Originally Posted by
bmwe92fan
This whole flight number thing seems to be a black box to me - two days ago I was on a flight number that actually belonged to two different flights at the same time! One was in flight from XXX-YYY and the other was in flight from AAA-BBB - and they were in different parts of the country! I think the first flight was massively delayed - and this situation occurred bc of the "reuse" of flight numbers resulting in two flights in the air at once - glad we weren't close to each other! I only realized this when I was on wifi checking flight status for my flight number and it came up as in flight in two different places lol...
The air traffic control system would take care of that, by either appending a letter after the number (e.g. UAnnnT) or having a different flight number altogether for one of the flights (as I recall pmUA has 9000-series numbers for this purpose, so one would be UAnnn and the other UA9nnn).