Letters after airline callsigns

Bernoulli Fan

Bernoulli Fan

Controller
Hey guys,

I was riding in the back of a United 75 last night and listening to Channel 9. I heard several airliners call in with letters after their callsign, including ours.

F9 228A
UA 12T
UA 938T
UA 766K

I am pretty sure we had a transponder with altitude encoding, so I am assuming these are not equipment suffixes. Any 121 guys care to elucidate? The Frontier guys even got their A dropped after getting something in the computer I couldn't quite catch.
 
It's usually after you've gotten delayed a long time, and there's another airplane out there with your same callsign. They just tack a letter on the end to make it clear who's who.
 
The most common is A. However, I have been told that ATC really doesn't like it and is cracking down on it. Our dispatchers were forced to change our call sign a time or two already from an 123A to a new number not currently in the system.
 
Air Wisconsin comes into ORF more often than not with an A appended to their callsign.

AWI581A
AWI597A
AWI603A
AWI71A
AWI85A
AWI881A
AWI91A

Being that this happens on a daily basis, I don't think it's because of delays.
 
Well, at Airnet, if I had to add an alternate or make some other changes to a canned flight plan I'd typically add a letter of some sort when filing the new flight plan so that when I'd call for clearance I'd get the right one. I did it more out of convenience to make sure I didn't screw up the routing and get the wires crossed with ATC.

I think one time I had clearance change my callsign to USCxxxA when xxx was delayed getting in and I was covering the outbound flight. But I'm sure tha happens more at the "airline" level than in 135 cargo.

Now I've got two letters at the end of my callsign...boy does that confuse some of the ATC folks!

-mini
 
Can't say for other airlines but at DAL, when you hear that, it means the domestic leg of a flight number has been delayed and that it will be in the air at the same time as the international leg.
 
Good stuff. Now that the only good airline (Midwest) has closed its doors (hey, they gave me warm cookies!), channel 9 is about the best thing going in the land of 22" seat pitch if you're a pilot.
 
Bernoulli Fan said:
Good stuff. Now that the only good airline (Midwest) has closed its doors (hey, they gave me warm cookies!), channel 9 is about the best thing going in the land of 22" seat pitch if you're a pilot.
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With all of the guys flying around right now missing handoffs and having to be called on 121.5 (trust me, that's what happens, A LOT, up there majors and regionals, at least once a leg for my last several trips)...... I would be laugh a little inside if a United crew did it while channel 9 was active.
 
cencal83406 said:
With all of the guys flying around right now missing handoffs and having to be called on 121.5 (trust me, that's what happens, A LOT, up there majors and regionals, at least once a leg for my last several trips)...... I would be laugh a little inside if a United crew did it while channel 9 was active.
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You're on guard.
 
cencal83406 said:
With all of the guys flying around right now missing handoffs and having to be called on 121.5 (trust me, that's what happens, A LOT, up there majors and regionals, at least once a leg for my last several trips)...... I would be laugh a little inside if a United crew did it while channel 9 was active.
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I was actually thinking about that this morning. What if all airlines had channel 9? You think a jumpseater or other pilot on NW188 might have said something if he noticed the wrong freq readback and then nothing for an hour and a half?
 
There are some carriers like Lufthansa, and British Airways who use letters in their callsign on a daily basis.

For example we see BAW5CA everyday
 
Callsigns

Why is it that recently i've noticed a lot of airlines have been adding letters (i.e. United 25T)?
 
Re: Callsigns

Probably because there's another flight somewhere in the air using the same flight number (maybe because of a delay) and they need a differentiator. E.G. there's a thru flight on AwesomeAir 222 from LAX-MIA with a stop in DFW, but there's a plane/crew swap in DFW. The LAX-DFW segment was running late but the DFW-MIA flight took off on time anyway. So now you get AwesomeAir 222 and AwesomeAir 222A. Of course, my airline doesn't do this so I could be way off, but that's the way I understand it.
 
Happens pretty often at United since the vast majority of their thru flights don't actually use the same plane. UA863 flies HKG-SFO-SLC. Its a 744 from HKG then an A319 to SLC, its very common for the SLC flight to be UA863L or 863T since UA863 is still in the air on its way to SFO.
 
Bernoulli Fan said:
I was actually thinking about that this morning. What if all airlines had channel 9? You think a jumpseater or other pilot on NW188 might have said something if he noticed the wrong freq readback and then nothing for an hour and a half?
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Probably not, for two reasons. There probably was radio chatter on whatever wrong channel they were on, or the pilots would have been saying what's going on. Second, even if a passenger did notice, who's going to listen to them? The flight attendant? maybe. The pilots? not likely, IF the FA told them about it.

Pax: sir/ma'am, i was listening to ch 9 and there hasn't been anything on the radio for a while.
FA: well, the pilots probably just turned it off for some reason.
Pax: could you see about getting it back on?
FA: I'll see what I can do.
[FA promptly heads up front, waits a few minutes, and comes back with some lame excuse about the situation]
 
cencal83406 said:
With all of the guys flying around right now missing handoffs and having to be called on 121.5 (trust me, that's what happens, A LOT, up there majors and regionals, at least once a leg for my last several trips)...... I would be laugh a little inside if a United crew did it while channel 9 was active.
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My guess is only Comm 1 transmits on channel 9. So whatevers happnes on guard which is normally on Comm 2 ( at least in my plane), the pax listening in the back will never hear it.
 
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