Registrations
Every country is allotted a prefix which is applied to aircraft registration marks in order to identify the country of registration.These prefixes have their origin in the conferences held by the International Telecommunications Union.
The first convention was held in Berlin in 1903 and was attended by 8 countries. No agreements were reached.
27 delegates attended the second convention in Berlin in 1906, but it was at the third conference in London in 1912 that the first codes were adopted.
A meeting held in Paris in 1919 after the end of the first world war agreed on further allocations.
The resulting 1919 convention also established the International Commission for Air Navigation (ICAN, or CINA in French).
Meetings of ICAN allocated further codes up to the publication of the French Air Navigation Act of 1925.
In 1926 Argentina was given the prefix R-A and the D-number prefix was formally allotted to Germany in 1928 (although it had been in use since 1920) along with the N-number allocation to Norway (clashing with the United States).
The 1927 International Radio Telegraph Conference in Washington agreed on further changes, although it took some years for these to fully come into effect. As many aviation prefixes differed from the radio call sign codes a further conference took place in June 1928 in order to harmonise the codes.
By 1931 the current list of prefixes was starting to take shape and in 1932 further changes took place.
ICAN remained until 1945 when a Provisional International Civil Aviation Organisation (PICAO) was established, lasting until 1947 when the current ICAO commenced operations.
The prefixes in use during the period from 1919 to 1939 are indexed in the pages referenced below.
The links will take you to the pre-war registers for these countries.
Registrations by Region:
Western EuropeEastern Europe
Scandinavia
Middle East
Asia and Russia
Africa
Oceania and Australasia
North America
Central America
South America
Caribbean
Registrations by country
Alphabetical index of prefixes