Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers • Hacker News Board

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

#391

Post by tyleo » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 8:46 PM UTC

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…

I work on a system where id reuse was necessary due to memory constraints. We were identifying hundreds of thousands of objects using GUIDs and referencing the GUID of course cost the whole 128-bits. All this data also had to be networked.

We moved the system towards using arrays which are filled with object data and the index of the object in the array is now the id… the 32-bit ids were of course 4x smaller.

All this being said, we do not claim the objects to be “globally unique”.

Edit: if I could go back in time though, I still might give this pattern consideration https://lucassardois.medium.com/generational-indices-guide-8...

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

#392

Post by alfalfasprout » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 8:50 PM UTC

tengbretson wrote: post #15

Havoc wrote: post #11

The entire aviation industry feels like it is in need of a tech stack 100% rebuild. Systems like Sabre are 60+ years old.

I don't disagree, but in 2024 where on earth could you staff large enough team to do such a task with developers that are self-disciplined enough to do it safely?

More importantly, they wouldn't be able to pay for the talent to pull this off. Also, due to how government contracts work it would almost assuredly end up staffed by eg; Raytheon, Booz Allen, or some other contractor which would hire bottom of the barrel contractors, give them minimal resources, next to no flexibility in requirements, and pocket the money.

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

#393

Post by alfalfasprout » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 8:53 PM UTC

wenc wrote: post #59

labster wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Researchers and academics did pretty well on weather models, which are much more important to safety than aviation software, because you can’t just disable severe weather for a few days.

Weather forecasting is a science problem. Flight codes -- and making sure they don't break systems -- is a software engineering problem. Different skillsets. I know folks who work at national labs. They have neither the skillset nor the interest to do this kind of work. (I am a researcher)

Strongly agreed. What makes this hard is not something novel algorithmically or in squeezing the last little bit of performance out.

It's the monumental effort of coordination across many, many entities running legacy software and doing so in a way that doesn't take down critical infrastructure in the process.

It's very, very difficult but in a completely different way to building weather modeling systems.

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

#394

Post by nottorp » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 8:53 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #366

nottorp wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. W…

> "NPt makes perfect sense for SOHO IPv6 Multi-WAN deployments." Wait, they agree with me. Well yeah, without implementing BGP and controlling your public prefixes its the only way to have multi-WAN deployments, and chances are home users aren't messing with BGP. Most users will get by fine just adopting their WAN-issued prefixes. > I don't think any of my internets has failed since like 2010... mostly keeping them o…

> imagine the thousands of dollars you'll save not keeping it another decade and a half!

Uh well, i'm in eastern europe and the fiber i would give up on is in a package with the cell phones and the tv channels, so i think i wouldn't even notice it missing from the bill. And it's all iptv so I don't think I can have tv without the fiber.

The other pipe is business ish (symmetrical, no restrictions on servers) so I'm not giving up on it, I'm using it to give stuff to customers etc.

> I get there's a lot of new acronyms with it digging deep in docs. I get it sounds like there's a million ways to deploy it.

As i said, last time I asked on some forum (maybe hn, maybe ars technica) i got drowned in acronyms. Most of them for extra daemons to handle ... some config for a larger network, i guess.

And believe it or not, I didn't know until today that you can ignore your ISPs prefix and do address translation with ipv6 :) I thought you use what you get and that's all. Because that was the promise of ipv6 wasn't it? No more NAT.

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

#395

Post by alfalfasprout » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 8:55 PM UTC

andix wrote: post #239

What would stop the airlines to use more than one airline code? For example for American Airlines not only to use flight numbers like AAxxxx but also ABxxxx. AB is assigned to Air Berlin, which went out of service in 2017. Edit: A1 seems to be unassigned, which might be even better, to not create confusions.

That's my hunch too (since you can basically forget anything like 5 digit numbers of alphanumeric due to old DBs that can't be migrated easily).

Probably the issue is that lots of assumptions around AA exclusively being American Airlines is baked in somewhere. That said, it seems easier than any of the alternatives (and recycling seems excessively risky and confusing).

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

#396

Post by nottorp » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 9:03 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #372

nottorp wrote: post #369

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. 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 wha…

> I bet you probably go to this website by visiting https://209.216.230.207

What you forget is on your average home network only the last byte matters. The first 3 don't change. It's always 192.168.x.y, x is fixed so you only need to remember the y.

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

#397

Post by bongoman42 » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 9:09 PM UTC

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…

I'm currently working on some airline code. It is amazing how much legacy code written in TPF is there and how restrictive it is. A lot of stuff is designed for straight up screen scraping.

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

#398

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 9:11 PM UTC

That's easy: fork the airline. Or have you run out of 2 letters too?

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

#399

Post by 404mm » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

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.

I have one that I bet the airlines didn’t think about: split them init multiple smaller companies and restore competitive market /s

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

#400

Post by TSUTiger » Mon, Aug 05, 2024, 9:18 PM UTC

jki275 wrote: post #69

kgen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably true. But their own systems internally almost certainly have those magic letters hard coded in thousands of places.

100% facts. They do.

In prior roles, I've worked at 2 of the largest US airlines that have gone through mergers. There are lots of hard-coded letters in decades-old code that help identify what's mainline, regional, and OA (other airline). We're talking everything from reservations (booking) to revenue recognition (flight departure).

It would be no simple feat to upgrade the tech stack. Hell, some of the mergers are still lingering within the systems because airlines wanted to complete it quickly for the passengers. The backend, however, has band-aids all over the place.