TD&H,
What you're saying makes sense if you're on an IFR flight plan. But for an off-airways flight, where you're just free-calling the relevant services, surely you announce yourself as "NewBoy1", and that's the only thing ATC will ever know you as? (Not sure what they'd write on their strip if they didn't happen to know that NewBoy is XBC, but that's their problem, not ours!!!)
I also know of several flying schools with their own callsigns, some of them have AOCs but others I'm 99% sure don't. Maybe they were allocated the callsigns before the change of rules, as 2Donks says. Interesting point, though: most of these schools allocate one callsign to each instructor. Thus the callsign moves from one aircraft to the next as the instructor moves around. And solo students have to revert to the aircraft registration. I'm not a big fan of this - it means that when you send a student solo, you are asking him to do something which he has never done before, i.e. use a completely different call-sign. First solo seems like a bad time to add any extra workload to a student, to me - especially knowing how some students struggle to pick out a call-sign they are familiar with on the r/t, let alone one they've never heard before. I only know of one school which has a call-sign for each aircraft, regardless of who is flying the aircraft. This seems like a better way of doing it, from the student's point of view at least. Would I be right in guessing that the school can basically decide for themselves how they are going to use their callsign?
FFF
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