Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

viewfromthewing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 461 posts

Re: Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

#81

Post by guardiangod »

zeagle wrote: post #80

Clearly the successor solution is to use eight groups of four hexadecimal digits each, separated by colons. Then each individual seat and peanut could be addressed to it's final destination. More seriously the solution suggested of giving the 3 companies other unused prefixes like D* U* and A* to use with their codeshares and non rev flights to start seems the easiest.

Done forget to have a secondary identifier to further divide the seat. I recommend using a short to represent the 65536 possible slices a seat can split.

Then on the ticket, there would be an extension section that tells you the alias of the person that is about to board. We can call it SNI or Sitter Name Indicator. Another section could be an indicator if the rider is alive when boarding. We can call the extension a heartbeat extension.

Re: Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

#87

Post by usr1106 »

I remember my wife was on a charter flight with 3 initial letters many years ago (in Europe). And when I tried to look up the arrival, many systems could not handle the flight number.

Now slightly unsure whether I did not dream up the whole episode, I did a web search and found https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/157429/what-is-th...

So IATA seems to have formally introduced that in 1994. (Whether they have abandoned it again later I don't know.) So big airlines could just get a additional 3rd letter(s). The first 2 would not have to change, which makes it easier for humans.

Re: Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

#88

Post by SoftTalker »

poopsmithe wrote: post #63
gumby wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How many airports still have flip-tab signs? Do they need to stay? Aren't they adding to an already noisy area? What's their maintenance cost vs. a LCD? What's their energy consumption vs. a LCD?

[flagged]

Re: Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

#89

Post by stephen_g »

kalleboo wrote: post #75

I don't even understand the point of code-share flight numbers. The first thing I do when I see one is look up the original flight number. Most flight search engines will also show you the original carrier. Why not just get rid of them and book on the original flight number? Is it needed somehow in their systems to know how a flight was booked or what flights are eligible? Can that be fixed instead of the flight numb…

Generally it's easier to book a trip with legs on different carriers if they have a codeshare arrangement, because you can just do it as a single itinerary through one carrier's web site. Otherwise you often need a travel agent to be able to put together the itinerary (that's not strictly necessary though, just the way they make it work so no technical reason they couldn't just offer non codeshare flight numbers)

The other thing is airline points/status - sometimes you get no status points/miles on non-codeshare partner flight numbers but you do on the codeshare flight numbers.

Re: Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

#90

Post by kalleboo »

stephen_g wrote: post #89
kalleboo wrote: post #75

I don't even understand the point of code-share flight numbers. The first thing I do when I see one is look up the original flight number. Most flight search engines will also show you the original carrier. Why not just get rid of them and book on the original flight number? Is it needed somehow in their systems to know how a flight was booked or what flights are eligible? Can that be fixed instead of the flight numb…

Generally it's easier to book a trip with legs on different carriers if they have a codeshare arrangement, because you can just do it as a single itinerary through one carrier's web site. Otherwise you often need a travel agent to be able to put together the itinerary (that's not strictly necessary though, just the way they make it work so no technical reason they couldn't just offer non codeshare flight numbers) The…

I guess my question is, is it easier to upgrade the carrier website flight booking engines and mileage programs to deal with the original carrier flight numbers rather than upgrading all of the systems across the industry to deal with a larger name space for flight numbers universally?
Post reply on HN