Question about civil registrations French military airplanes
In the latest Scramble I read something about civil registrations used by French military airplanes: Rafale F-SD.., Mirage 2000-5F F-UG.. After a few hours searching the internet I cannot find much more on this subject.
Is there someone out here who can help me with getting an overview of which planes or helicopters (army, air force, navy) are using which civil registrations? Any help is more then welcome.
In principle, all French military planes have a secundary civil registration. Always comes in handy in the case of diplomatic clearance for overflying -or routing to- "difficult" countries, or when operating in/from a mainly civil environment, such as an airport in the case of Gendarmerie/Securite Civile. The registration consists (obviously) of the F- prefix, followed by two (or three) letters that are specific to a type or a unit and two (or one) that are specific to an individual plane. For instance, the F-ZB** range is used by the Douane and the Securite Civile, the F-MJ** range is used by the Gendarmerie and the F-TER* range by Alpha Jets of the Patrouille de France. In all cases, 2- or 3-letter codes displayed on aircraft are (the final) part of this semi-civil registration, as in "113-KH" for a M2000 and in "ABU" for a TBM700. The main problem with this is that in practice, the codes (and therefore the registrations) are not necessarily unique to the individual aircraft. We all know that especially the fighters change a lot between different units and between codes within the same unit. That means that their semi-civil registration also changes at that time. That makes it almost impossible to use as an identification tool. "113-KH" might relate to M2000 no.98 one week and to no.103 a week later following overhaul. Another great example of this practice was seen at Phalsbourg this weekend: Up to now, all helo's of 1RHC had codes (and therefore registrations) in the F-MC** range; at present, they are all being recoded with Gazelles taking up the F-*G** range and the Pumas the F-*D** range.
Finally, your list is not complete as you can see when measuring it against the codes known (see MASR/Scramble Military Serials etc). See the Tigre at Phalsbourg with (F-M)BHG code; also, the Extra EA330's delivered so far use the F-TGC*-range, not F-GC**.
Frank ,Albert,
I also got re-interested by the news in the last Scramble issue.
It's a complicated system, what i can add so far is found below:
I'll start with the Navy :
F-X*** have always been operational Flotile and F-Y*** have allways been training or other liasionflights, this still seems to work out nowadays.
F-XCA* Lynx 31F
F-XCB* Sa321G 32F
F-XCD* E2C 4F Not sure about this one.
F-XCG* Sa365N 35F
F-XCH* As565MA 36F
F-XCK* Super Etendard 11F
F-XCL* Rafale 12F Not Sure
F-XCQ* Super Etendard 17F
F-XCU* ATL2 21F
F-XCW* ATL2 23F
F-XCX* Da50 /E121 24F
F-YCE* ?? DCAN Not sure if they have any aircraft left.
F-YCV* All 3 22S
F-YDT* Da10MER 57S
For the Sa365N and As365 it is known that the callsigns seem to be fixed.
Sa321G's used to have a fixed callsign in the past, i amnot sure if this still is the fact.
For the Lynx, i have a report for a Lynx which had its F-XCA* on a plate in the cockpit, so they might be fixed as well.
For the Da10MER's i found out that the registration is asssigned to a certain pilot, and not the aircraft itselves, this might be correct as for F-YDTD i have allready number 32 and 129.
For the Army you can indeed always add F-M to the code of the aircraft, i don't think they will make fixed callsigns for the Army at all, the recent re-coding at Phalsbourg seems to prove this, they have all been recoded, but again in a certain range which seems to belong to a squadron ,rather then to a specific aircraft.
Airforce will follow later, i still need to look up a lot of stuff.
