Ah, Air Anglia. A wonderful company. Despite morphing into AirUK, KLMuk and finally having a loco offshoot called buzz was still a good outfit, good enough for me to stay with them 24 years. I only quit when a certain Irish airline took over buzz. buzz (with a lower-case "b") was never used as a callsign, the flights still operating as "UK".

Cobham = Flight Refuelling Ltd = Tarrant Rushton airfield (until they moved all their operation to Bournemouth in the mid/late '70s.)
The company has nothing to do with the town of that name where Chelsea (yeuk) have their training base but is named after Sir Alan Cobham who did so much to imbue 'air mindedness' in the country in the '30s with his 'National Aviation Day' tours.
They had previously operated various types from Bournemouth (eg Scimitars in the late '60s when I was attending the College of ATC on my initial assistants course).

Thread creep:
Female controller to Luton inbound: 'can I turn you on at 4 miles?'



(There's no answer to that)

Didn't the Braniff B747 call ex EGKK use Big "Oh" 1? It was painted totally orange.

The Braniff 747 was nick-named Big Orange, I can't remember them using that for a callsign though. Seem to recall advertising in the UK press before they started the service "Big Orange is Coming to London" or some such!

chevvron,

Not really on thread but I thought that the Scimitars at Bournemouth were operated by Airworks who provided the same Fleet Requirements Unit for the Navy as Cobham do now, especially on Thursdays. They also operated Canberras and Hunters but I can't remember what their call sign was although I used to share the same bit of sky. Throughout the 60's Flight Refuelling only operated from Tarrant Rushton, mainly on drone development using Meteors and then the Vixen.

In the early 70s didn't some bit of BA use Sovereign?

In the USA, Trans State Airlines (a feeder for United and American) uses the callsign "Waterski". Other feeders: PSA Airlines; "Blue Streak" and Expressjet; "Acey", GoJet; "Lindbergh".

I think you're correct. Even as I pressed 'Submit' I had my doubts.
FR moved to Bournemouth en-masse after 1974 because Tarrant Rushton used 122.5 in '74/'75 and when I started at Farnborough this was also Farnborough VHF Approach frequency, shared with Tarrant, Andover, Weston Super Mare and Bitteswell. Course it became Farnborough Tower in '75ish when we got 125.250 for Approach/LARS, the recievers were in a different place so we didn't get interference from the other stations.

One of the funniest ones that I can remember was Arrow Air at Miami. We used "Arrow" as a callsign but the FAA objected on the basis that it sounded too like "Aero" (which it does with an American accent).

So, we had a competition and the winning submission was "BIG A" for that was what was painted on the tail of all the aircraft and no one else in the world was ever going to use that callsign!

The winner, who was a 707 F/O I think, either got $100 or a "letter of thanks" from George.

Another one that I got involved with was "Watchdog". When I was "between jobs" I helped an ex-RAF mate out by flying a Do-228 out of EDI for the Scottish Fisheries Department.

We were "Watchdog Delta" regardless of who was flying the flight.

Ah Yes, before the Do228 I remember the old Fisheries Patrol Islanders coming into Newcastle, for fuel presumably, calling up as 'Watchdog'.

Incidentally, when we started TNT (Air Foyle) in 1987, the callsign was "Nitro".

When we moved on to the Belgian register in 2000, it was decided by the wheels (that sat in their offices and never had to use it) that we were to use "Quality".

The wet-lease and associated companies (such as Panair) continued to use "Nitro".

“Nitro” NTR dates from 1993-ish, around the time TNT dropped PIK for EDI. They used “Foyle” UPA from 1987 up til then. The Pan Air leased pilots called as “ You-pee-ay”!

I bow to your superior knowledge. I was on the first course at Hatfield in 1987 and retired 19 years later.

Maersk Air UK used 'Bluestar'. Those of a superstitious nature connected it to the White Star Line and thought the worst.

The Belgium TNT operation used the call sign "Qualitay" as their three letter code was TAY.
I did some contract work for TNT with Channel Express (Channex) and we would be "Nitro" from STN to LGG and "Qualitay" from LGG to BGY or other European destinations.

"Channex" call sign used to be "Express Air" (As it used to be Express Air Transport), but this got confused with Air Europe Express so was changed.
Soon after the change, Air Europe went bust so the change was a waste of time.

I can't remember the Airwork call signs at Hurn in the '60s but I do recall the BAC 1-11 test flight call signs were "Lima 22" or another number, as each test pilot had his own number.

They just called "Braniff". The flight number DFW-LGW was BN602 IIRC. They started with one 747 in 1971 (which was dedicated to the Dallas-Honolulu route) but then added more as the network expanded to the UK and Continental Europe.

RAF canberras used to use "mothball" when taking part in the Thursday war in Lyme Bay, maybe a homage to their age?

A good chuckle reading this thread.

Yes, Bealine is still used by the BA maintenance tugs at Heathrow - not uncommon to hear "Bealine Papa Echo" or similar requesting a re-position of an evening. Luckily for the residents nearby, it's an A319 going for maintenance nowadays instead of a Trident 1 going for engine runs.

Trying to choose an acceptable callsign which remains available for a new airline isn't easy. I seem to recall we tried everything we could think of to inject some humour but failed miserably.

"Thunderbird" was already taken by an airline in Canada. Our aim to generate a laugh every time by calling for push-start as "Thunderbird One" failed miserably.

Next request was for "Nighthawk" as a run of faux-French accents calling 'allo 'allo to London would have brightened up the morning. That was a no-go too, for reasons I can't recall.

We tried all sorts and by a process of elimination ended up with something so mundane that I now can't even remember what it was. Efforts to brighten up the airwaves well and truly grounded.

On a similar vein to previous post.

A tug (s) at Birmingham UK, still uses the “Monarch” callsign when moving aircraft from / to their hangar.