Firstly, note that when initialising your data array, subscripts, as standard, start at zero rather than one. This can be changed but doing so is strongly discouraged.

Here is a GRT sort that achieves your goal.

johngg@shiraz:~/perl/Monks > perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
my @data = qw{
   E1180 D250 A1180 D130 E855 E975 A130
   A250 B1105 B1225 B2480 C1180 C1600 D1180
   };

say for
   map { substr $_, 5 }
   sort
   map { pack q{ANA*}, substr( $_, 0, 1 ), substr( $_, 1 ), $_ }
   @data;'
A130
A250
A1180
B1105
B1225
B2480
C1180
C1600
D130
D250
D1180
E855
E975
E1180
[download]

I hope this is useful.