How NOT to get a call sign

[texdog]

Ragman 75, 1965 Laredo, Texas T41 flight instructor, I was assigned call sign Ragman 75, I will leave it up to your imagination as to why. I had four students a day and their call signs were Ragman 76, 77, 78 and 79. On check rides the student being checked had to use Ragman 75.

[dlloyd3]

A buddy, Ten, last name Fore.

[Mel]

In the Air Force, I was called "Ten Gallon". I'm 5' 4" tall and wear a Texas hat.

[flion]

My nick is not aviation related and I doubt my fellow local pilots even know what it is. I'll try to keep it brief. As a teenager, I developed interests in Shakespeare and also ancient military tech, so I started hanging out with the Society of Creative Anachronism and the Renaissance Faire crowds. My character background was supposed to be from Venice, Italy, so I started to get inundated with winged lions - pendants, figurines, artwork, etc. Flying lion = flion. What has always amused me is how the name stuck everywhere except aviation.

[breister]

Originally Posted by jetjok

OK! Help out us uninformed civilians...Who has a picture of a "snoopy" that they can post up??

A little late!

[breister]

Fun re-reading this old thread. Gotta say, the names being fessed up to are rather, err, tame?

Some memorable ones:
A fellow named Giancola = "Gyno."
Another named Lippsman shortened to "Lips."
A guy with a head so big they couldn't use standard helmets. Someone joked they should just given him a bucket - "Bucket" stuck.
A fellow named Skip who broke his arm wiping out in a racing cart = Skid
Even those are fairly tame, and then there were the TDY nametags...

[AlpineYoda]

One of my kids had a elementary school Spanish project - describe your family.

He made a poster with drawings of the family and captions like "Mi Mama es flaca" (My mom is skinny). "Mi hermano es bajo" (my brother is short).

To this day, he insists he meant that "Dad is strong", but he wrote "Papa es gordo" (fat).

Some friends of mine saw the poster and Gordo has stuck. I even woke up one day on a ski trip to find someone had glued nylon letters across the front of my ski helmet with GORDO.

[airguy]

Airguy has nothing to do with flying, but came from a previous business I had, working with high pressure air systems. I sold and installed air systems for scuba shops, fire departments and paintball fields - and people were always forgetting my name and just hollering at me "Hey Air Guy!" And it kinda stuck over the years, so I just rolled with it.

[scsmith]

This is a great thread, I have really been enjoying it.
Remarkable how much that tool really does look like Snoopy.

I don't have one (yet) but I can share a story about a clever but tame one.

My grad-school mate finished his PhD thesis and turned it in at Stanford one day, and the very next day, reported to AOCS in Pensacola. Already having his instrument rating before he signed up, he was acing the flying, and of course doing well in the classroom too. Finally with about a week to go before graduation, one of his instructors asked him, "OK, what's your story?"

Bill explained that he wanted to be an astronaut, so being a fighter pilot with a PhD in applied aerodynamics seemed like the right path.

So Bill became Doc.

I wouldn't mind having 'Doc' too, but as you-all say, you don't get to pick your own. So I am just waiting to earn one, but doing my best not to do something stupid, at least around airplanes.

[David Paule]

That reminded me that one of the students in a flight test class I was in was asked why he got a PhD in applied math. His reply was that they didn't offer theoretical math at his school.

There was dead silence when he said that. And it didn't lead to a call sign.

Dave