Last night while waiting at the airport to pick up a family friend, I glanced at the big board to check if the plane had landed. Sure enough, it was delayed. However, looking at all the other flights, I was intrigued by the flight numbers.
I can figure out that the first part of the flight number (US 1014) determines the airline (in this case, U.S. Airways). However, the numerical part escapes me.
Are all flight numbers unique?
Does 1014 mean it is the 1014th flight of the day for U.S. Air, or for all airlines in general (which doesn’t really make sense, since an earlier connecting flight was US 322, and there was not that much time between them).
Can two different airlines have the same flight number for different flights (i.e US 1014 and AC 1014).
Who determines the flight numbers?
Do they get recycled sometime later after a plane crash?
Is there a flight number 1 somewhere? Flight 666?
“The FAA does not assign the flight numbers used by most air carriers and commuters. If it did take on this task, it would probably have as much difficulty as the air carriers themselves. Assignment of flight numbers is typically a function of an airline’s marketing department. Sometimes it appears that Marketing chooses the quickest, easiest method of assigning numbers to newly-created flights. Consequently, some flight numbers have only one number that is different, some have numbers that are transposed, some just happen to sound similar, even though they may contain few, if any, of the same numbers. This problem appears to be increasing, as airline mergers and buyouts have led to operators blending flights under the same carrier name, but with a decreasing pool of available flight numbers.”
Flight numbers are assigned by the airlines, and are usually on a weekly or daily schedule (i.e., the 2 pm SFO-SAN is always 323, or it’s always 323 on Mondays). There might be a code (the first digit or two indicates the hub, or the route, or the originating aiport, or something, and the last two digits indicate that flight, and no other – unique day and time, at the least), but the airlines usually just number them sequentially as they add flights and routes to their schedules.
I’ll say it again: airline flight numbers are not unique, and are not assigned by FAA. They are assigned by the airline, and usually by Marketing, and they usually don’t mean anything.
If you check a few airline web sites, you’ll see that same numbers are used by different airlines. American Airlines flight 001 is a New York to LAX flight, while Northwest flight 001 is an LAX-Tokyo-Bangkok flight.
Each flight number is unique in the sense that there’s only one Northwest 1024 for a given day. There may be one every day, or only on certain days of the week.
I think low and/or easy to remember numbers are more often used for major international routes, while boring 4-digit numbers are usually used for domestic flights. Northwest 05 and 06 are (or used to be) Chicago/Tokyo and Tokyo/Chicago flights which I’ve taken many times. And we all know what TWA 800 used to be.
Nah. United’s SFO to SAN has flight numbers 36, 1469, 533, 1273, 1053, 955, 1077, and 785. In that order.
I suspect that the low-number flights are old routes that have been in service for years, which is why all the three- and four-digit flights are odd-numbered; they’re more recently inaugurated, after they established the “north-south flights are odd, east-west flights are even” policy.