On the Airbands

Controller Shortage

“Punky” is one of my excellent regular RAAF contacts.

He is a fighter jock, and I will leave it to him to answer a question that has filtered in from a large number of military aircraft monitors, that is: “How are military tactical callsigns decided on; not the rootwords, but the numbers tagged on the end?”

With transport squadrons, like No 36 Squadron at RAAF Richmond NSW, the numbers following the rootword (TROJAN) are individual pilot allocations. With non-transport squadrons, like, for example 25 Squadron, the numbers are in fact serial numbers, allocated on a daily tasking basis. For example, a couple of 25 Squadron rootwords are Phantom and Devil. 25 Squadron is allocated serial numbers from 300 through 377. On any given day, if 25 Squadron is flying a total of 20 sorties, the aircraft crews are allocated sequentially running ascending numbers, so that the first aircraft would use the callsign “Phantom 300”, the next “Phantom 301”, and so on. The same situation exists for all the other squadrons. The serial numbers are also used in the IFF codes, so that “Phantom 301” would have “0301” in the IFF.

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