Originally Posted by
megan
? Sqd, MW302, "AK"
I believe MW302 spent its entire RAF career at Lyneham with 511 Sqn, before being sold to Hunting-Clan in 1952 but never actually used by them before being broken up at Bovingdon in 1954.
A feature on many of the aircraft is two white letters on a black background on the nose. The first letter identifying the squadron and the second the aircraft eg KY-M would become KM.
I'm not convinced that those two-letter nose codes were related to the WW2-style squadron code. I've seen photos suggesting that for aircraft with fuselage codes the code, if present on the nose at all, would either be reproduced in full (with the hyphen), or consist solely of the last (individual aircraft) letter.
By contrast, the two-letter nose codes ("A_", "C_", etc) that can be seen in photos of 24 and 511 Sqn examples are typically on aircraft that don't have the hyphenated squadron/individual code on the fuselage.
I'm wondering if this was a very early predecessor of the system the RAF used many years later on types as diverse as the Chinook and Tornado, where squadrons were allocated a letter (again starting from the beginning of the alphabet) which were painted on the aircraft along with the individual aircraft code, for example "AB", BH", etc.