Oldest Flight Number/route

[dublindispatch]

Slightly curved ball question, but does anyone know what the oldest continuosly used flight number and route in the world or even europe is? As in fllight number, route airline etc

[renfrew]

It would probably turn out to be a UA/TW/AA flight going back to the thirties.
It would take an awful lot of research to prove it though.

[chiglet]

It would probably turn out to be a UA/TW/AA flight going back to the thirties.


Since TWA have gone to the wall and the others were "latecomers", I think that KLM are in with a chance, or even QANTAS.

[parabellum]

Pan Am used to have flights PA1 and PA2, they both circumnavigated the world, one east bound and one west bound but I don't know just how far back they go.

[Jofm5]

one east bound and one west bound but I don't know just how far back they go.

Didnt they go right to the back and back round ? :}

ok sorry will be quiet now :(


As an apology - this may be of interest Pan Am Route Maps (http://www.panamair.org/OLDSITE/History/routemap.htm)

[Skipness One Echo]

Think most of the BA stuff was changed when BOAC and BEA came together, some time after 1974 when the BE prefix was dropped and the "Speedbird" callsign was adopted fleetwide.

Aer Lingus have some longstanding routes to the UK from Dublin that are years old and still going strong, I wonder if a QF001 might be up there? I bet it's a Heathrow service with number being "one".

[StbdD]

A problem in following the 'oldest continuously operating airline' line of thought in searching for this answer is that the question asks for the oldest continuously used flight number.

The first flights/routes of the early companies would of course have been numbered #1, #2, etc. but might have been between 2 cow pastures and they may very well still fly that route. However, over time those flight/route numbers would presumably have been transferred to what they considered their more prestigious flagship routes. The answer therefore wouldn’t likely be a current single (or maybe even double) digit flight number.

The lineage of most US airlines in the 1920s are a bit too murky to make definitive claims possible IMO.

Most of KLM’s route structure was interrupted by WWII.

All that being said, my bet would be on a Qantas flight/route internal to Australia.

[powerstall]

Would KLM count since operations stopped during World War II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) apart from the operations in the Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean. Merged with Air France (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France) in 2004?
Qantas would be my best bet... for continuos operations. :E

[beamender99]

Think most of the BA stuff was changed when BOAC and BEA came together, some time after 1974 when the BE prefix was dropped


Some flight numbers were changed with the objective of improving inter terminal baggage flows. A good example was the South African routes which really hacked off quite a few .
Having started to change route flight numbers the whole idea was dropped.

[DeepestSouth]

My 'starter for 10'! Stand by for a bit of very sad geekery!

According to to the 1977 Guiness Book of Air Facts and Feats:

The oldest airline service still operated by the original airline company was the KLM London/Amsterdam service started on 17 May 1920 using a DH16 of Aircraft Transport and Travel piloted by H 'Jerry' Shaw. After that, all early KLM flights were operated by the same airline under charter.

Now the interesting bit ... that service still operates - Flight KLM 1000 Heathrow to Schiphol. That could be a contender!

Right - I'm off to count my collection of used rivets ... berble, berble, berble ...!

Regards

DS

[Groundloop]

Would KLM count since operations stopped during World War II apart from the operations in the Dutch Antilles in the Caribbean.

Are you sure? Didn't a number of KLM aircraft get out the Netherlands before the advancing Germans and then operated out of Bristol during the war in association with BOAC?

[WHBM]

Flight numbers were not used in Europe pre-WW2. There were what were termed Line Numbers, but these were from a Europe-wide coordinated numbering system and were the same in both directions, so more akin to railway timetable Table Numbers. For information of those writing above about KLM, all the KLM Line Numbers were in the 500 series under this scheme. Line Number 1 was a Lufthansa flight, and they appear to have done the coordination of the scheme.

There were flight numbers in use in the USA in the 1930s. A quick glance shows American had a flight 3 New York to Los Angeles in 1937, via many waypoints, and they still have an AA 3 as a nonstop on this route today, 62 years later, so this could be a contender. No other flight numbers on the route (there were multiple daily operations even in 1937) coincide between these two points.

[Liffy 1M]

Certainly, quite a few flight numbers have remained largely unchanged for several decades, especially on what might be termed prestige routes. In this regard some well-known European ones would be KL641 (AMS-JFK), LH400 (FRA-JFK), AZ610 (FCO-JFK), LO006 (WAW-JFK) and EI105 (DUB-JFK). As a matter of interest, note the caption to this 1962 photo:

Photos: Douglas DC-7C Seven Seas Aircraft Pictures | Airliners.net (http://tinyurl.com/mqjyef)

[Tim Zukas]

It depends on what you mean by "route". AA flight 2 started in the 1950s as an LAX-IDL nonstop (probably on DC-7) and I think it has existed continuously since then. Flight 1 had a short gap when the 707 first appeared, and I vaguely recall flight 3 hasn't been continuous either, but maybe AA 4 has been.

Anybody got a timetable after 1955 or so that doesn't show AA 2 and AA 4?

If you're asking which route has been continuously operated the longest by one airline, Atlanta-Birmingham on Delta will be hard to beat-- something like 75 years.