Two Questions

[Donesh I.]

Risking being called ignorant, here they are:
1. What do Aircraft types have different nomenclarures like Airbus A320-232 instead of Airbus A320-200 or Boeing 737-8Q8 instead of Boeing 737-800 mean?. What do the last two characters mean and why so.

2. This A380 has got patches on the fuselage which look like something has been painted over. On closer examination, it seems like some writing, names??. Can somebody please enlighten me about what the writing is? The aircraft in question is Qantas Airbus A380-842 VH-OQK

[Rowan McKeever]

Hi Donesh!

With Airbus, the last two characters relate to the engines. If the second-last number is 0 it has GE, 1 is CFM, 2 is PW, 3 is IAE, 4 is RR and 6 is Engine Alliance. The last number tells you the thrust rating of the engine on the wing, the higher the number the higher the thrust rating. So A320-232 has IAE engines with a fairly standard thrust rating, the A320-216 that you see with AirAsia and Alitalia (and others no doubt) have CFM with quite a high thrust rating.

With Boeing it's just a customer code. So *38 is Qantas, *FE is Virgin Australia, *36 is BA... there's a list here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_customer_codes) (with the usual wikipedia caveat)!

VH-OQK has a 'Spirit of Australians' special livery with people's names on it, as does the B737-838 VH-XZA. The names were chosen through a promotion a while back.

Cheers
Rowan

[Greg Hyde]

For Boeing the trailing three characters designate the aircraft type and operator who ordered the aircraft.

eg: B737-838 is 800 series ordered by Qantas (38)
B737-8FE is 800 series ordered by VA (FE)
B737-476 is 400 series ordered by Australian Airlines (TAA)

For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_customer_codes

[Donesh I.]

Oh Thank You, Thank you so very much. No more guessing for me.