How to read an aircraft registration
Every airliner carries a unique identifier painted on its fuselage. Here is how to decode it.
G-BYGD. EC-FOZ. 9V-SMW. Those are not model numbers or serial numbers. They are registrations - the aviation equivalent of a licence plate, and the single most useful thing to know about an aircraft.
One airframe, one registration
A registration identifies exactly one airframe anywhere in the world. Type tells you what an aircraft is; the registration tells you which one. Two Boeing 747s built in the same month on the same line are different machines with different histories, and the registration is what separates them.
The prefix is the country
The part before the hyphen is the nationality mark, allocated by the International Telecommunication Union and administered by each country's civil aviation authority.
| Prefix | Country |
|---|---|
D- | Germany |
G- | United Kingdom |
EC- | Spain |
OE- | Austria |
HB- | Switzerland |
PH- | Netherlands |
9V- | Singapore |
N | United States |
The United States is the exception that trips people up: American registrations have no hyphen and mix letters with digits - N104UA, N941NA.
China uses numbers
Chinese registrations take the form B- followed by four digits: B-5216, B-2917. The same B- prefix covers Hong Kong and Macau, where the suffix is letters instead - B-HSI.
What changes, and what does not
Registrations are reassigned when an aircraft changes country or operator. A jet can wear three or four different registrations across its life while remaining the same airframe. What never changes is the manufacturer's serial number - the MSN - which is the truly permanent identifier.
That is why our records list both where we have them: the registration is what was painted on the aircraft, and the MSN is what the aircraft is.