Retiring flight numbers
 

It's well known that airlines usually permanently retire a flight number after they have a fatal crash. In fact, United took some flak last year when they accidentally reused flight numbers from the UA flights that were crashed on 9/11.

But I'm wondering, do airlines ever retire flight numbers from incidents on other airlines?

Google has a cool feature that you can Google a flight number and it will return the status. It's a quicker way to get the current info than going to the airline website or to a site like flightaware.

Well, I often fly on AA 447, so during a recent delay, I Googled "AA flight 447". The first two search results (shown right below the Google flight status) were flightaware and flightstats. But most of the rest of the page was search results with information about Air France 447, which vanished into the Atlantic in 2009, killing 228 people...

I don't believe there's much of a pattern. Both UA and DL still use 800 (though AA doesn't), while AA still uses Flight 1 despite a fatal crash on the same route where all onboard died.

Not always are flight numbers retired after crash. United 267 crashed at SLC in 1965 killing 43. 727 flying LGA-CLE-ORD-DEN-SLC. Strange thing 267 is flying todaPy LGA-DEN-BIl so not only is UA 267 still flying operating out of 2 of the same airports it did on the day of the 1967 crash including the very airport it last left DEN when it crashed approaching SLC.







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Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.1030 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

A while back, I posted in another FT thread to the effect that AA 1 continues to operate, despite there being three prior fatal crashes under that flight number.

From Wikipedia's "American Airlines" article:

"January 14, 1936: A Douglas DC-2-120 operating as American Airways Flight 1 crashed near Goodwin, Arkansas, killing all 17 people on board. Cause undetermined.

October 30, 1941: American Airlines Flight 1, a Douglas DC-3 en route from New York City to Detroit with two stopovers at Buffalo and Chicago, stalled and dived into a plowed field over St. Thomas, Ontario in Canada killing all 20 on board after circling to look for a place to land. Cause undetermined.

March 1, 1962: American Airlines Flight 1, a Boeing 707, crashed shortly after takeoff from Idlewild airport due to a maintenance error causing rudder failure. All 95 people onboard were killed. At the time, it was the nation's highest death toll involving a single commercial airplane."