United Kingdom Military Aircraft Serials - AA100 To ZZ999

AA100 To ZZ999

By 1940 the serial Z9978 had been allocated to a Bristol Blenheim and it was decided to restart the sequence with a two-letter prefix, starting at AA100. This sequence is still in use today. Until the 1990s this 2-letter, 3-numeral serial number sequence, had numbers in the range 100 to 999. An exception to this rule was Douglas Skyraider AEW1 which received the UK serial WT097, which incorporated the last 3 digits of its US Navy Bureau Number 124097. Recently, past unassigned serials, including those having numerals 001-099, have been assigned.

Some letters have not been used to avoid confusion: C confusion with G, I confusion with 1, O and Q confusion with 0, U confusion with V and Y confusion with X.

During the Second World War RAF aircraft carrying secret equipment or that were in themselves secret had "/G" suffix added to the end of the serial, the "G" signifying "Guard", denoting that the aircraft was to have an armed guard at all times while on the ground, for example LZ548/G, the prototype de Havilland Vampire jet fighter, or ML926/G, a de Havilland Mosquito XVI experimentally fitted with H2S radar.

As of 2009, serial allocations have reached the ZKnnn range. However, in recent years, serials have increasingly been allocated out-of-sequence. For example the first RAF C-17 Globemaster was given the serial ZZ171 in 2001, and a batch of Britten-Norman Defenders for the AAC were given serials in the ZGnnn range in 2003 (the last ZG serial being allocated more than 14 years previously). Also, some recent serials allocations have had a numeric part in the previously-unused 001 to 099 range.