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

321–330 of 461 posts

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

#321

Post by pixl97 »

daemin wrote: post #207
raverbashing wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ever hear the saying "If you owe the bank 1 million dollars it's your problem. If you owe the bank 10 billion dollars it's their problem".

You list listed off the largest airlines on the planet of which pretty much every other airline has to interoperate with. This isn't "AA just has to deal with it", it becomes "This is now everyones problem".

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

#322

Post by crmd »

vel0city wrote: post #276
cooljacob204 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right but for the wrong reason. You are referencing the private blocks that are designed for private use. The vast majority are not designed for private use. The reason it's not unique (using my rudamentry understanding of networking) is because multiple routers can broadcast the same IP so devices can use the closest router. However I think it's fair to say IP address are intended to be unique to an org while…

> You are referencing the private blocks that are designed for private use. Sure, but the person I'm replying to wasn't making a distinction here. They're just saying, "Have you ever changed the static IP address of a computer", where does that exclude RFC1918 IP addresses? I'm right for the right reasons IRT to the person I'm replying to. There are IP addresses which are absolutely not globally unique in any way, sh…

Real talk.

I’ve been working in tech for 20 years, am coming off a year-long sabbatical, and for the past couple of months have been struggling with the feeling that the joy is gone and I should consider a radical career change.

Reading (what feels to me as) the aggressive pedantry of parent commenter in this thread is giving me a straight up anxiety attack. I’m not sure I have it in me anymore to be in meetings with people whose brains work this way.

Is it like this in every industry or is it more concentrated in tech? I don’t know who’s going to see this, but if you have any perspective or feedback you’d like to share, I’m all ears.

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

#324

Post by pixl97 »

jki275 wrote: post #40
maxsilver wrote: post #23

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…

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…

And there is so much functional testing that needs to occur on systems boundaries. I'm just thinking of crazy things that happen often enough like luggage getting put on the wrong flight and shipped via another carrier via agreement.

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

#325

Post by dotancohen »

ianburrell wrote: post #318
dotancohen wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv6 is seen and used directly by professionals, not the general public. Overbuilding it in the sense being mocked made sense.

The funny thing is that IPv6 is used more by general public more than professionals. Public doesn't notice that their mobile network is IPv6, or that there home internet also supports it. It is the professionals that are dragging feet upgrading the business networks. More people access Google with IPv6 on weekends, currently 46%, than on weekdays, 43%. Presumably because mobile and home networks are more likely to be…

No, IPv6 is the underlying technology behind the general consumers' internet connections, but the general public is not using IPv6. The general public has no idea what IPv6 is.

I.e. IPv6 is used by the general public, but the general public is not using IPv6.

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

#326

Post by nottorp »

vel0city wrote: post #302
nottorp wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as mine only took me an hour or so while yours took multiple days. Yeah, because the first time I had no idea what I was doing, except vague feelings about ipv4 works. Did you factor in your pre existing ipv6 knowledge when you counted just an hour? > Network Prefix Translation can be done pretty easily. What's "easily"? How many services do I need to setup? Some other helpful HNer tried to explain to me once and t…

> Do you set up complex ipv6 networks at work? Your standard was "It's unusable on your fucking home network." I've set up and managed IPv6 at work before, yes. I don't know if I'd call them "complex" networks though. Either way I set it up at home several years before. And I had been running IPv6 at home before I even bothered setting it up in a way I wanted, as my ISP's box previously had a decently competent SLAAC…

> As for this disdain of running such complicated systems like "DNS"

Disdain? I run a few bind instances for my own domains. On rented servers where they belong. I'm just opposed to having one required for my local network.

> https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/nat/npt.html

"NPt makes perfect sense for SOHO IPv6 Multi-WAN deployments." Wait, they agree with me. That there are SOHO IPv6 Multi-WAN deployments. Who would have thought?

> running around and changing the default route on all the devices on your network when a gateway goes down? What a nightmare. Just have your router have multiple WAN connections and have it do the failover for you.

It used to be that but I don't think any of my internets has failed since like 2010... mostly keeping them out of inertia. So I've never felt the need to fix the manual failover. It's not all devices anyway, just the one I'm using at the moment.

> But hey just complain about how it's just impossible and takes so much work instead of actually learning new things.

Too many new things to be exact. Most of them needless. However either people have figured out by now how to work around the ipv6 commitee to simplify things, or they were always there but whoever tried to explain ipv6 to me before had a fetish for enterprise solutions. I distinctly remember being told I need to set up at least 2-3 extra services for my dual wan setup.

Your answers are almost devoid of acronyms and "helper" services that i need to set up and learn because it sounds professional. You almost only included firewall rules :)

This was not my opinion of ipv6 before. Maybe I'll give it a chance in the future. My current setup still works "just fine" though so I need to be very bored to fuck it up.

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

#327

Post by pixl97 »

josephcsible wrote: post #290

> assigning the same flight number to more than one flight a day (although that means they need for it to be flights that would never both be in the air at the same time, such as where the same plane is used and can’t reasonably be substituted) I thought this was already common on a lot of airlines. For example, tomorrow, Southwest flight 1861 goes from MDW to DAL from 1:55pm to 4:10pm, then from DAL to SNA from 4:50…

One should note, this is why SW completely falls apart when mass weather delays or computer systems crashes occur. They have any number of 'serialized' components in their system that are efficient in optimal situations but degrade poorly.

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

#329

Post by whizzter »

tyingq wrote: post #243
jll29 wrote: post #227

> Here’s the full answer, along with how they triage the problem – for instance by assigning the same flight number to more than one flight a day (although that means they need for it to be flights that would never both be in the air at the same time, such as where the same plane is used and can’t reasonably be substituted) This sounds like it's calling for trouble! Whenever I hear that any IDs could be "recycled", I…

>Whenever I hear that any IDs could be "recycled", I make a mental note to replace the person making such a proposal from all teams that I am involved in. I understand the sentiment, but in this case, someone is trying to solve for constraints they didn't invent. Flight number was fixed to 4 digits long ago and propagates out to a lot of different systems, many not in the same company as the airline, also many being…

Seems to me like an ego issue honestly since the article points out that a large part of the bloat is from codesharing, using the actual operators code feels like an obvious solution unless egos are too fragile.

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

#330

Post by pixl97 »

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.

American Airlines has the most flights of any airline on the planet. It's kinda like saying "The person that spends $1 a day and the person that spends $1 million a day have the same standing to a business".
Post reply on HN