After playing and reviewing Air Traffic Chaos for the DS, I wanted to get an idea of how close the game comes to real air traffic control. The answer is surprisingly close, for a handheld game. But then I learned something even cooler. From what I gather, each airline has three designators that are used in different contexts.

First, there’s the IATA airline designator. This one is only two letters.¹ As you probably guessed, they ran out of unique IATA codes a long time ago, creating a huge mess. Nonetheless, they still use IATA codes on, say, the arrival/departure board, or your boarding pass. A lot of booking computers are still on the IATA system, too. The IATA sells an ASCII text download of the codes for $3,150. Presumably, the price is so high since they have to employ top-tier ASCII programmers to produce this document every month.

Next, there’s the ICAO airline designator. This is a three-letter code, allowing for 16,000 combinations or so. (“Don’t you mean 17,576 combinations?” you ask, computing the cube of 26 in your head. No, I don’t, because codes beginning with “Y” and “Z,” along with a few others, are reserved for special purposes.) I gather that the ICAO designator is now the standard code used in most airport operations, but I didn’t research it very much because I got too excited by a third, non-boring designator, the telephony designator.

In the Wikipedia article about call signs, I learned that an airplane’s radio call sign, used by flight crew and air traffic controllers, is typically made up of its telephony designator and its flight number. Wikipedia provides this example:

For example, British Airways flight 75 would use the call sign Speedbird Seven-Five (with the last word properly pronounced fife), since Speedbird is the telephony designator for British Airways and 75 would be the flight identification.

“Speedbird 75”? Holy crap, I went into the wrong line of work. I mean, being at the controls of a 777 would be cool enough, but if I’d known you also get to call yourself “Speedbird,” well, that would have been the icing. I’d be a fancy airline pilot by now, and you wouldn’t be reading this post, and you would probably cry. So thank goodness things worked out the way they did. I guess.

It turns out that most telephony designators are based on the airline’s name and thus aren’t as interesting as British Airways’ “Speedbird” (named for its classic logo). Don’t worry, there are still a lot of great ones. I found a number of perfectly awesome airline sobriquets in a BBC h2g2 article listing non-intuitive telephony designators. Below is a selection; imagine yourself barking each one into the radio as you hurtle through the sky at untold airpseeds.

• Aero Services: Bird Express
• African Safari Airways: Zebra
• Air Chaparral: Maverick
• Baron Aviation Services: Show Me
• Braathens Helikopter: Bee Copter
• Express Airlines: Flagship
• Germania: Joker
• Lux Aviation (Luxembourg): Red Lion
• Nawa Air Transport: Supernawa
• Nurnbergen Flug: Flamingo
• Oman Air: Oryx
• Skywings: Skyfox
• Titan Airways: Zap

This is Zap Five-Niner-Niner, signing off.

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1. Technically the IATA code can contain three letters, as this is what the modern specification calls for, but it’s never been implemented. I guess IATA is first waiting to see if they add any more letters to the alphabet. (“Double-Q,” anyone?) ↑