Originally Posted by
Chris Scott
I spent a fair amount of time flogging up and down between the UK and East Africa in the 1970s. Sorry to challenge the consensus, but I'm fairly sure EAAC's long-haul flights (Super VC10s by then) used "East African" as the callsign. Knowing pilots, "East Aff" would be a tolerable abbreviation for short-haul flights (DC-9s, F27s) on VHF, but it would not come over with sufficient clarity on HF R/T.
One person Jhieminga might be able to contact for a definitive answer would be Gerry Surley (sorry, not sure of the spelling!), who performed engine runs on his former mount at Dunsfold last August.
BTW, if memory serves EAAC's station ops R/T callsign was "Eastair": e.g., "Eastair Nairobi."
It took me a while and I ended up asking another ex-EAA captain, but here's the answer:
The official VHF callsign was East African for the airline with a 3 number code suffixed by 0 for the Dakotas, 3 for the Friendships, 9 for the DC-9's and 6 for the SVC-10's. The second figure in the SVC-10 callsign was the day of the week, starting Monday and all other numbers on every fleet were whatever marketing dreamt up for the final two numbers.
I think almost without exception we all used East African on the initial call then abreviated it to Eastaf subsequently. Occasionally there would be a misunderstanding whilst non East African Airways aircraft were calling Nairobi, as the ATC Centre callsign was Eastair Centre frequently abbreviated to just Eastair.
With regards to HF, it was rarely used on the domestic fleets although the aircraft were all equipped with it as far as I remember. With the SVC-10's we used SSB to call base at Nairobi and also mainly Bombay and Karachi, but in general most of us didn't bother. Again the two first paragraphs of this reply would indicate the norm.