31–40 of 159 posts
All the problems in the video come from trying to use the letters to guess the areas they refer to. They might be related but they might also not. And that’s fine. Your booking site will let you type the full area name anyway.
Wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. If you think of the codes as meaningless IDs, there are no problems. The system is unambiguous which is the most important thing. MEL refers to one specific airport and you can know that for sure. All the problems in the video come from trying to use the letters to guess the areas they refer to. They might be related but they might also not. And that’s fine. Your booking site will…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
#3 has RFML - Refugee Meal. I wonder what that is.
A lot of airlines have done refugee flights at one point or another, so I guess they needed a way to tell the ground crew to load whatever special foods were needed.
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A lot of airlines have done refugee flights at one point or another, so I guess they needed a way to tell the ground crew to load whatever special foods were needed.
What 'special foods' would be needed for refugees?
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I've also wondered why cryptically abbrevated things like NOTAMS are still the way they are. It made sense in a teletype/telegraph world where brevity was worth time and money. From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM: A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06 Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005 A)EGLL B)0609050500 C)0704300500 E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN…
> Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though. You're correct. It's straightforward for pilots. They can quickly read a NOTAM and understand everything. Also, it's pretty standard and unambiguous worldwide. As…
The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Teletype[2] that are still pushing data around. Not the mention standard meal codes[3], like BLML for "bland meal" and CLML for "celebration cake meal." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system [3]: http…
I've also wondered why cryptically abbrevated things like NOTAMS are still the way they are. It made sense in a teletype/telegraph world where brevity was worth time and money. From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM: A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06 Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005 A)EGLL B)0609050500 C)0704300500 E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN…
So airport codes are no better than "standard" book numbers - ISBNs are not unique, contrary to what one may thing, and, yes, the mantra is "one book, two numbers" because there is "old" ISBN and the more recent "ISBN-13" with more digits.
I started cataloging my home library using the barcodes on the books and pulling the meta-data from Amazon via ISBNs, but ever so often, the cover image pulled was for a completely different book, although the barcode contains a check sum and the Amazon data was not incorrect. The reason? ISBN re-use! (rolling eyes)
This reminded me of the dude in one former company who proposed to reuse UUIDs...