RAF Display Callsigns?

[GLIDER 90]

Over the years with RAF aircraft going abroad & in the UK appearing at airshows and doing displays. Did they use the callsign they had flown in on or did they use their aircraft type?

[dook]

I always used my aircraft type. In a busy RT environment there was never confusion.

[GLIDER 90]

That makes sense especially if you were displaying at Fairford.

[nipva]

I agree with Dook. As an ex display director anything other than type callsigns would have been very confusing. When Lightning/Jaguar/Tornado etc called 'running in' at least you immediately knew what was going to emerge from behind the chimneys/over the hill/out of the murk without having to hurriedly convert an alphanumeric callsign from one's notes.Moreover the other a/c on frequency knew too..

[pr00ne]

Must be a tad confusing now when the call "F-16 running in" is made, nearly as confusing as the call "F-104 running in" made in the 70's, WHICH F-104? There were a LOT of 'em!

[chevvron]

Originally Posted by nipva

I agree with Dook. As an ex display director anything other than type callsigns would have been very confusing. When Lightning/Jaguar/Tornado etc called 'running in' at least you immediately knew what was going to emerge from behind the chimneys/over the hill/out of the murk without having to hurriedly convert an alphanumeric callsign from one's notes.Moreover the other a/c on frequency knew too..

That's the way we do it at Farnborough too, however there is the odd case where the AOCs display approval requires the pilot to use a 'standard' callsign so we allow that, especially if there is another aircraft of the same type displaying in the same display.

[nipva]

There were a LOT of 'em!
Yes there were but rarely more than one singleton per event. For my part I would only book one F104/F16 per display day so the question of duplication never arose. In the heady days of the F104 one might have a singleton F104 display as well as a team - the highly entertaining Slivers from Belgium spring to mind and that is the c/s they used.

[golfbananajam]

From memory when operating my old flying club's A/G radio, I only ever used "Red Arrows" to/from them (sadly only while they were in transit, courtesy call to let us know they were there really). BBMF a/c usually called initially as BBMF-type following which we would shorten it to type only (eg initial call BBMF Spitfire, reduced to Spitfire). I seem to recall the Vulcan only ever called us as Vulcan too. Used to get a privately owned Mustang that called up as Mustang-full reg which we then shortened to Mustang after the initial call.


All from memory, don''t do the A/G stuff anymore.

[dook]

I once did a display where there were two of us flying the same type (it was a prestigious competition).

It was arranged with the display director and ATC that we would use the callsigns xxxxONE and xxxxTWO.

Again no confusion.

Seemples..

[Pontius Navigator]

On one display we had 12 Spitfires.

[dook]

Not so seemples.

Do tell us then.