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Thread: How do Airline Assign Flight Numbers?
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Old Jul 15, 2005 | 12:54 pm
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SJC1K
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Originally Posted by spike74
Seems like major international flights get low numbers and short small city-small city flights get high numbers. How does it work at each airline?
You've identified a pattern that many airlines follow, but AFAIK there's no rule.

Usually codeshares have a designated, rather high range. For example, UA-marketed flights on SkyWest (flown as United Express) are in the 6000s. I think UA codeshares on US are in the 2000s.

UA often pairs consecutive numbers, at least for international flights. UA888 is PEK-SFO; UA889 is SFO-PEK. UA888 is surely deliberately chosen--8 is a very auspicious number in Chinese culture. The number 4 is very inauspicious (it sounds like the word for "death"), so if the PEK-SFO flight were UA444 it would be very lightly traveled (at least by Chinese).

I remember once flying flight 1776 from LAX to BOS, I think on DL. I was pretty sure that was deliberate too.

Anybody else have examples of obviously significant flight numbers? Is there a 321 or 3210 to MCO (the major airport nearest to Cape Canaveral)?
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