Originally Posted by
Peter47
As I have posted before, I have a strong dislike of the approach adopted by some carriers such as American of giving an inbound and outbound flight, generally operated by the same aircraft, the same number. This can definitely cause confusion when looking up flights using a tracking website.
It's hard to see what other option a carrier like AA has. When you take into account all the codeshare flights that are allocated AA marketing flight numbers, it's likely that there simply aren't enough unique flight numbers to go round.
So it you're going to duplicate flight numbers, you could argue that the least confusing way is to assign them to a given route in both directions. That doesn't break any of the scheduling rules. AA393, for example, operates DFW-MEX and MEX-DFW daily (and uses a different aircraft on each leg).