Flight numbers

[DVR6K]

Hi all,

I ask a lot of daft meaningless questions. Allow me to present to you the latest...

How does an airline determine what flight numbers it is going to use??

I know that some use flight numbers according to the base of the aircraft. For example I seem to recall that all Airtours / MyTravel flights from LUT were 600's with the return flight being one number more than the outbound.

And I know that BA use different sequences of flight numbers for all their different franchises.

But the other day I was at Dundee and noticed that Scot Airways have a few flights to and from LCY using the same a/c every day but the flight numbers seem to have no pattern about them. Some were 3 digit, some were 4 digit.

Remember seeing a thread about BMI callsigns and the recital of most of the alphabet after the flight number to avoid confusion in the air. I tried to find it, but unless it was on pages 43 to 20935 of my search, I had no luck.

Cheers!

[Big Tudor]

In the days when CityFlyer was a BA franchise they were allocated flight numbers in the 8000-8199 sequence, 80XX or 81XX being the common denominator. Each destination would have its own identifier and that would be the 3rd number. The last number was whichever flight of the day it was. For example DUB was 8080-8089, NCL was 8070-8079. The callsign was also linked to the flight number and destination, ie BA8081 would have callsign Flyer 81DA, 81 for flight number BA8081, D for route DUB and A indicating it was outbound. Got confusing when you had more than one destination starting with same letter. Dusseldorf used F as the route identifier.

Some flights were designated as through flights, i.e. LBA-LGW-DUS so the LGW-DUS leg would be flown as a LBA flight number. Could be that ScotAirways are operating Dundee-City-Somewhere else on the same principle?

[Old Smokey]

DVR6K,

There's no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers. I hope that this is not one of them.

Generally, it's up to the airline's own numbering convention. I've worked for 2 airlines and each had it's own numbering system.

Usually it's Odds (or Evens) outbound, and Evens (or Odds) back to home base / home country. Alternatively, Odds North and West, Evens South and East.

Singapore Airlines (SQ) uses blocks of numbers for particular regions, e.g. 60's Thailand, 70's Philippines, 100's Malaysia / Indonesia, 200's Australia and New Zealand, 300's Europe, 400's India / Middle East, 800's China (I wonder why), 900's Japan etc. A few of the old low digit numbers are preserved for the old 'early days' traditional routes, e.g. SQ 001 to Hong Kong.

You've got to listen very carefully when some other operator is on the same frequency with the same flight number.

[Daysleeper]

http://www.bvag.net/Divisions/flightnumber.php?div=bcs

[DVR6K]

Aaah, interesting. It appears there IS method to the madness. I never thought that airlines use particular numbers for flights to a particular country so to look at a group of flight numbers going to different places would confuse. As indeed it did.

Cheers all, once again the PPruNe posse (or "kru" if you like) has come up trumps.