How do Airlines Assign Flight Numbers?
 

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?

it really doesn't work any way, except that the old rule was that a flight that was primarily east-west/west-east was an even numbered flight and north-south/south-north was an odd numbered flight.. at least waayyyyy back.. now, things are just whatever they assign it as..

there are a few that seem to be "connected"

QF93 is mel-lax
QF94 is LAX-mel

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)?

Lucky number!
 

WN has had a flight 711 for years from SAT to LAS. :cool:

How about NWA Flight # 1492 - MSP to CMH (Columbus).

Also, some airlines will keep a general range for flights serving a particular region. For example, most (all?) UA flights to/from Asia are 8xx. All NW flights to/from Asia are single digit or low-2-digit numbers. (Not sure where the transition occurs to to/from AMS flights because SFO-NRT is 27/28 and I'm sure there's a 3x between DTW and AMS)

More on the same: NW SJC-MSP are 19x, SFO-MSP are in the 35x-36x range etc etc.

Each individual airline has its own numbering scheme. However, there are some general guiding principles that tend to be followed.

Westbound/Northbound/Clockwise are odd-numbered while Eastbound/Southbound/Counterclockwise are even-numbered

Many airlines use certain ranges to denote certain regions of operations. For example Air India uses 1xx for NA/Europe flights, 2xx for Africa, 3xx for East Asia, 4xx for SE Asia, 5xx for Russia, 6xx for Domestic, 7xx-9xx for Middle East.

Yet other airlines incorporate the day of operation into the flight number on a certain route. Eg. flight 1011 on Monday, 1012 on Tuesday, 1013 on Wednesday, etc...

I remember being on a cell phone call at ORD once in one of the UAL areas, and I was distracted when I overheard: "Flight 1776 with service Philadelphia is now boarding." True story... this was in 2003, if I recall.

In my experience, the "flagship" / most popular / most prestigous long haul route is generally flight number 1/2/100/101.

Examples: QR001, EK001, GF001 to Heathrow, VS001 to Newark and others

Indeed, LHR-JFK on Concorde was flight BA1. JFK-LHR on Concorde was flight BA2.

I once suggested to a client that flight "419" should go to Lagos.

They were not amused. :p

Don't know if it's the case with any airline, but flights to Orlando (or perhaps Melbourne, FL?) should be numbered 321. The Space Coast was able to snag 321 as its phone area code when the numbers were reassigned not too long ago. I wonder if they had to pay for it.

That's really quite funny; good one! ^

United has a flight SFO-BUR that is Flight 1187. The BUR tower frequency is 118.700.

And Independence Air's two daily flights from IAD to LAS are Flight 7 and Flight 11.