Spotting (Part 2)

Aircraft spotting. What does it entail? What are the rules? Are there rules? These questions I hope to explain in part two of my occasional series on spotting.

All civil aircraft (I’ll talk about military aircraft in a later blog) will have a registration allocated to it before it is allowed to fly. (I’ll gloss over A-class and B-class registration for the time being as well). The beginning part of the registration will denote which countries civil aviation authority the aircraft is registered with. Aircraft registered with eth Civil Aviation Authority here in the UK will have registration starting with G-. Ones registered in Ireland will start EI-. Aircraft registered with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) in the US will start with a N. A complete list of all the country codes can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_registration. Now the idea of aircraft spotting to try and collect as many registrations as possible.

So what are the rules of the hobby?

Well quite simply, there aren’t that many. Obviously you can’t count aircraft that you haven’t seen. Seeing them on TV doesn’t count. In the old days you used to have to have read the registration yourself to count it. That is something no longer the case. I’ll talk about some of the electronic gadgets we have in a later blog, which makes seeing the registration obsolete.

There are those spotters that the registration isn’t that important to them, so called frame spotters. An aircraft could have many different registrations during its life. A frame spotter will count the first registration they see the aircraft carrying and not worry about any subsequent registrations and they have already seen that airframe. A registration spotter will want to see the aircraft carrying as many different registrations as possible.

Apart from identifying each aircraft individually are there any other reasons for a registration?

Three things I would like to mention here, First is that it denotes which countries aviation authority the aircraft is registered with. Ryanair, being an Irish company, registers all its aircraft in Ireland. The plane will fly under Irish aviation rules. The Russian airline Aeroflot register their aircraft either with the Irish authorities or with the authorities in Bermuda. Again when you fly with them, you fly under the rules of that country.

Secondly, if you own a pilots licence of one country you can only fly aircraft registered in that country, unless there is a reciprocal agreement between the two countries to allow pilots from one country to fly the aircraft of another. So if you have a British licence, you can’t fly and American registered aircraft, as there is no agreement between the two countries.

Lastly, one other quirk of aircraft registrations. Breaking up aircraft for spares is big business. But customers prefer spare parts that have a traceable history especially when it comes to something like an engine. They like to know the paper work for that spare part is in order. The most trusted source of spare parts will come from American registered aircraft. As such spare parts from US registered aircraft will attract a premium. So to maximise their profits, the first thing an aircraft breaker will do when they buy an aircraft for breaking is to registered that aircraft on the US register. This is really a paper exercise as many of the aircraft would have already been grounded before this registration is allocated. So the aircraft would never fly under its US registration but the breakers can advertise the spares as being from a US registered aircraft and thus attract a better selling price.