"Direct" flights would be okay if:
- No "change of gauge" (switching aircraft) was permitted.
- The second leg was not allowed to leave until the first leg arrived (plus time to allow pax & bags to connect).
- For any misconnection on a "direct" flight, regardless of cause (e.g. weather), stranded pax had to be considered IDBs.
Of course 1 implies 2, and 3 would probably be tantamount to a ban on the practice.
I would only rely on a "direct" flight if it was, for all intents and purposes, guaranteed to operate with one aircraft. Say EWR-XXX-IAH (10am-11am...noon-2pm) where XXX has only one inbound flight in morning (and has no maintenance facilities).
Originally Posted by
dkul
The "direct flight" is the major reason, but another less obvious reason is that the airline would run out of numbers (due IT limitations). At its peak, XJT was running 1300 daily flights as COEX, no way to give each individual flight a separate number.
Why not? There are ~10,000 available numbers for CO. The current schedule allocates about 1700 numbers for COEX flights (XE and RP; I assume "at it's peak" means before RP).
I assume that the amusing situation when both segments of the same flight are airborne at once (i.e. delay on the inbound) means that the separate numbers are not
really required (the official flight # has to be changed.)
That being said; as far as I can see,
there is no reason that two flights operating on the same day with the same flight number must be one "direct" flight. If a flight number can run twice in a day as a direct flight, it could operate as two totally independent flights with even fewer problems. For example:
CO1234 XXX-WWW 8am-9am
CO1234 ZZZ-YYY 5pm-7pm
This basically eliminates the problem of having the same flight airborne twice at the same time. It would cause even less confusion than the current situation (where you have to specify origin/destination), as the two flights would have no airport in common.