An anecdote:
When I bought my Aerostar, the guy that taught me to fly it is a very experienced Aerostar guy. He has like 18000hrs on Aerostars alone. In any case, he always called up ATC phonetically (like this with my registration, N79SR):
“Seventy Nine Essss Arrrrr”
Anyone would agree that’s pretty sloppy. But you know what – nobody ever misunderstood it during the week I spent flying with him. Not once. Goes to show that phonetics are easily understood by the brain.
Not really about being a non-pro on the radio, but I always wondered is there any use of adding your aircraft manufacturer & model after your callsign (in typical situations listed in the CAP413/Doc9432) from an ATC point of view? Do they really care about it and wouldn’t it be better to use something generic like “light piston airplane”, considering that there are hundreds of different aircraft?
igor wrote:
Not really about being a non-pro on the radio, but I always wondered is there any use of adding your aircraft manufacturer & model after your callsign (in typical situations listed in the CAP413/Doc9432) from an ATC point of view? Do they really care about it and wouldn’t it be better to use something generic like “light piston airplane”, considering that there are hundreds of different aircraft?
I think there are two aspects here: 1. there is difference between cessna 150 & cessna TTX(aka 400) – one can fly almost 2.5 times faster than the other, and 2. ATC has got to do the paperwork! :) There is an item on a flight strip, so he needs to populate it. I was always questioning the US method – “cessna N12345”. What’s the point? 150 is Cessna as well as Longitude…
Peter wrote:
The problem with saying “to” is that you then must say the “altitude” or “flight level” after it, to make sure it doesn’t get heard as “two” followed directly by some number.
I barely passed my RT exam (BZF 1 or was it two? in Germany) because of that. The examiner gave a clearance climb 2000ft and I read back climb to 1000ft (when departing from 1000ft elevation…) because he pronounced it more like to thousand than two thousand. I was totally confused because I didn’t expect the to but that was what I heard so the second time I read it back in the same way. Only then I started to think about what he said (the clearance continued with something like not below 2000ft) and I replied something that actually made sense. In the end I passed but the examiner told me he has a little bit of doubts to let me fly between the big jets like that.
Clipperstorch wrote:
I passed but the examiner told me he has a little bit of doubts to let me fly between the big jets like that.
Well I wouldnt get too worried about it as long as you know what you need to say and are understood by those on the other end of the radio. But he obviously wasn’t the guy giving out RT/English proficiency to a couple of obviously totally unprepared Ryanair jets’ Pilots that I came across flying into Limoge in 2019, that was truely embarrasing to listen to, such that my non-pilot partner commented on it to me…
arj1 wrote:
I was always questioning the US method – “cessna N12345”. What’s the point? 150 is Cessna as well as Longitude…
Not quite. Over here you use ‘Cessna’ for anything with four cylinders and the designator above that. E.g. a C182 is a Skylane, a C210 a Centurion. ATC will query your type if you only say the tail number.
172driver wrote:
ATC will query your type if you only say the tail number.
Although you could be anything from a Pietenpol Aircamper to some fast pressurised Lancair and you’re just “Experimental (tail-number)” :-)
At non towered fields, having the type (e.g. Cessna, Grumman, Cherokee – for some reason no one says “Piper”, it’s always the major airframe model) is useful because you know then the basic planform of the plane you’re looking for which helps confirm you’ve correctly identified which aircraft is which.
alioth wrote:
you could be anything from a Pietenpol Aircamper to some fast pressurised Lancair and you’re just “Experimental (tail-number)” :-)
Usually people in fast Experimentals add the type. Nobody uses “Experimental Pietenpol” but a lot of people would say “Experimental Lancair” for an initial call to ATC then use whatever the tower replies with (which would typically be Lancair). On CTAF few use “Experimental” at all unless it’s a highly unusual type that nobody on frequency would know, and in that case they might alternately use e.g. “blue and white low wing”
For some reason you hear people saying “Piper Cub 123AB” as though somehow “Cub” isn’t enough 
igor wrote:
is there any use of adding your aircraft manufacturer & model after your callsign
Does anybody know if this is allowed on this side of the atlantic (i.e. in Europe)? I’m not sure but I think that it wasn’t allowed to say e.g. “Skylane D-EWTF” or Baron D-GOSH" or similar. Although the phraseology exists in the official EASA documentation. Additionally, I never heard that usage of callsign here. Or is this allowed nowadays?
