Aircraft names/titles

In editing some older articles, I found that aircraft designations (aside from the caps controversy) have been used inconsistently. At one level, this can be handled by redirects, but this, in turn, leads to messy-looking "related articles" list when the article title for related names uses different formats. Unfortunately, some of these designations are heavily linked, and I'm hesitant to move articles for fear of breaking links, disambiguation, etc.

Procedural question: if we do agree on a naming standard, should that be in an article linked from the Military Workgroup page? How should it be named (both namespace and name).

Now, there are national variations in naming, and the U.S. ones are not themselves completely consistent. European military aircraft manufacturers are somewhat consistent, while Russian and Chinese designations have their own systems.

US convention
There was a major reorganization of U.S. naming conventions in the sixties, but that effectively brought the Navy naming system into compliance with the Army and Air Force. The main system identifies an aircraft with an alphanumeric code, with a letter that identifies the basic aircraft type (e.g., B=bomber, F=fighter), followed by a hyphen, followed by the design number within that type. Not all designs reach production. So, the B-17 was the 17th design of the bomber series, at least until the numbering system restarted. There are various prefix and suffix letters, and even numbers, for variants, but they are beyond the scope of this definition.

The manufacturer and the service then come up with a word or phrase that defines the aircraft. For example, the B-17 was officially the B-17 "Flying Fortress". There are some traditions; bombers designed by Boeing are all something-Fortress, while Navy fighters designed by Grumman all were named something-cat (e.g., F-14 Tomcat).

It seems totally random if that name actually gets used in practice. The CH-47 helicopter is officially the Chinook, and that name stuck, while the UH-1 Iroquois helicopter is universally the "Huey". F-14's were either the Tomcat or the Turkey. The B-52 Stratofortress is commonly -- we have it used in articles here, with no other identification, as the BUFF. In due deference for the CZ family-friendliness policy, that is an abbreviation for Big Ugly Fat...fellow. Yes, fellow.

For some WWII aircraft, the main articles are variously B-17, B-24 Liberator, and B-29, with redirects from B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24, and B-29 Superfortress. Should we standardize on alphanumeric alone or alphanumeric and name, bearing in mind some names are rarely used? In at least one case, to the best of my knowledge, the F-111 never had a formal name, but was called the Aardvark or the 'vark (the electronics warfare version was the Spark Vark).

Now, let's take an example that leads to much confusion. A much-loved transport aircraft started life as the DC-3 ("Douglas Commercial 3"), with the official military designation C-47 Dakota, but, in U.S. practice, called the Gooney Bird.
European
British practice, which seems common to most of western Europe, is primarily to refer to an aircraft by its name, qualified with revision letters and numbers. The exact aircraft that was the DC-3 in commercial use, C-47 in U.S. military (well, Army--the WWII Navy version was the R4D, for reasons you really don't want to know).

Now, (avoiding a separate hot thread) person from the U.K. wants to look up this aircraft, their history books will refer only to the Dakota. Another redirect?

European practice now tends to be to keep the name as primary, but add various combinations of letters and numbers for variants. For example, the Tornado is a multirole, multi-country fighter. The U.K flies the Tornado ADV (air defence variant) and IDS (interdiction-strike); Germany and Italy also have a Tornado ECR (electronic combat/reconnaissance). I don't see any problem with Tornado or Eurofighter as article names, although there have been several totally different Typhoons.

European commercial names do tend more to family and number, such as Airbus 380 or Comet V.

Russian/Soviet and Chinese

Moscow designates its aircraft by design bureau (Mikoyan and Gurevich = MiG, Sukhoi = Su, Antonov - An), and number within the design bureau. There's no immediate way to tell the type of aircraft from the alphanumeric designation, so NATO (much as it did with WWII Japanese aircraft), assigns a code name whose first letter gives the type: MiG-21 (fighter) FISHBED, Tu-160 (bomber) BLACKJACK, Mi-24 (helicopter) HIND.

China has built licensed copies, derivatives of these designs, but they change the alphanumeric designation. Their copy of the MiG-21 FISHBED is the J-7 FISHBED.

At present, I use the design bureau number on the main article (e.g., MiG-21) and put in a redirect from FISHBED. When referring to it in text, I have been inconsistent: I always start with the designation, but then haven't decided how best to write the NATO code: either [[MiG-21]] (NATO reporting name [[FISHBED]]) or [[MiG-21]]/NATO: [[FISHBED]].

So what does this all mean?

I'm not sure we can standardize more than by nation or region, but I'd like to be consistent: the U.S. official name either never or always appears in the main title (hard when there isn't a name), with redirects for whatever is the name/no-name designation, plus redirects for especially common informal names.

When an aircraft started out as European, I'm inclined to have the main article use the original name (e.g., Harrier) and then redirect from the U.S. [[AV-8]].

I'm mixed about the Russian/NATO. I do think the main article should be the designation with redirects from NATO; I think [[designation]] (NATO reporting name [[codename]]) is prettier than [[designation]]/NATO: [[codename]], but the latter is easier to type.