Hawai'i flight numbers re-allignment

[ContUNITEus]

Just a curious thing, to see how they roundtripped one flight number - 691 PHX-HNL-PHX. Interesting to see this. Has any other airline ever done this, or currently have this?

It's also nice to see how the flight numbers are being cleaned up and realigned per market, sort of like they did with the European routes as 7XX flight numbers and 8XX South America.

 

[robbedagain]

3847 phl bwi phl

ive seen it before not sure why they do that from time to time or what the occasion is but may be it might have something to do with the merger

 

[FWAAA]

A couple weeks ago, AA did this with nearly every Eagle regional flight number and yesterday morning, following the weekend load of schedule changes, AA did it to many mainline flights as well. Problem is, AA has about 3,800 flights between mainline and Eagle and US has about 3,200 total flights. Add in all the codeshares on other airlines and they were going to run out of numbers if they didn't assign the same number to both directions. The range of available numbers is just 0001 thru 9999 less all the retired memorial numbers (11, 77, 191, 587, etc).

Additionally, AA brought back a lot of "direct" or "through" flights where the same flight number applies even though there's a change of planes at the hub, like AUS-DFW-LHR.

 

[WorldTraveler]

DL increased its use of RT flight numbers for the very same reason post NW merger when the volume of flight numbers increased dramatically. There are very few N. American single segment flight numbers anymore other than for codeshares.

There has been talk about using alphanumeric flight numbers but many distribution systems can't support it and it is confusing given that airline codes can be alphanumeric as well.

 

[tadjr]

Not only do they now have round robin flights, there are many flights that now look like WN flight routings. 417 goes BOS-CLT-ORD-PHX-SFO....687 runs SAN-PHX-EWR-CLT-SLC. There are quite a few of these out there now. Saw UA flight the same way. Their evening flight from TPA leaving at 7-ish goes TPA-IAH-LAS-EWR running as a red eye on the last leg. Expect to see some interesting routings coming up as the flight numbers and routings start to change.

 

[UPNAWAY]

[sub]American and US are also eleminated any duplicate flight numbers so they can code share quickly once the merger is approved.[/sub]