United Kingdom aircraft registration

[5] The principle of registering and externally marking aircraft had been agreed upon in 1910 at an international convention in Paris and a draft Air Navigation Order had been prepared in 1911, but was not put into force before the First World War.

[5][6] With the end of the First World War the Air Navigation Regulations came into force on 20 April 1919, allowing civil flying to commence on 1 May 1919.

[5][6] The first civil flight under the new regulations took place on 1 May 1919 when a de Havilland DH.9 of Aircraft Transport and Travel flew from Hounslow to Bournemouth using former military serial C6054 as an identity.

[1] The new register came into force on 22 July 1919; aircraft flying on temporary former military serials and those allotted in the K-100 sequence were all re-registered sequentially from G-EAAA.

[1] At the 1927 International Radio-Telegraph Conference the United Kingdom was allocated radio callsign prefixes B, G, M, VP, VQ and VR.

[10] The oldest flyable aircraft in the world as of 2011, a Humber-built Bleriot XI from 1909 owned by the Shuttleworth Collection in the UK, still uses the very early form registration G-AANG.

To comply with the regulations of the European Aviation Safety Agency, all gliders have had to be registered and marked externally in the G-xxxx sequence since 2008, except for a small group of specified vintage types known by the name of the EASA document, Annex 2.

Air cushion vehicles were allocated registrations with the prefix 'GH-', e.g., GH-2012, the BHC SR.N6 that carried out the first hovercraft expedition up the Amazon, and the Mountbatten-class SR.N4's GH-2006 Princess Margaret and GH-2004 Swift.