Originally Posted by
WHBM
The Australians have run out, not surprisingly, of 3-letter registrations, despite some fairly constant reuse over time. The new Qantas fleet of Airbus A220s go up from VH-X4A, and they seem to have started using number digits in all the positions, somewhat at random.
The system has been in use for just over a year now. Here's the CASA announcement:
Aircraft registration marks in Australia are changing to include a new alphanumeric system. The first release of 1500 new marks will be available from Friday 23 September 2022. Initially, the new marks will only start with an X or 8, for example VH-8AB, VHX9B, VH-X22. Marks will not contain the numbers "0" or "1" to avoid conflict with these numbers and letters. They also must contain a mix of alphanumeric characters - they cannot contain only numbers. The full complement of marks will be made available when our digital systems are more developed and able to manage large numbers of alphanumeric marks.