So much for plan A.
When it came time to apply the Southern Skies decals I discovered they didn't fit. With a bit of testing I found that the tail decals are around 15 per cent bigger than they should be. (Either that or the kit is smaller than it should be.) So I spent a goodly portion of this afternoon scanning and resizing them and deleting the blue backing colour. Here's the end result of my struggles.
Having done all that, the decals fitted very nicely but bear no resemblance to the tail markings on a Skywest Fokker 50. The blue is far too dark and the white of the sunburst has disappeared. I'm sure some genius modeller could resolve these problems, but it ain't me. Next time you see this is will have a white tail again with Virgin written on it, which is okay because that's what happened to the real thing.
I have Southern Skies decals for Skywest Fokker 100s and Airbus A.320s, and I will be very annoyed if they prove to be as useless as this decal sheet was.