How do you make a professional callsign? Let’s say that we are flying for American Airlines. The first section of your callsign would be American. But what would come after that? I purposely made an invalid callsign to get this text to come up: Identifier can only contain numbers and two suffix letters. From my understanding of callsigns, I would’ve thought that the next section of the callsign would’ve been the flight number. For instance, 482 or 2778. So I am slightly confused when it says that it can contain two suffix letters. Could someone please explain what this means and when to do this. Thanks! Also, as a smaller question, is the A380 the only plane that uses “super” at the end of its callsign? Or would a 747 also have this added to it?
To answer your first question:
Some airlines (E.g. Turkish Airlines, Wizz Air, EasyJet, Ryanair, etc.) sometimes use callsigns that contain both numbers and letters in them. They follow the format Airline, Up to 3 numbers, Up to 2 letters. The 2 letters in the end are the suffix letters mentioned in the error message. A real-life example would be WizzAir 10AC (WZZ10AC), you can see many more examples of that by tapping on aircraft on FlightRadar24, usually in Europe. There’s no set rule as to when these are used, but you can either come up with something, or check the current one on FlightRadar24 (or another flight tracker).
With the 20.2 update came the option to add letters to callsign identifiers, which improved realism by allowing usage of that callsign format.
As for your second question, the A380 (and Antonov An-225 Mriya, which doesn’t exist in IF) are the only 2 aircraft in the world that use Super as their callsign suffix. The 747 uses Heavy.
Let me know if you need any further clarification!
The B747 still uses ‘Heavy.’ The only aircraft that uses ‘Super’ is the A380 in-app.
You are also able to put four numbers in a call sign, as shown below with your American 2778 example. The rules for the identifier are five characters, three numbers and two letters at the end (eg. Airline 123AB) as the limit.
Thanks! Is there a minimum requirement for the numbers and letters? For instance, would WizzAir1A be an invalid callsign due to a lack of characters? Thank you!
Okay, thanks. Now I’m just being picky, but would WizzAir1 and WizzAirB still be valid? And what if you didn’t put anything at all behind the airline? Would that work? My guess is you would have to put at least something there. Thanks!
So some airlines also have calsigns for unschelueld, charter or repositioning flights. For example southwest uses WN85XX if they have one of thoes flights. Also most flight calsigns are the same as the flight number so looking at the route on FR24 may help make a realistic one.
