Whilst recognising the need for anonymity in the report, it may have been useful to see if there was any similarity between the callsigns for these two aircraft.
Frequently I hear ATC instruct for example "BirdSpeed 231 ... " followed by "BirdSpeed 321 ..."
If the two companies alluded to earlier are the ones concerned they use a mixture of numeric & alpha numeric callsigns.
Also I'm not sure if one of the operators (if the hypothesis is true) readback method of callsign preceding the confirmation of understanding of the instruction causes any confusion to:
a) ATC
b) Other aircraft in the vicinity.
When this is heard on R/T it is almost as though it is a confirmation that because the callsign comes before the instruction it is deemed as a matter of fact that the instruction has been understood as the callsign was returned correctly. Well, my simple brain hears it like that!
Last edited by ROSUN; 22nd Oct 2013 at 10:05.
Reason: kant spell korrectly