Commercial airline call signs
C
Commercial operators, including scheduled airline, air cargo and air taxi operators, will usually use an ICAO or FAA-registered call sign for their company. By ICAO Annex 10 Chapter 5.2.1.7.2.1-
Full call signs type C, a call sign consists out of the telephony designator of the aircraft operating agency, followed by the flight identification.
The flight identification is very often the same as the flight number, but could be different due to call sign confusion, if two or more flights close to each other have similar flight numbers( e. g. KLM649 and KLM645 or BAW466 and BAW646).
For example, British Airways flight 75 would use the call sign Speedbird Seven – Five, since Speedbird is the telephony designator for British Airways and 75 would be the flight identification.( The telephony designator is not the same as the call sign, although the two are sometimes conflated). Pan Am had the telephony designator of Clipper.
For these call signs, proper usage varies by country. In some countries, such as the United States, numbers are spoken normally( for the example above, Speedbird Seventy-five) instead of being spelled out digit by digit, leading to the possibility of confusion.
In most other countries, including the United Kingdom, they are spelled out.
Air taxi operators in the United States sometimes do not have a registered call sign, in which case the prefix T is used, followed by the aircraft registration number( e. g. Tango- November- Niner-Seven-Eight-Charlie-Papa).
Some variations of call signs exist to express safety concerns to all operators and controllers monitoring the transmissions. Aircraft call signs will use the suffix " heavy " for heavy aircraft, to indicate an aircraft that is going to cause significant wake turbulence, e. g. United Two-Five Heavy;
All aircraft capable of operating with a gross take-off weight of more than 136 tonnes. must use this suffix whether or not they are operating at this weight during a particular phase of flight. These are typically Boeing 747, some models of the 757, 777, or 767, Airbus A340, A330, A350 and A300, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 or MD-11, or Lockheed L-1011 aircraft.
A- Z of Flight
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