Originally Posted by
WHBM
If you made a major purchase of new aircraft, normally just BOAC/BEA, you could get a block of 26 ending A-Z, but again it would be the very next such block in sequence. The Vanguards were thus all G-APEA and upwards.
Just a couple were skipped. In best civil service tradition, the one which alphabetically followed G-ARSD is blandly described as "Registration Not Allocated".
Since the letter "Q" is not used, any A-Z block would only cover 25 aircraft.
Registrations ending in "VD" were also not issued for many years but policy seems to have been relaxed some time in the late 1990s.