I was watching the NOVA show on the crash of Air France Flight 447 (Rio to Paris) when I tried to check and see if there still is an AF 447 or if that flight number has been retired. Looking at the Air France website I can’t seem to find any active flight numbered 447.
Is it typical for airlines to retire flight numbers from flights that end tragically?
They seem to still have flights between the two locations…
Yes, very common.
IIRC, yes it was renumbered.
I don’t think it’s terribly uncommon for airlines to “retire” the flight numbers used in particularly notorious disasters. For example, American & United “retired” the flight numbers that were involved in the September 11 attacks; when a computer system at United automatically assigned these numbers to some new flights earlier this year, United renumbered the flights and issued an apology. I don’t believe Swissair uses Flight 111 any more, nor does Egyptair use 990.
Especially that Swissair doesn’t exist anymore.
Well, I’ll be jiggered. I Googled them, saw an airline of a similar name, and just assumed that they had re-branded.
Renumbering is not limited to flight numbers. In 1998, someone shot the driver of the 359 bus in Seattle and it went over the side of a bridge onto an apartment house.
That route is now the 358 bus…
Ive been too have been curious about the flight numbers of planes involved in disasters just never got round to posting the question so thanks dolphinboy
I was also wondering about images of the Twin Towers on old movies and series repeats. It must be distressing for the many people affected by 9/11 to see the Towers pop up on their TV sets even years later.
Do the TV stations make any effort to cut scenes showing the Towers from their transmissions?
Sometimes. But the opposite is also true. The American version of Life on Mars showed the Sam Tyler character waking up in 1973 New York and seeing a newly constructed Twin Towers.
While the show was inferior in most respects to the BBC version this was a more arresting image than waking up to see a Manchester expressway missing, IMHO.
The last thing passengers want to hear when being called to board is the flight number of a famous crash.
Interesting, flight numbers are retired but tail numbers (N numbers) are recycled.
I would guess tail numbers are like car plates or VIN numbers and changing them would involve mountains of paperwork.
Doubt if many people associate a tail number with an accident.
Just a thought.
Not only paperwork, but lots and lots of cash.
If you want to know (within reason) where an airplane started, look at the N or tail number.
If you see a US Airways 737 in Orlando that has a number that ends in AW, that airplane was a part of America West.
For the most part the legacy airlines used common sense with the tail numbers. Anything that ends in AA started with American; if it ends with TW it’s an old TWA airplane. Likewise Delta mostly uses DL and Northwest used NW as much as it could. I never could figure out Continental - they just seem to have random junk on their tails. Maybe since they are now officially United they will all get the UA tails.
The tail numbers don’t usually change unless the airline is planning on keeping the new airplane for a long time. Of course the definition of “long time” fluctuates. From what I’ve seen (strictly as a tail number observer while at work) this seems to be about 10 years or so.
Why change a tail number? No reason, other than fleet commonality and making your airline look and feel like a big player.
The piles of cash and paperwork required to do that have to please the beancounters before it will happen, of course.
My airline (FedEx) is great about this - every airplane shows up with a tail that ends in FX, FE or FD. It costs Fred Smith a ton of cash to do that, but he does.
And more to the point of the OP - no one really cares about tail numbers. But flight numbers have some special importance.
We had our first ever fatal crash over two years ago (FedEx 80 landing in Narita). We lost both pilots, and by news standards it was a minor event (only two people and some boxes? Who cares!)
But we took it seriously, and even though we don’t carry passengers the flight from Guangzhou to Narita has been renumbered. FedEx 80 will always be remembered as the flight that Kyle and Tony lost their lives, and no one wants to take that away from them.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention N8FE. It’s a Dassault Falcon (business jet) modified to carry cargo and one of the first (if not the first) aircraft used by Federal Express. Why 8FE? The popular rumor is that the boss wanted his nascent company to look bigger than it actually was. It’s currently in the Smithsonian collection.
The only other interesting tail number I know offhand is a Concorde with the British registration G-BOAC. British Overseas Airways Corporation was one of the forerunners of British Airways.