The answer came from one of my buddies at MacGeekGab. It is red because of a setting in Accessibility. If you look in Settings-->Accessibility-->Display & Text Size, there is a setting "Increase Contrast". See if that is enabled. If it is, and you don't want that, turn it off. Then the Airplane Mode icon will go back to orange.
thumbs96 wrote:
We recently completed our iOS updates. And now one of our phones show a red airplane button and the other phone has the standard orange button. When in use. Trying to figure out why?