16-8597 —

First class catch John.

Agreed beautiful catch!

What complete hogwash for the identification tag. The supposed "N" number is a U.S. Navy serial number. U.S. Navy/Air Force/Marine/Army/Coast Guard aircraft NEVER carry an "N" number. "N" numbers ONLY apply to civilian, U.S. owned/registered aircraft. And "Hawker Siddeley?" Come on, the editors should know better and do something about this.

Whoever wrote the caption deserves severe punishment: write 10,000 times with his own hand I SHALL NEVER GET CONFUSED AGAIN BETWEEN AIRFRAME MANUFCTURERS NAMES NOR REGISTRY'S NAMES. THERE!!!!.

Paul Wisgerhof and Chalet.....Just to let you know, Flight Aware added their ID to that photo...I wrote the description below their title from the actual unit site that the aircraft belongs to...

John ... If you had entered the entire reg number, it would not have auto-entered the letter "N." All US Navy aircraft regs begin with the numerals "16xxxx." In fact, the US Navy even puts the entire reg number on all of their aircraft. It is right there on the E-2 in your photo. The entire reg number of this E-2 Hawkeye is plainly visible just behind the word NAVY. If I can see it in your photo, so could you. If you just enter four numerals, the program auto-fills an "N" and then auto-enters the type of aircraft that corresponds to that reg. It's not the FA program's fault if you don't even enter the full reg number. And, just as an FYI, if you enter the full reg and then enter "E2," the program will show it as a Hawkeye. There are thousands of photos of US Navy aircraft; including many, many, many pictures of E-2 Hawkeyes, in this gallery; so it takes mere seconds to view one and learn how to enter the info correctly. And BTW, nice ***** pic.

Alrighty now, that's about enough of busting John Suttons' chops!
Gee golly, he'll probably never again submit a photograph of an aircraft with essentially six vertical stabilizers and a UFO mated to the top of the fuselage.

Just another pretty face! Great shot - captures all the lovely features of the E-2!

Nice pic. Nice a/c. Dangerous on the flight deck, especially at night. Hard to see those props.
Not trying to be pedantic, but to clarify for anyone that might not know military aircraft, the "reg number" as has been referred to in comments is technically the Bureau Number (called BuNo in jargon). The Bureau is the Bureau of Aeronautics. USN and USMC use the full 6-digit number. USAF uses a NN-NNNN format. (not sure what the Army does).
I can't clearly see the BuNo, but it looks like it's 1628597. Which makes sense as they were in the 161xxx range when I was working with the F/A-18 program in the 80's.

Chris Bryant......
I looked all over the aircraft for ID numbers after reading your comment...The only numbers I found were E-20 over 168597 under the back wings...

John, that's a D model Hawkeye so it reads E-2D. There are still some E-2C models in use by the Navy but the D is replacing them.

Thanks Gary....Closer look I see the "D"