N7F

The Superstition ARC ran N7F Special Event Station in March to commemorate the Falcon Field Open House on March 23, 2013.  We worked 22 stations from the airport, I am told, but the best part was the interaction we had with the public.  We were handing out literature and answering many questions, and perhaps picked up a few members out of it all.

The FAA refers to Mesa's Falcon Field as FFZ, as it refers to Phoenix Sky Harbor by the identifier PHX.

Our choice for call sign went with the letter N, for aircraft markings often resemble amateur radio call signs starting with N or NC.  Our choice for call sign was further settled on the letter F for "Falcon Field."

Come to think of it, we could have used N2F, as in "N plus two F's."  We used the numeral 7, however, native to Arizona call signs.

Falcon Field got its start prior to World War II, when Hollywood producer Leland Hayward and pilot John H. "Jack" Connelly founded Southwest Airways with funding from friends like Henry Fonda, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, Hoagy Carmichael and others.  Southwest Airways operated two other airfields in Arizona -- Thunderbird Field No. 1 (now the site of Thunderbird School of Global Management) and Thunderbird Field No. 2 (now the site of Scottsdale Airport) -- to train pilots from China, Russia and 24 other Allied nations.  Falcon was to be Thunderbird Field III and would train British pilots.

But the British said they'd like the field to be named after one of their birds, and thus Falcon Field was opened as the No. 4 British Flying Training School (BFTS).  There were six BFTS airfields in the U.S., in Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, California and Arizona.

--Read the entire article on Wikipedia:  Falcon Field (Arizona)