Missing Aircraft Designations

Originally posted by Shugo
Delta... then what superstition has the government ever believed in? And if it's courtisy, when did the government begin caring about courtisy?

Well, they believe in the superstition that superstitions make people easier to control...

And it's not so much courtesy as it is that people will choose or choose not to spend their money based on a lot of superstitions.

Is that what you wanted to hear?
DeltaChaos

Better than I thought. But, I still think that there was a designation with 13 in it.

originally posted by: Shugo
Better than I thought. But, I still think that there was a designation with 13 in it.

Prior to the introduction of the 1962 Tri-Service designation system, the War Department and its successor, the Defense Department, assigned US military aircraft designations with the number 13. There was a photo-reconnaissance variant of the B-29 which was initially designated F-13 before being redesignated FB-29 and finally RB-29 in 1948 (the letter F was initially used to denote reconnaissance aircraft even while fighter aircraft for the USAAC/USAAF bore P-for-Pursuit designations, but after the US Army Air Force became the US Air Force in 1947, the designation letter for photo-reconnaissance aircraft was changed to R because all USAF fighter aircraft were now officially classified as fighter aircraft).

The C-for-Transport designation sequence within the 1962 Tri-Service designation system holds the record for the highest number of unassigned design numbers of any Tri-Service aircraft designation sequence. The C-16 designation was reserved three times but was not assigned, while C-30 was reserved but without being requested for assignment to a transport, and the designations C-34, C-39, C-42, C-43, and C-44 were skipped to avoid confusion with existing military aircraft (the skipping of C-34 for the Army-operated Cessna Citation Ultra in favor of UC-35 to avoid confusion with the T-34 didn't take into account the fact that the Citation Ultra was difficult for aircraft identification experts to confuse with the T-34 as the latter was a trainer and not a transport). Although the official reservation for the YFC-36 designation contained scant descriptive details, YFC-36 was in all probability the initial intended designation for the YAL-1 airborne laser variant of the 747-400.

Although James Fahey (author of the 1946 book U.S. Army Aircraft (heavier-than-air) 1908-1946) claimed in a May 1947 issue of the Flying Magazine that P-73 and P-74 were skipped in favor of P-75 for the Eagle fighter plane at General Motors' request to provide a symbolic design number for the Eagle, the fact that USAAF documents had XP-73 reserved for and applied to the proposed military version of the Hughes D-2 suggests that General Motors was aware that Hughes D-2 when first proposed to the USAAF had XP-73 reserved for it, and that even though XP-74 was available for allocation, General Motors may have requested the allocation of XP-75 to the Eagle as a pun on the Curtiss Wright company designation Model 75 for the P-36 Hawk.