Originally Posted by
jsloan
There’s no reason it couldn’t be real. The only requirements for N numbers are listed here:
https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certifi...orming_nnumber And N29999 would qualify.
I was under the impression that UA simply scoured the registry looking for values that were available and would match the internal tail designator. So if it’s tail 999, they’d look for Nxx999 and see what’s available. That may be an oversimplification on my part, but I agree that there doesn’t seem to be rhyme nor reason to them.
The random assignment of N numbers is more of a Continental model. United had the NXXXUA format, with (roughly) each hundred block assigned to an aircraft type. N7XXUA was for 777, N4XXUA A320, N8XXUA for A319, etc.
This approach also had the added advantage so that if in the flight status you saw say a 777 as ship 2786, you would know it was N786UA, which would make it easy to do flight tracking based on tail numbers.
But with the Continental model, if a flight operated with a 777, and the ship was listed as say 3001, you couldn’t as easily figure out what the tail number was.