August 29, 2023 "A" is for "Airplane"

The Liberty Gazette

August 29, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

“A” is for “Airplane.” So are “N” and “C” and “G” and many other letters. Have you ever noticed letters and numbers on airplanes and wondered what they meant?

Every airplane has an alpha-numerical identification similar to license plates on cars. It’s often called a tail number and is assigned when the airplane is registered to a new owner. When an airplane is new, it must have the number painted on a vertical surface, such as the tail or side of the airplane. 

Like cars, airplanes’ registration numbers help governmental entities tax people more. Unlike cars, when we’re traveling in our airplane, we are identified by air traffic control by our tail number. Scooting along the complex network of highways in the sky, when we press that mic button to communicate with a controller, we don’t say, “This is Linda,” or “This is Mike.” We say November-Two-Six-Niner-Fife-Eight, the correct pronunciation for our tail number. It’s also commonly referred to as a callsign. There’s a whole published glossary for pilot-controller communications for the standardized way in which we talk. But the “November” part of it is to identify the airplane’s home country, the U.S.A. “C” denotes an aircraft registered in Canada, while a “G”-registered airplane comes from Great Britain. This was decided in 1944 during the Chicago Convention of the International Civil Aeronautics Organization, a branch of the United Nations. 

But there were tail numbers before then. The idea came from the use of callsigns by radio operators. All around the world, as early as 1913, radio callsigns began with a letter, followed by four more letters, and each country was assigned its own first letter. This was the first format used in the aviation industry. 

In the U.S., owners can apply for a special letter-number combination of up to five characters after the N, but most airplanes keep the number series assigned to the manufacturer when the airplane was built. If an airplane is de-registered, that N-number can be assigned to another aircraft. 

There may be between two and five characters after the N, but the first of those must be a number between one and nine. There may be up to two letters, but they have to be at the end of the callsign. For instance, John Travolta, who started flying at age 15, has a fleet of a dozen or so jets and other aircraft all of which sport tail numbers ending in “JT”. His Bombardier Challenger 601 is N392JT.

So why an “N” for us? Because the U.S. Navy was the first to use it as an identifier way back in 1909.

Callsigns can also be nicknames. For airliners, these are followed by the flight number. British Airways still uses “Speedbird” from their glory days of the Concorde. UPS used to have the callsign “Brown Tail,” which unfortunately induced much mocking (and which we heard they paid an ad agency a lot of money to come up with). Now they use UPS. More letters for the alphabet soup.

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