual sold four Blue Angels license plates at the show and twice as many of the sample Blue Angels license plates that people use to decorate the front bumper of their car.

"We didn't have the sample plates available last year at the November shows," Lunsford said Monday. "We sold eight of those sample plates this year at the show, and of course this morning, we've had quite a few calls from more people from other states wanting to know how to get one them."

Colin Warren-Hicks can be reached at colinwarrenhicks@pnj.com or 850-435-8680.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Blue Angels Florida license plate most popular in Escambia County