  Along the years HiRes and AGASA experiments have explored the fluorescence
and the ground array experimental techniques to measure extensive air showers,
being both essential to investigate the ultra-high energy cosmic rays. However,
such Collaborations have published contradictory energy spectra for energies
above the GZK cut-off. In this article, we investigate the acceptance of
fluorescence telescopes to different primary particles at the highest energies.
Using CORSIKA and CONEX shower simulations without and with the new
pre-showering scheme, which allows photons to interact in the Earth magnetic
field, we estimate the aperture of the HiRes-I telescope for gammas, iron
nuclei and protons primaries as a function of the number of simulated events
and primary energy. We also investigate the possibility that systematic
differences in shower development for hadrons and gammas could mask or distort
vital features of the cosmic ray energy spectrum at energies above the
photo-pion production threshold. The impact of these effects on the true
acceptance of a fluorescence detector is analyzed in the context of top-down
production models.
