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Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

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

#201

Post by xattt »

ginko wrote: post #171
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.

Why do airlines even need separate flight numbers for codeshare flights? Why not just use the flight number of the operating airline in the booking? IMO it's just confusing for passengers as well.

I feel the real reason is also why badge engineered cars also exist: market capture.

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

#202

Post by pantulis »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #197

A lot of the software used to coordinate this stuff is very ancient at this point. The fix is straightforward from a technical point of view but super complicated to implement because it involves replacing/fixing half a century old software systems in use in thousands of companies across the industry. Probably a lot of cobol and other crap that is still in use for this.

And if you thought flight numbers are complicated, wait until you see what is in the future for PNR codes:

https://www.iata.org/en/programs/airline-distribution/retail...

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

#204

Post by HPsquared »

ginko wrote: post #171
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.

Why do airlines even need separate flight numbers for codeshare flights? Why not just use the flight number of the operating airline in the booking? IMO it's just confusing for passengers as well.

More jobs for everyone.

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

#205

Post by [deleted] »

lxgr wrote: post #155
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.

Having multiple prefixes per airline doesn't seem trivial, given that this historically wasn't a thing. I could imagine a bazillion code snippets of if flightNumber.startsWith(OUR_AIRLINE_CODE) that might be incredibly painful to fix on short notice.

[deleted]

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

#206

Post by lxgr »

globular-toast wrote: post #167
lxgr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could imagine many legacy systems identifying “their” flights based on the alphanumeric prefix alone (as opposed to doing a database lookup).

Yep. Not only a ton of software would make this assumption, but a ton of human-based processes too. Lesson: if you make your IDs easily decodable, people will decode them and use them directly instead of whatever API you intended them to use.

According to Hyrum's law, this is an API :)

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

#207

Post by daemin »

raverbashing wrote: post #195
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…

True And that's why they should have started thinking about this 20 years ago (or even before that) Thinking of something like this: every new development and maintenance should be done with 5 digits in mind. While keeping it backwards compatible for 4 digits

There was no need to have 5 digit codes or more than 0-9 for the flight numbers 20 years ago. Arguably there isn't a need now. It's 3 airlines in the entire world which have this issue because they want to have their own 4000 flights plus codeshare more than 6000 other flights from partner companies.

This is a problem for people inside those 3 airlines to solve within the constraints that the current living world has imposed on them.

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

#208

Post by daemin »

hans_castorp wrote: post #132

The headline is a bit misleading. Because it's not "airlines" in general, but: > and it’s really only a problem for three airlines in the world.

It's 3 airlines in the USA that have this problem because they want to add more codeshare flights that other airlines are running.

I don't think there will be enough motivation from the rest of the world to solve this problem any time soon.

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

#209

Post by philjohn »

blahedo wrote: post #139

I'm remembering the ISBN switch, which I thought would throw off some older systems—and it probably did, but it took so long to happen that the transition ended up being pretty smooth. The key element was that for a solid ten years or so, every book had both an old-style and a new-style ISBN (and possibly some still do). I'm hoping that behind the scenes they really are looking at a better plan than just "work around…

I still love the bit of book trivia that since 13 digit EAN's start with a country code, you can convert an ISBN-10 into an ISBN-13 by prepending it with the code for "book land" - 978.

(I worked on Library Management Software for 6 years).

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