>a flight number seems like an immaterial bookkeeping abstraction
Not when it comes to airline operations. Crews are assigned to flight numbers; changing their assigned flight number, even to the same route/city-pair, constitutes a schedule change, which requires a recalculation of all their duty hours. When operations are all fubar and your crews are out of position you cannot afford to limit your options. Ergo, changing the flight numbers often has knock-on effects related to the crew regulations that are best avoided.
I capitalized "Airlines" for a reason, but I would guess it's pretty representative for the country. The reason your number and my number are different is not because AA is an unusual airline, but because the two numbers are about completely different things. There are three groups of Americans: (A) those that don't fly in a given year, (B) those that fly once, and (C) those that fly multiple times. Roughly, your number is A/(A+B+C) while mine is B/(B+C).
I just looked up a flight on Delta's site. I entered the flight number, or what most people would consider the flight number. "DL133" Delta darius it was an invalid number. Turns out they just wanted "123" how hard would it have been for them to strip the leading "DL"? Apparently to hard
I think they meant "flight number including two-letter prefix". But even those get reused from week to week (even day to day?) so might be different models.
> Yeah well, it might help to always make the first two or three characters unique, then you can be certain it always works without having to check the list. Realism is kept that way.
Unfortunately these two are fundamentally at odds. In real life the call signs are based on carrier (or tail number if no call sign is assigned). In the current iteration, there are two airlines, United (all of the UAL flights) and British Airways (all of the BWA flights), plus the Cessna "airline" that mimics general aviation craft by prefixing the call sign with "N".
The airline doesn't like it because it enables ticket arbitraging. (That's the reason they're fixed to your name) Also for tracking (err security.. but that's not really their fault)
Turkish Airlines has a specific flyer they give to all their flights originating from Turkey and Europe to USA that asks people to write 1 and 7 in a specific way in the customs form. I guess that explains why.
My guess is that it works for certain airlines. I tried the three next flights fromthe local airport. Some of those are just one letter and three numbers. That makes it pretty hard to make assuption regarding the meaning of the code, without having a reference.
reply