Airlines Are Running Out Of Flight Numbers, And They Don’t Know What To Do About It
by Gary Leff
Airlines use up to four digits for flight numbers. That means they can have up to 9,999 flights (since there’s no flight zero), and no one comes close. American Airlines operates around 6,700 daily flights including its American Eagle regional services. So they should have plenty of room to grow!
Except they don’t. American Airlines, Delta, and United are running out of flight numbers, and nobody knows what to do about it.
In fact, this topic came up at an American Airlines employee meeting last week. After the airline’s second quarter earnings call, top executives talk to employees and take questions. A worker in IT raised it: “We’re running out of flight numbers. Are we looking at 5-digit or some other solution?”
The airline’s Senior Vice President or Network Planning Brian Znotins laid out the challenge and what they’re doing about it.
- They actually have more than 9,999 flights that they want to put their flight number on
- That’s because they have partners where they codeshare. They want to sell American Airlines ‘flights’ from Doha to cities in India and Pakistan, for instance. They want to sell American Airlines flights that are operated by Alaska Airlines.
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):
With consolidation in the industry, airlines have been running out of flight numbers. …[Codeshares have caused us to be] running out of flight numbers. We have more than 9,999 flights that we would like to go out and number. And so ways to save flight numbers, we actually have a model that goes and conserves flight numbers so that we can continue to add where we want to. Our regional partners…we have to add flight number ranges for that.
Believe it or not there’s a whole body of work that revolves around flight numbers and it’s not just 1989 to Kansas City for the Super Bowl.
Needless to say, the actual answer to the question is we run through-flights and we also do something called an ‘out and back flight number’ where a flight going to a station will have the same flight number as the return flight back to the hub, and that’s also so we can conserve flight numbers.
Now on the technical side we’re working in systems that originated in the 60s. We have two-letter airline codes and we have four-digit flight numbers. You think of this as like a Y2K issue if you remember that. It is immensely difficult to find ways to add another digit to this field, and it’s really only a problem for three airlines in the world. The remaining airlines don’t run into this issue.
So for us, and other two big competitors, we found workarounds for it. And I think the technology investment would be too great…
The computer systems airlines use are built on top of systems that are built on top of systems that date back sixty years. So it’s hard to adjust for this. And, as with Y2k, older systems economized on data size for storage and processing reasons. Abbreviations were used. For instance that’s how United Airlines elite status levels got their names, “1K” was used instead of 1000K or 100,000 mile status because they only had two digits to designate it. It was meant as an internal tag, not to be public with customers, but it eventually stuck.
Back in April, American Airlines shifted their flight numbers so that mainline flights extended not only from 1 to 2,999 but out to 3,139.
They also still have fun with flight numbers for instance running flight 1776 between Philadelphia and Boston; flight 1492 to Columbus; AAA777 to Las Vegas; and flight 420 to Denver.
And American Airlines CEO Robert Isom chimed in on the answer to the question about limits to flight numbers noting that “we have aspirations to be a lot bigger, so over time let’s put that down as a project.”
