Those are still nominal numbers though. Almost all numbering/lettering schemes have some logic built into them but it still doesn’t mean you can do math with them even though people try to all the time. I work with many such schemes as part of my job as a systems analyst and have throughout my career with many large corporations.
Someone at some point figured out a brilliant plan to treat ordinal numbers like math problems and it doesn’t end well. Whole software packages are built around the schemes. It could be something like an embedded date of manufacture combined with a product code or whatever other cockamamie scheme someone wants to make up. Everything works until the company buys a competitor and they find out that their schemes cause logical duplicates and there is no way to sort them out systematically based on the data given. All of the systems fail some of the time and then they try to come up with a new scheme that will cause the same problem years later.
I have redesigned systems around ill thought out nominal numbering schemes more times than I can count and I am going through two now. For some reason, people think that just because something looks like a number, you can do basic math to work things out when that is not the case at all for nominal numbers. They aren’t true numbers. They always have exceptions that break the whole concept and force you to use lookup tables to translate them. You might as well use letters or Chinese symbols because they are all the same thing logically speaking.
Wikipedia does describe some general guidelines traditionally used to assign flight numbers. Among other things, single- and double-digit numbers have been used for premium or long-haul services, e.g. British Airways 1 used to be the morning Concorde flight to NYC. East- and northbound flights may have even numbers, with the return flight numbers increased by 1, which makes them odd, obviously. Regional and commuter flights may have four-digit numbers, as well as charter flights. These are only a few of the “rules” which the article mentions, “rules” in this case being more like “guidelines”. I notice a vague similarity to Amtrak train numbering schemes, and wonder which of the two inspired the other.
But what would be the point of all this? It’s not like your flight number is a top secret military operation.
Wikipedia does describe some general guidelines traditionally used to assign flight numbers. Among other things, single- and double-digit numbers have been used for premium or long-haul services, e.g. British Airways 1 used to be the morning Concorde flight to NYC. East- and northbound flights may have even numbers, with the return flight numbers increased by 1, which makes them odd, obviously. Regional and commuter flights may have four-digit numbers, as well as charter flights. These are only a few of the “rules” which the article mentions, “rules” in this case being more like “guidelines”. I notice a vague similarity to Amtrak train numbering schemes, and wonder which of the two inspired the other.
[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus]
Wikipedia does describe some general guidelines traditionally used to assign flight numbers.
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It doesn’t say one way or the other, but I always assumed for some reason that different airlines don’t use the same numbers–that every flight number is unique across all companies. But apparently that isn’t the case.
It isn’t the case at all. If it were, then there could only be 999 three-digit flight codes worldwide, which clearly is not the case.
And not only do different airlines use the same numbers; within an airline the same number may be used for different routes (at different times). As noted above, BA 001 used to be BA’s LHR-JFK Concorde service, but at the moment it’s used for a LCY-SNN-JFK service (currently flown by an Airbus 318, which is a bit of a comedown from the Concorde).
Or, different numbers may be used for the same route: EI 152 flies the DUB-LHR route, but so do EI 154, EI 156, EI 158, EI 162, EI 164, EI 166, and many others. In fact Aer Lingus devotes 14 different codes to DUB-LHR flights (and 14 more to LHR-DUB flights). You can see the impossiblity of dividing 999 codes between all the worlds’ airlines on the basis that each code is only used by one airline, when one regional European airline uses 28 codes for just one of its routes.
7 and 11 are considered lucky numbers for gamblers stemming from the fact that they are winning numbers in a dice game called craps. Las Vegas is a US city famous for gambling.
1492 was the year Christopher Columbus first sailed the ocean blue, beginning the age of European settlement of the Americas. Columbus is a city in Ohio named for Christopher Columbus.
We bought a car when living in CT. The dealer told us he could tell when and where someone bought their car based on the plate number. Not relevant, but interesting (to me at least!).
When I explain to people that the popular game ‘Sudoku’ could just as well be played with 9 different symbols – stars, crescents, pentagrams, circles, triangles, squares, etc. – they look at me as though I were crazy. Nine different colors would work, too; or animal pictures, etc.
While there may be some information derivable from a particular number assignment, flight numbers cannot be derived from the information.