One of the questions we’re often asked is what the registration numbers painted on aircraft bodies mean, and what they tell us about an aircraft.

Like any vehicle, an aircraft must be registered, but unlike a car, the logic behind aircraft registration is partly based on international rather than national rules.

PS: If you read to the end, you’ll understand how it is possible to register SEA, SEX & SUN aircraft.

Aircraft registration is governed by international rules.

The requirement for aircraft to be registered was laid down by the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) in the 1944 Chicago Convention, which was the organization’s baptism.

Initially, the Chicago Convention only stipulated that each aircraft must bear a “nationality mark”, and it wasn’t until 1949 that the rules for formatting this registration were specified. Dans cet article nous allons nous concentrer sur l’aviation civile, l’aviation militaire ayant des règles spécifiques.

Registration is therefore a sequence of characters:

• The first corresponds to the country code
• The following is a code composed of numbers and/or letters assigned by the country according to its own rules
• To avoid confusion, if the country code begins with a letter, it must be separated from the country code by a hyphen.

Under these rules, the registration of a French aircraft could look like F-HTYA (which is Air France’s 1st A350), and that of an American aircraft like N302DU (which is a Delta Airlines A220).

As for the country codes, the list is too long to publish here. Just specify the ones you are likely to see most often:

On the face of it, it’s simple, but in practice there are still a few subtleties that can “lose” the observant passenger.

An aircraft is not always registered in the country of its airline.

All French airline aircraft are registered F-XXXX, so there’s no problem there. But how come you’ll see a lot of Alitalia or Aeroflot aircraft with foreign registrations, such as Ireland (EI).

Why ? Because some countries, such as Ireland and Bermuda, offer very attractive tax advantages for the owners of these aircrafts. So why don’t French airlines take advantage of this windfall and register their aircraft in Ireland?

France has specific regulations stipulating that any airline with a French air operator’s certificate must register its aircraft in France. So too bad for Air France, Corsair and other Air Caraibes: their planes will be registered in France.

But that’s not such a big handicap. To register an aircraft in Ireland, the airline operating the aircraft must also be Irish, which means that a local subsidiary has to be set up. And while taxation in Ireland and elsewhere is favorable to owners, it should not be forgotten that many airlines do not own their aircraft.

Tax havens….only for aircraft owners

Indeed, some of Airbus and Boeing’s biggest customers include businesses with obscure names you’ve never heard of. They buy aircraft to lease to airlines. Better still, they sometimes even buy aircraft from airlines and then lease them back.

Today, more than half of all commercial aircraft are owned by such lessors. While Ryanair owns all its aircraft, before the crisis Air France owned just 40% and Alitalia 10%. Half of Emirates’ A380s are also leased.

If tax havens are a haven for lessors, they are of little interest to “lessees” who are content to operate the aircraft under their colors.

Friendly countries for unhealthy airlines

So why set up a subsidiary to register aircraft in Ireland? The Cape Town Convention protects aircraft owners against the difficulties of their lessees, making it “easy” for them to recover their property. It’s as if an apartment owner could easily evict a delinquent tenant.

Imagine, then, that a lessor leases an aircraft from an airline, and the airline has payment difficulties. His worst fear is that his equipment will be immobilized, that he will no longer receive his rent, and that he will not be able to reclaim his property.

So, on its own initiative if it owns its aircraft, or under pressure from the lessor if it leases them, an airline of dubious health has every interest in registering its aircraft in a country that has ratified this convention! What’s more, there’s a good chance that if it doesn’t do so, not only will no one lease aircraft to it again, but its current lessors will try to get theirs back as quickly as possible.

If the European Union has ratified the convention, some of its provisions must then be ratified on a state-by-state basis, something that France, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany have not yet done, unlike Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, etc. ….

To find out who owns a French-registered aircraft, simply visit the DGAC website.

And for those interested in safety, since the country of registration is responsible for checking the airworthiness of the aircraft, how do these countries check thousands of planes? Well, they don’t, and transfer this responsibility to the country of the operating airline.

So much for the choice of country of registration, but that’s only part of the registration process. What about the rest?

As the rules differ from country to country, we’ll take a look at what happens in France.

Aircraft registration rules in France

The commercial aircraft you’ll be flying on will have registrations starting with F-B, F-G F-H and F-O.

For your information, vintage aircraft will be registered F-A, gliders F-C, microlights F-J, those based outside mainland France F-O, and aircraft undergoing tests or not yet delivered to their owners F-W.

What’s next? The DGAC assigns the other letters, but the airline can “reserve registration marks”, i.e. apply for the last two letters of its choice.

While Air France is very conservative on the subject, others are trying to be more creative!

Music, sunny destinations, SEA SEX & SUN

Yes, we’re wise at Air France, unless you believe that they decided to register a Boeing 747 F-GITA with the intuition that it would end up in a lagoon after running off the runway in Tahiti, thus earning the sobriquet GITANIC.

But Corsair loves music! In fact, its A330s and A330-Neo are registered as F-HJAZ, F-HROK and F-HRNB, among others.

Air Caraïbes likes to refer to the sunny destinations it serves. So you can fly F-HPUJ (PUJ=airport code for Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic), F-OFDF (FDF=Fort de France), F-HAPTP (PTP=Pointe-à-Pitre, not to be confused with PPT, which stands for Papeete in Tahiti), F-HHAV (HAV=Havana in Cuba) or, even stronger, in honor of its base, F-.ORLY (the irony being that, as mentioned above, to register an ORLY aircraft, its base must not be in mainland France, but overseas).

But it will never match what Corsair achieved in the 2000s with three B747s, respectively registered F-HSEA, F-HSEX and F-HSUN.

And that’s it!

Image : Thai Airways plane registration by Heffalum via Shutterstcok

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