Same flight number for outbound and return
 

I noticed the other day that CO #1219 flies EWR-PBI at 8am and then returns, also as CO #1219 from PBI-EWR at 12pm. When looking up flight information on CO.com, you get:

Is this common? How is this "allowed"? Seems quite confusing operationally.

Becoming more common. Solution to a flight number shortage.

Also it's possible for both to be in the air at the same time.

Though not on the same callsign -- they'd have to modify that.

I've heard UA put a letter at the end of it sometimes.

mduell ran the numbers on which letters are most likely: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/15488970-post93.html

Lots of Charlie, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Tango.

EGF used to have 2 of the same callsigns in the air on opposite sides of the country all the time until they went from 3 digit operating flight numbers to 4.
ANZ does it almost daily with flight 1 in UK and NZ airspace at the same time.

That is incorrect. Although UAL will usually put a suffix alpha character, it is common to operate two in the ATC system at the same time.

http://flightaware.com/about/faq.rvt#twoflights

Flight number and call sign are different though.

Common practice for PMUA - especially United Express segments. I guess it wasn't as common on PMCO.

False.

Source: I write air traffic monitoring software and manage an ICAO call sign and can assign flight numbers.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9700; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.668 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

This is really annoying as it drives all kinds of third-party status tracking tools (WorldMate/TripIt) nuts. Wish they wouldn't.

Yeah, I noticed reference to this in a thread linked above in the PMUA forum from several years ago. (When I had zero interest whatsoever in reading that forum...although I still really don't...)

I think even direct one-stop flights were relatively uncommon on CO. Let alone a EWR-EWR itinerary with a stop in PBI. ;)

I guess we can chalk up another change to the way PMUA did things. So much for the conspiracy theories.

I don't think there's a choice in this though -- it's either do PMUA or run out of numbers!

I noticed an interesting instance of this earlier today. Screwing around on ITA, looking for mileage runs, I noticed that XXX-BWI has a lot of routings that go XXX-IAH-EWR-BWI. Still not a good MR... except that there's a CO flight that goes IAH-SNA and then SNA-EWR, with the same flight number. And on ITA, it prices out the same as any other IAH-EWR -- for about 2000 extra miles.

(I wasn't sufficiently motivated to see if the fare would actually book on .bomb or CO.com. Also, identity of XXX is left as an exercise for the sufficiently motivated reader).

Hmm, dunno about IAH-SNA-EWR, but I do see the direct flight IAH-CLE-EWR that nets an extra 191 miles for an elite member and is a permitted component of an -iah-ewr- routing: LAX-IAH-CLE-EWR-BWI is allowed on a UA K fare (but not the equivalent CO fare with -IAH-EWR- routing).