Aircraft Rego Prefix - WHY?

[training wheels]

Anyone know how aircraft registration prefixes came about? There doesn't seem to be any logical sequence in how they are derived. For example;

VH - Australia VR - Hong Kong (pre '97) VT - India 9V - Singapore 9N - Nepal 9M - Malaysia PK - Indonesia PH - Dutch N - USA B - China



..... and so on.

I've tried to make a guess as to how some of these came to be, for example;

Could the 9x prefix be those countries colonised by the British at one time or another in their history?

As for PH and PK .... a common factor here being the Dutch influence over Indonesia in their history.

Same reasoning for VH, VT and VR .... but influencing factor here is the British influence in these countries' history.



But as you can see, I really have no idea!!! http://www.pprune.org/ubb/NonCGI/frown.gif

Can anyone shed some light on this?

[Luftwaffle]

Interesting question. I think I'll Waffle about it.

So many of them are natural, Canada, Deutschland, France, Great Britain, and so on down to Zimbabwe, that I imagine the early air powers got the ones they wanted, and countries come later to the table were left with the bones and gristle of the alphabet. The world map has been extensively redrawn since the invention of the airplane.

A flight sim group has a list of current and old prefixes at http://195.207.29.197/db/prefix/ and looking at the old single letter prefixes seems to back up that hypothesis.

Your colonial association guess seems a good one, as most of the French African colonies had F-prefixes before their independence in the '60's, and Australia started as G-AU.

I suspect that the US National and the old Canadian CF had something to do with being named after the military units that had aircraft. Canadian Forces? National Air Force? Some of the other weird ones may make perfect sense in the language of the countries concerned.

[PaperTiger]

Personally I wouldn't classify Zimbabwe as an early air power :), but you are correct the 'good' prefixes were allocated to the major countries following WWI. No idea why the US took 'N'.
The scheme of a single-letter prefix was somewhat short sighted, and in 1929 the allocations were revised after it was discovered there were actually more than 26 countries. The new scheme added 2-character prefixes and all Vx were reserved for the (ahem) British Empire.

Since the formation of the United Nations, the prefix allocations have been coordinated (more or less) with radio call-signs. This explains why 'new' countries don't get sensible prefixes which you might think are available, but in fact are not.
A list of these radio prefixes is at http://www.qsl.net/sars/country.htm and a history of all the aircraft prefixes at http://umcc.ais.org/~schnars/aero/cont-reg.htm . (This one has some errors and a bit of guesswork, but interesting nonetheless IMO).

[This message has been edited by PaperTiger (edited 19 May 2001).]

[This message has been edited by PaperTiger (edited 19 May 2001).]

[Boss Raptor]

I believe they were originally derived from internationally recognised radio station prefixes...if you look at ham radio id's they all are prefixed by the appropriate country letter/s. Some are new and some have been altered over the years but most still equate to this original link...just as PT states...

North America used to use 'NC' I think before WW2...

[This message has been edited by Boss Raptor (edited 19 May 2001).]

[foghorn]

I have a theory that Holland took the Philips radio callsign and so became PH-.

Anyone know if this is true?

[chiglet]

BR,
I know that all airfields in Canada's 4 letter ICAO system derives from their locator/ident radio beacons [YYZ became CYYZ] etc

[dv8]

I thought the Americans took N for Number only later did they add letters
Only a guess http://www.pprune.org/ubb/NonCGI/confused.gif
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don't dv8

[This message has been edited by dv8 (edited 19 May 2001).]

[PaperTiger]

"North America used to use 'NC' I think before WW2... "

And for a while after. The letter following the N denoted the type of license.
NX = experimental (prototypes etc.)
NR = restricted (seen on racers)
NL = limited (not widely used - mainly ex-military)
NC = don't know ('commercial' has been suggested but it was applicable to all private aircraft as far as I can tell).

They stopped using them late 40's I think, but these suffixes are still allowed on restored aircraft.

And the 3-char Canadian airport codes were themselves allegedly derived by prefixing the CP Railway telegraph city id with a Y.

[TR4A]

1912 LONDON CONVENTION AND 1912 RADIO ACT

The U.S. Congress finally passed a comprehensive Act to Regulate Radio Communication, which was signed by President Taft on August 13, 1912, and went into effect December 13, 1912. Officially this new law implemented provisions of the 1906 Berlin Convention. However, a new International Radiotelegraphic Convention had been signed in London on July 5, 1912, to become effective July 1, 1913, and the new U.S. law included many provisions which actually reflected standards of the soon-to-be ratified London Convention, most importantly the requirement that most radio stations had to be licenced, plus the provision that radio operators now had to quality for operator's licences, not just certification. A number of publications were issued as the Bureau of Navigation worked to implement its new responsibilities under the 1912 radio act, including:

Radio Call Letters: Edition May 9, 1913. (This was the only version of this document, as subsequent call letter policies were reported in the annual Radio Stations of the United States, beginning with its first issue of July 1, 1913.)

http://www.ipass.net/~whitetho/1913call.htm for a listing of all call

C = Standard,
L = Limited,
R = Restricted,
X = eXperimental.

[PaperTiger]

dv8

For a very short period after the first set of national allocations, the US reggies looked just like everyone else's. A dash and four letters N-ABNA. I guess they then decided this wasn't you know, different enough.

And since we have descended into the really obscure, Ian Fleming was unaware of this change some 40 years later and has a pilot in one of his books calling "N-AKOI". I have absolutely no idea why I remember this, but there you are :)