GRALISTAIR

I am an experienced flyer and I have made this rookie mistake. My wife's flight a few months back was DL65 MAN-ATL which got delayed 26 hours due to an MX issue.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/delta...cancelled.html

So she flew back the following day. I saw DL65 arriving on time. Well of course that was DL65 for that day - they (DL I assume) had made the delayed flight DL9865 which ended up being about 26 hours late. I felt a fool because I told my family it was on time and had landed safely - it had not. DL65 had landed safely and DL 9865 was still in the air.

sidneysit

CO used to have the same flight number (#1010) for the segment EWR--->SNA and SNA--->EWR before the schedule and flight number are reassigned after merging with UA. However, both flights have different schedule. Also, the same plane is used for both segments, meaning that the outbound flight of EWR has to arrive at SNA and then turn around to get back to EWR. So the chance of having two flight in the air at the same time is non-existent. You still have to be careful, though, that when you look up information regarding the flight such as on-time performance.

shingu79

Why not just institute a NO SAME FLIGHT NUMBER in rolling 7 day period?
or even 3 day rolling period.

Common sense is so uncommon these days...

MSP-MN

You way over-estimate FAA systems. The system that processes flight plans, while being sold as "Next-Gen," still runs off 1970's technology at the moment. Usually airlines will catch when there will be a duplicate, and change one of the flight numbers (ie SKW4737 and SKW473K) however sometimes they don't. The only indication ATC usually gets in the tower is when the the datablock (the little tag with Call Sign, altitude, speed, etc.) doesn't link up to the radar track because there is already some plane, somewhere in the air, with the same call sign already. However this lack of data can be caused by several other things as well, so the controller has to figure out what has gone wrong and try to fix it. There is no error message to explain what is going on, just no data at all. BTW, he/she is doing all of this while an unidentified radar blip is rapidly leaving their airspace, so they have to co-ordinate with adjacent controllers so they know what is going on as well. It's easy to see where confusion can take place.

milepig

In the case of large carrier, they'd run out of numbers.

Calchas

Earlier in the topic, I gave a direct counter example to your statement, showing it happened at least once on two AA flight sharing the same call sign. (Unless, that is, you have reasons to doubt the airline pilot's blog in question.)

sbm12

Not anymore. UA does have a special block of flight numbers for "extra sections" but it is no longer as simple as prefacing the flight number with a 9. The current pool for mainline extra sections is 1745 - 1764 for sCO and 9740 - 9759 for sUA; 9800-9999 are used mostly for codeshares.

Full list for UA flight number assignments is on page 95 of the timetable: http://www.united.com/CMS/UADocument.../timetable.pdf.

t325

Why do airlines do this? I understand keeping the same flight number if the DEN-PHL flight in the above example is operated by the same plane as SFO-DEN. I can't think of a good reason for re-using a flight number when it's a different plane though, it's not like there's a shortage of flight numbers.

ChrL

Are you sure they allow it? According to the DOT a direct flight does not involve a change of plane:

"direct flight (intermediate stop, no change of planes)"

http://www.dot.gov/airconsumer/plane...-flight-delays

jrl767

apparently marketing trumps complying with government-provided definitions

ROCAT

-----