Originally Posted by
Snakecharma
Have you considered that the ground station is identifying themselves?
They are Virgin Sydney not Velocity Sydney. Similarly contracted airlines call Qantas Sydney if they use Qantas for ground handling. If you are talking licensing regs I assume you mean Part 61?
As far as licensing is concerned I don't know if ground people require a flight radiotelephony licence - they used to if I remember correctly but not sure these days - but they could call themselves "Big Sky base" if they wanted
Yes... Qantas say "QANTAS TWO-NINER this is QANTAS SYDNEY". They do that because Qantas' ICAO callsign is Qantas. British Airways' is Speedbird and they don't say in London "BA London this is Speedbird Eleven" they say "Speedbird London". Carriers who are handled by Qantas call Qantas Sydney because that's what their route manual tells them to do because the handling is by Qantas and no one is going to answer if they use their own company callsign because there's no one there to answer. Every airline I'm aware of that calls it's own company groundstations uses it's ICAO call sign except VA. If there's a process to obtain callsigns and VS has "Virgin" but VA is allowed to use it, what is the point of getting callsigns and registering them in the first place, why not just use whatever they want???
And no, Part 64 CASR covers licensing for Radio Operators but I don't think it covers callsigns.