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Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers

viewfromthewing.com

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

#371

Post by drdaeman »

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.

Searching a large codebase for a constant (like "DL", plus tracing all related variable use if something is assigned this or related value), and replacing the logic is a relatively easy kind of change. Especially in the modern day when we got all those nice semantic analysis and code transformation tools.

Especially if they got proper tests.

Certainly way easier than replacing use of a deprecated API (and people do this kind of stuff all the time).

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

#372

Post by vel0city »

nottorp wrote: post #369
vel0city wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of machines at home and yet having DNS tied to DHCP or running mDNS is too much of a hassle. I would hate to have to remember even the last octet of all my machines in my house. Instead it's just the simple names. The numbers underneath can all change whenever, it doesn't matter. Until I start calling my kids by an octet a name will be easier to remember instead of "is that north camera 101 or 105 or 113 or..."…

> Lots of machines at home and yet having DNS tied to DHCP or running mDNS is too much of a hassle. Yes. I have no problem remembering the numbers. Illegal?

I bet you probably go to this website by visiting https://209.216.230.207 since that's way easier to remember than https://news.ycombinator.com

I mean why would anyone really care to deal with DNS anyways, just a bunch of fluff. Real IT admins just memorize IP addresses. Why would I bother dealing with all that DNS hassle?

If its easier to remember this site by its name, why wouldn't it also be easier to remember what your file share's host is by just remembering its name instead of some collection of digits? Do you remember people by their phone numbers or by their names?

Having functional local DNS is not complicated these days. On tons of systems it comes out of the box, you almost have to go out of your way to not make it work. You need to actively try to not use it.

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

#373

Post by fellowniusmonk »

pixl97 wrote: post #321
daemin wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Is this anything other than a problem the big 3 have made for themselves for what are essentially marketing reasons?

Is codeshare as a "solution" really the best solution or is it just the best solution that also meets the marketing teams requirements?

Do smaller airlines even care for a solution? Wouldn't a global industry wide solution basically be the big 3 bullying the smaller players to spend tons of money so the big 3 can juice their own mindshare?

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

#374

Post by drdaeman »

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.

Just do it right please and make sure every flyer gets at least four last groups and two last digits of the fourth group to themselves. ;)

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

#375

Post by kelnos »

burnte wrote: post #368
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. There's an EMR/EHR we use at my employer that reuses UUIDs. If an appointment is moved/rescheduled, the UUID is reused for that appointment meaning the UUID is no longer UU. It causes major issues with other apps that interact with the EMR/EHR, to the point we hav…

That seems... fine... to me? It's not a different appointment; the time has just been changed. It feels like that's a bug with the other apps: they are assuming that they can cache all metadata associated with an appointment and that nothing will ever change, but that's a bad assumption.

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

#376

Post by kelnos »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #98
gentle wrote: post #83

I love that so many people here think they can think about the problem for 10 seconds and come up with a solution that hasn't already been considered a thousand times and discarded.

Any well-written article should anticipate, ask, and answer the obvious questions. For example: Why not use alphanumeric characters? And if the answer isn't known by the sources the writer quotes, the writer should say so.

> Why not use alphanumeric characters?

This suggestion is also obviously trivially discarded: it is safe to assume that many, many, many systems expect only numbers in those fields, and will blow up if they encounter letters.

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

#377

Post by kelnos »

conductr wrote: post #179
layer8 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Answered in this comment by “hagbard celine” under the article: https://viewfromthewing.com/airlines-are-running-out-of-flig...

That comment explains the issue but exaggerates the impact. Sure, a change can be made and alphanumeric may not be right. No it won't be anything like the recent Crowdstrike issues. The impact of making a change on downstream systems is solved by planning it out. Communicating the intent and setting a switch over date. Some people may not heed the notices and their systems will crash. That's unfortunate, but just lik…

> Some people may not heed the notices and their systems will crash

Some of these systems are indirectly responsible for keeping people safe and alive. This "oh well, you should have paid attention and taken care of it" attitude won't fly.

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

#378

Post by pasc1878 »

kelnos wrote: post #375
burnte wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There's an EMR/EHR we use at my employer that reuses UUIDs. If an appointment is moved/rescheduled, the UUID is reused for that appointment meaning the UUID is no longer UU. It causes major issues with other apps that interact with the EMR/EHR, to the point we hav…

That seems... fine... to me? It's not a different appointment; the time has just been changed. It feels like that's a bug with the other apps: they are assuming that they can cache all metadata associated with an appointment and that nothing will ever change, but that's a bad assumption.

Well that would depend on what the written specification of that id is.

Is it the id of the appointment at that time or is it the id for the appoint meant.

Seems like the originator chose the latter and the others the former.

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

#380

Post by kelnos »

whizzter wrote: post #329
tyingq wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

It's not ego, it's marketing, loyalty, and customer comfort.

Passengers don't want to see "multiple airlines" in their itinerary. They wonder if the baggage allowances are the same, and if those bags will make it all the way to the final destination. They wonder if they'll get miles on their "main" airline for the whole trip, or if it will be broken up between different loyalty programs. They wonder if the connection is actually doable time-wise, and if there's a delay, will the airlines work together to either hold the next leg for some amount of time, or rebook without hassles and fuss and each airline pointing at the other, claiming it's not their responsibility.

Codeshares solve all these problems.

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