Tail numbers or Aircraft ID that start with F, G, and I

Peter wrote:

US aviation predates ICAO by some decades

So does European aviation

Jan_Olieslagers wrote:

Doesn’t ICAO impose a minimum of five characters in any registration?

ICAO only imposes the choice of the nationality mark – the first one or two out of the three radio callsign letters allocated to each country by thr International Telecommunications Union. The only deviations are Oman (A4O), Bahrein (A9C) and Laos (RDPL).

The plane registration per se isn’t regulated and is left to each national authority – most countries follow the 5 character practice but not all, Russia doesn’t either for instance. Bahrein uses 3+3 e.g A9C – HMH.

what_next wrote:

I have no source that I can quote, but from these three national registrations I have never seen anything other but four letters following the I-, F- and G- . Just letters, no numbers. So always five characters total as you write and therefore certainly distinguishable from a Canadian four-character registration.

Same here. 5 characters total, all alphabetic.

Peter wrote:

The two-letter ones seem to be followed by three letters (9A=Croatia):

LN (Norway) + 3 alphabetic – 5 characters total
Same for SE (Sweden)

Peter wrote:

The two-letter ones seem to be followed by three letters (9A=Croatia):

SP has six letter callsigns with “S” being the third character for ultralight planes, eg. SP-SZAK. Everything else seems to be 5 letters, eg. SP-ABC, but the third character can, at times, mean something (B for Baloon, Y for an Experimental, eg. SP-YYY).

All G reg aircraft will match the following regular expression and nothing else (with one unusual exception)

G\-[A-Z]{4}

in other words, after the G- there will always be exactly 4 more characters in the range [A-Z].

The unusual exception was Concorde. For a time it was G-N81AC. It was flown domestically in the US for Braniff, and for each arrival in the US, it would be “sold” to Braniff, then the G- would be taped over, and then “sold back” to British Airways when it made the return crossing!

http://www.concordesst.com/history/events/braniff.html

Jan_Olieslagers wrote:

Apart from those you mention, many European countries identify the class of plane through the registration:

Yes. In Norway it is:

LN-G[XX] Gliders and motorgliders
LN-O[XX] Helicopters
LN-Y[XX] Microlights
LN-C[XX] Balloons

The rest are powered airplanes.

Ah, yes, gliders. SP-#### – eg. SP-1234 – just digits allowed.

Peter wrote:

US aviation predates ICAO by some decades

And those of us with the best US registered aircraft have NC registrations, or possibly NR or NX

C = Commercial
R = Restricted
X = Experimental

The first international convention on aircraft registration was in 1919. I think they phased out the second letter In the late forties, a few years after the Chicago Convention of 1944.