61–70 of 461 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And by "researching" we mean overpaying consultants who will do absolutely nothing useful.
i wanna be a consultant
I quit after a year because I hated having to hustle to make payroll.
> Except they don’t. American Airlines, Delta, and United are running out of flight numbers, and nobody knows what to do about it. All of the above mentioned airlines are the size they are because of mergers. Why don’t they use the IATA codes of the airlines they absorbed. For example Delta merged with Northwestern. In addition to DL, they could also use NW. American merged with USAirways. They could use US in additi…
Northwest Airlines.
I'm sorry if I'm pedantic, but Northwest was my childhood airline flying with my dad on many of his business travels and I have many fond memories with them. My Delta SkyMiles account hails from Northwest WorldPerks, opened in 1998!
I might also have a soft spot for Delta because of that too.
The entire aviation industry feels like it is in need of a tech stack 100% rebuild. Systems like Sabre are 60+ years old.
Enormous path dependance. There's a photo in that article that shows the problem: the flip-tab sign that has space for four numerical digits. I was thinking they could just switch from 0-9 to 0-9A-Z but that photo showed why that would be a disaster. Plus any solution has to be approved for use worldwide. Fortunately the two-digit IATA codes have already switched to 0-9A-Z (e.g. JetBlue is B6) so allowing constrained…
> Except they don’t. American Airlines, Delta, and United are running out of flight numbers, and nobody knows what to do about it. All of the above mentioned airlines are the size they are because of mergers. Why don’t they use the IATA codes of the airlines they absorbed. For example Delta merged with Northwestern. In addition to DL, they could also use NW. American merged with USAirways. They could use US in additi…
That would be a recipe for confusion among pilots and controllers. They rely on visual sighting of aircraft for some operations and have to maneuver in relation to each other so if the livery doesn't match the IATA code then that increases the risk of error.
Wouldn't the easy solution be to use two sets of letters for IATA coded flights for the same airline? Something like "DL1234" and "DZ1234" for Delta? I know a lot of the two-letter codes are claimed too, and I'm sure there must be some reason this wouldn't work OK, but it would seem like they they would each have at least one code left over from the various airlines they've acquired over the years? If an American Air…
That's not such a great solution, it kicks the can down the road and it's super confusing to humans to have the same airline be represented different ways.
> Except they don’t. American Airlines, Delta, and United are running out of flight numbers, and nobody knows what to do about it. All of the above mentioned airlines are the size they are because of mergers. Why don’t they use the IATA codes of the airlines they absorbed. For example Delta merged with Northwestern. In addition to DL, they could also use NW. American merged with USAirways. They could use US in additi…
That would be a recipe for confusion among pilots and controllers. They rely on visual sighting of aircraft for some operations and have to maneuver in relation to each other so if the livery doesn't match the IATA code then that increases the risk of error.
But, similar reasons: mixing branding is going to cause confusion (codeshares already do this enough without injecting a “third” airline into the mix).
> Except they don’t. American Airlines, Delta, and United are running out of flight numbers, and nobody knows what to do about it. All of the above mentioned airlines are the size they are because of mergers. Why don’t they use the IATA codes of the airlines they absorbed. For example Delta merged with Northwestern. In addition to DL, they could also use NW. American merged with USAirways. They could use US in additi…
>For example Delta merged with Northwestern. Northwest Airlines. I'm sorry if I'm pedantic, but Northwest was my childhood airline flying with my dad on many of his business travels and I have many fond memories with them. My Delta SkyMiles account hails from Northwest WorldPerks, opened in 1998! I might also have a soft spot for Delta because of that too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It almost certainly would completely break thousands of functions that have those magic letters hard coded into them in fortran, cobol, C or whatever. You might even find that clever people back in the 70s used other ways of representing those letters so you can't even search for them. I've worked on codebases like this -- I've seen it take a team of engineers years to add a single digit to an ID number in a multi-mi…
But lots of airlines have come and gone or merged over the years and these systems would have already had to deal with new airlines codes?
5 digits instead of 4?