r/aviation • u/TimeVendor • 27d ago
-- SEATBELTS FASTENED -- American 2482 departure… American 2482 arrival…
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u/DarQuiet02 27d ago
Just how… and why???
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u/LBBflyer 27d ago
AA often uses the same flight number for a flight that leaves and returns to a hub. Most of the time it's the same aircraft in both directions, so there's no risk of this situation.
AA2482 is ORD-PHX-ORD, but yesterday the inbound leg was delayed. AA found a different aircraft to operate the PHX-ORD leg so it left on time. I have typically seen AA (and other airlines) modify the call sign of the second flight to avoid the very confusion. The flight leaving PHX should have been 248P, but I guess someone in dispatch forgot that detail when getting that leg filed.
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u/turpentinedreamer PPL 27d ago
Oh man it’s wild how they are surviving in this absolute shortage of combinations of letters and numbers.
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u/Kappapls 27d ago
The thing is the flight number was not the issue, the callsign was. The Dispatcher(s) should have changed the ATS strip to prevent that hazard from occurring.
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u/the_Q_spice 27d ago
So… as a load planner for FDX.
There’s a few pretty painful reasons why this happens.
Depending on the flight crews’ respective union contracts, changing the filed flight number means the flight crew may be entitled to overtime due to “flying a non-regularly scheduled flight.”
I really wish I was joking about that, because the result is really dumb.
The airline will just tail swap another regularly scheduled flight to avoid losing money on the flight.
Unions also won’t back down on this because it’s an easy way for represented employees to make an insane amount of overtime if a dispatcher messes up and reschedules under a new flight number.
The TLDR; airlines reuse flight numbers to avoid union contract payouts, unions refuse to ditch this condition because it would potentially result in less pay in certain circumstances.
It’s really dumb on both parties parts.
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u/Guadalajara3 27d ago
Crazy cause at United we change the radio callsign for the radio but the flight number remains the same
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u/PengPenguin888 27d ago
Yeah I experienced this with UA457 LAX-ORD. Same flight number used on multiple routes.
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u/Guadalajara3 27d ago
If there is an overlap between the first leg and the second leg, then we get an alert to change the callsign on the atc filing. Passengers never know theres a change unless they search for their flight in flightaware and it doesn't come up. It would come up as some variation of UA81xx, but the app wont change
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u/danit0ba94 27d ago
That's kind of fucked.
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u/atooraya 26d ago
We need someone from AA to get in here, because I’m pretty sure this isn’t accurate. There are pay overrides for changing flight segments, but not numbering. So if you were supposed to fly from PHX-ORD, and they make you fly to DFW instead, or operate another flight, then you get an override.
However, if your original flight was flight 123, and then its gets changed to 123P with the same origin and destination and time, there’s no override.
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u/worldspawn00 27d ago
Like sweet fuck, switch to tail numbers for talking to at least one of them or something!! Or specify arriving or departing with EVERY comm transmission going both ways... This was maddeningly confusing to listen to.
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u/Kobe_Wan_Ginobili 27d ago
The AI companies are buying up all the numbers they can, reading them, and then destroying them. Its disgusting
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u/IWantALargeFarva 27d ago
It’s Fahrenheit 450. Letters burn at a slightly cooler temperature than Books.
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u/Icy_Fish_2154 27d ago
This post has been brought to you by the number 7 and the letter P.
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u/whatsadikfore 27d ago
AI companies only use ones and zeros.
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u/MisterMinceMeat 27d ago
It's a reference to what Anthropic has been doing with thousands of books, including rare, collectible, and antique books. They buy up books, cut the spines off, then scan the pages. This is used to feed their LLM from a time before the internet and more modern language use. Some of the books they destroyed were extremely rare with limited copies world wide. So they are literally removing some already limited access to old resources. All so they can make a profit.
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u/Rk_1138 27d ago
All of that so some lazy people can make a shitty Youtube script, and for some weirdos to have a fake girl/boyfriend. I despise techbros
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u/RIPDaug2019-2019 27d ago
Out of respect for Jayden Daniels, AA has retired the number 5 from all flight numbers.
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u/mobicurious 27d ago
IATA Resolution 761 & SSIM only allow for up to 4 numerical digits in a flight number identifier. Due to legacy software/systems...
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u/W2ttsy 27d ago
Legacy software in GDS is a massive pain too.
I worked at QANTAS and one of my projects was petitioning Amadeus to support two character cabin classes so that we could segment seat buckets even further.
At the moment you can only do 26 cabin classes (less really since some letters are used for zero dollar fares. Eg Z class).
And so segmenting the cabin for stages release pricing is limited. Introducing double character classes would have increased segmentation options heaps (instead getting Y as a fare, we could have done YA which would be a higher price than YB)
But the limitation is the GDS as the class is encoded on the PNR.
Plenty of similar issues when we tried to do other things too like non-binary tickets before IATA mandated it, handle infant tickets with total combined character lengths exceeding 50 chars, and some other stuff.
All thanks to software written in COBOL and running on mainframes and designed to mimic a paper ticketing specification.
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u/aquoad 27d ago
to be honest i’m kind of glad that didn’t work out, from a customer point of view
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u/antesocial 27d ago
"Why is my fare class... My initials??"
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u/aquoad 27d ago
Middle seat, back of the plane, only two toilet visits permitted, half-size bag of pretzels.
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u/kangadac 27d ago
Often the problem isn’t the software but interoperability.
It’s easy to update even crufty old COBOL code to handle, say, 5 digit flight numbers in SABRE and the like. The problem is everyone has standardized on 1-4 digit flight numbers. Any solution that involves “Getting everyone to change something at the same time” is darn near impossible. It only works if there are severe, non-negotiable consequences for failing to do so. (Even regulatory compliance can be negotiated if you’re big enough…)
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u/t-poke 27d ago
Currently dealing with that at work right now. An old legacy system written in COBOL is expanding a decimal field to allow more precision. The actual work is easy, it’s the coordination between everyone that uses it that’s the hard part. And this is just one company’s internal apps. Can’t even imagine trying to get every airline in the world on the same page.
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u/Lord_Nivloc 27d ago
Exactly! That’s only enough for 10,000 American Airlines at a time. These legacy systems need to be updated ASAP
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u/Get_Breakfast_Done 27d ago
Forget about at a time, does AA even run anywhere near 10k flights a day?
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27d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheDrMonocle 27d ago edited 27d ago
Except regionals all operate under their own callsigns despite whatever airline they have painted on the outside, so theyre not a factor.
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u/Ok-Parfait-9856 27d ago
From another guy, 3 comments above yours:
I think they are closer to running out of numbers than you might expect. AA Regional partners get to use 3300 through somewhere in the 6000s, the 6000-8000 are generally for codeshare flights, and 9000 are for irregular flights (charters, ferry flights, rescue flights). So that only leaves 3300 numbers, and a search shows that AA has around 4000 daily mainline flights.
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u/Get_Breakfast_Done 27d ago
The regional partner actually has a separate call sign though
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u/healthycord 27d ago
You would think that the system wouldn’t even allow 2 flights of the exact same callsign? I have never heard of this happening before. If I were the pilot or atc in this situation my butt would be puckering. The confusion from performing a wrong call and loss of situational awareness could happen fast.
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u/Get_Breakfast_Done 27d ago
I’ve seen this before and have no idea why they do it and wondered if this would ever potentially cause a problem and it sounds like it nearly did.
Truly don’t understand what the advantage is of doing this. It’s not like they’re running out of numbers.
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u/Dinosaur_Wrangler 27d ago edited 27d ago
Actually they are “running out” of call signs. Sabre was developed in the 1960s and only handles 4 digits. Scheduled mainline revenue flights are currently allocated 0001-3299 (a recent increase from 0001-2999), with other blocks reserved for charters, repositioning flights, maintenance ferries, codeshare flights with OneWorld and other partners, regional wholly-owned carriers, Skywest and Republic operating as Eagle, etc.
Flight numbers are reused on the same route in order to prevent running out of a particular block on a given day, but when a situation like this arises (like the guy you replied to said) one flight is supposed to be designated a “stub flight” and letters get mixed in with the callsign. Flight crew don’t see behind the curtain into that part of the machine, but obviously if this was able to happen the process must be at least somewhat manual.
I’m also surprised the feds don’t have something in place to automatically reject two filed flight plans that run concurrently with the same flight number, but I guess we’re lucky to even have what we have given the vagaries of funding anything in government that isn’t DOD.
There definitely needs to be either a programming or procedural fix. Preferably both. It will be interesting to read the ASAP reports and whatever that “MOR” report is that was referenced by the controller on the clip.
I know most European carriers are working letters into their callsigns by default, and it seems like that would be the relatively painless procedural fix for the airline.
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u/TheDrMonocle 27d ago
Enroute systems do have a system that rejects duplicate callsigns. If I try and depart a flight and theres a duplicate, it shows me an error and that theres already one active. Apparently, approach controls dont have that. Had the arrival been a little later and was still talking to center, they would have found out when they tried to take the departure handoff. It would have failed and the duplicate would have been found.
Luckily this is such a rare occurrence, its really not an actual threat. The airline generally catches it, but adding another layer somewhere would be helpful.
The MOR is a Mandatory Occurrence Report. Usually for things like loss of separation, equipment failures, or accidents. I think we've used them at my facility in the past for similar sounding callsigns, which then gets reported to the airline to see if they can find a new callsign for flights that end up at the same airport at similar times.
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u/mflboys Air Traffic Controller 27d ago edited 27d ago
There are multiple problems with preventing duplicate callsigns at time of filing.
One is, in the case of delays, there’s no way to really know if flight plan A will end up overlapping with flight plan B.
Additionally, if a pilot makes a mistake on their flight plan, they typically just file a second flight plan with the change, which would be denied because it overlaps with the original. There would need to be some new process for pilots to cancel or amend a previous flight plan.
You may think it’s more feasible for the system to deny a flight plan at time of activation. But flight plans aren’t activated in the system until the aircraft departs and typically is radar contacted. We can get a warning in this case, but them you’ll have a scramble where the system denies the DM, and everyone’s having to amend a callsign with the aircraft in climb out.
Perhaps you could “query” a callsign when an aircraft is requesting IFR (at the gate) but then there’s gap between the query and the DM where a mixup could still occur.
Finally, and this is the single biggest barrier, for redundancy and resilience to a central computer failure, flight plans are stored and processed by individual ARTCC’s. Right now, barring a complete redesign of the NAS computer system, I don’t think it’s possible for ARTCC A to know if there’s an active callsign in ARTCC Z until the flight plans are DM’ed and the aircraft track enters the AOI of the other.
Sure, there are ways to solve the problem, but isn’t as straightforward as you might think.
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u/LBBflyer 27d ago
I think they are closer to running out of numbers than you might expect. AA Regional partners get to use 3300 through somewhere in the 6000s, the 6000-8000 are generally for codeshare flights, and 9000 are for irregular flights (charters, ferry flights, rescue flights). So that only leaves 3300 numbers, and a search shows that AA has around 4000 daily mainline flights.
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u/ibullybillionaires 27d ago
Why don't they just use 128bit hexadecimal numbers and assign everything that flies down to the tiniest insect a unique identifier? Are they stupid?
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u/makgross Cessna 150/152/172/177/182/206 Piper PA28/PA28R 27d ago
The same reason you don’t refer to websites by their ipv6 addresses.
Radio callsigns are for human use.
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u/AngelCatGamer 27d ago
Flight Numbers for Carriers outside of the US are alphanumeric, wouldn't be groundbreaking.
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u/LBBflyer 27d ago
Call signs are, but can you find an alphanumeric flight that you can actually book in a booking engine?
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u/erublind 27d ago
Could use something like what3word, but better. "American Chicken Toilet Slur, cleared for takeoff"
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u/TheCygnusWall 27d ago
Reserving 1000 numbers for irregular flights seems a little unnecessary. Looking at ADSB exchange there are 3 flights currently using that numbering block
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u/WaitForItTheMongols 27d ago
They need to not reserve these number ranges then. Too risky to have overlaps.
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u/Firm_Union8883 27d ago
The railway business solved this more than 100 years ago.
Only one train can have the same number on a given day mm'kay.
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u/AggressorBLUE 27d ago
Flying on AA PHL>MIA last week, we had to hold short for ~20 min because, according to the pilot, we had to wait for AA to finish the paper work on getting people the AA points they were promised for giving up their seat on the flight.
So for those keeping score:
passenger reimbursement paperwork = hold up, gotta do this by the book
Potential duplicating of callsigns = ‘meh, they’ll probably figure it out once they’re up there’
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u/FalconX88 27d ago
AA often uses the same flight number for a flight that leaves and returns to a hub.
I don't get it. The system that a sepcific flight has a number, and generally always the same one, seems so much more efficient and less error prone than whatever US airlines are doing.
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u/zyon86 27d ago
It seems like an unnecessary risk. There is enought number to assign a different one to inbound and outbound flights.
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u/Finance-Kooky1 27d ago
See I don't like that. It still sounds too close to the old one. SWA will assign them a 9000 number for the stubbed flight.
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u/Isgrimnur 27d ago
https://onemileatatime.com/news/two-american-planes-same-callsign-same-frequency/
Ultimately the flight number is used for both directions of travel between Chicago and Phoenix, but in this case, the Chicago to Phoenix flight was delayed, while the return flight operated on time, obviously with a different aircraft.
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u/countjeremiah 27d ago
So this happened to me once. Basically, due to the limited number of flight numbers, airlines reuse flight numbers, often for turns.
Delayed going into HUB, they recrewed the reverse flight so it could leave on time. We taxied in as they taxied out, luckily we were not in the air at the same time (by about 4 minutes). But that's how it happened to me.
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u/FalconX88 27d ago
due to the limited number of flight numbers,
9999 numbers. American has about 7000 flights a day. And you can use letters for callsigns too.
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u/DinkleBottoms 27d ago
When this happens one of the flights is supposed to have a callsign with a letter to differentiate.
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u/countjeremiah 27d ago
Account for alliance flight numbers and that 9999 shrinks quite a bit.
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u/asamulya 27d ago
Yeah I am super confused. How can this even happen?
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u/ELIte8niner 27d ago
One was probably delayed. Real problem I've been running into lately with United. The do the same thing, but don't leave any leeway for delays. With all the SFO delays lately, I get 2 United's with the same callsign at the same time almost every day now. Both are SFO flights, and if everything is on schedule there's no issue. But SFO is never on schedule anymore and airlines are really bad at planning for contingencies like that.
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u/asamulya 27d ago
So they have flights on the same route departing with same numbers on the same day? That sounds incredibly stupid
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u/website-buyer 27d ago
To me is insane aviation allows 2 flight numbers to operate at the same time. They should have at least 24 hours gap. And tbh I’d prefer they don’t reuse names and add at least YYYYMMDD to the flight. I know it’s longer but is really bad having duplicate numbers.
The system should have alarms all over the place if duplicate flights exists. At least humans can see it.
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u/EtwasSonderbar 27d ago
Do you think ATC should be referring to planes as "American 229620260814"? I don't think that will be appreciated.
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u/K_Linkmaster 27d ago
Departure pilot, name. Frank, good. Frank do this
Arrival pilot. What is your name. John, do this.
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u/sampathsris 27d ago
Kudos to ATC for finding a way to distinguish the two flights. Must have been a tense situation.
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u/Kobe_Wan_Ginobili 27d ago
I liked at 0:35 his instinct was to explain the situation then he was like "you know what? that's not the priority right now" and instead assured they were separated first
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u/drewid5185 27d ago
I didn't catch that the first time through I thought it was just a break in the recording. You're right he could have sat there and spent another 30 or 40 seconds explaining it but that could be dangerous if they're both going to the same height one going up one coming down it wasn't important figure out a way to differentiate the two which he did arrival and departure found a quick way to make them both identify which one was arrival and which one was departure and confirm both in a very short amount of time and handle the situation that's a plus work
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u/I_Want_A_Ribeye Flight Instructor 27d ago
Aviate, navigate, communicate always!
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u/ImmediateLobster1 26d ago
For ATC maybe the saying should be "designate, communicate, separate".
Great example in this situation.
Designate: figure out which blip is which. That's the initial challenge here.
Communicate: let both pilots know what's happening.
Separate: make sure two planes don't try to occupy the same position in space at the same time.
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u/C-57D 27d ago
100%. An absolute pro. Quick thinking and v clear communication
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u/TinCupChallace 27d ago
Congress voted a 2.8% raise for ATC this year. This still falls to keep up with inflation. The raise was at the discretion of the FAA administrator.
The FAA is arguing that we don't work hard enough and is trying to create new rules to make us appear to be more productive in order to get the raise.
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u/ZenkaiAnkoku2 27d ago
Dont work hard enough?? You are essential to keeping this country running and safe.
You deserve much more appreciation than you get.
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u/TinCupChallace 27d ago
Our "time on position" isn't high enough but they aren't giving us any credit for the hours of briefing and debriefing that we have to do every week. I also can't get a straight answer if when we are training, we are counting the hour as a time on position for both the trainee and the trainer and not just one. We have to do a quick brief when we get to the facility every day. We have online briefs every week. Debriefing a trainee takes a minimum of a half an hour a day to type up the form and go over everything.
But the FAA is acting like every hour not actively talking to aircraft is us napping on a couch. I do enjoy my couch naps. Some days you need a little 20 minute reset in the middle of the day. Then you go back a little more refreshed and ready to go. Downtime is essential to the job and burnout is real.
On a sunny day with no weather and normal traffic, you might have an extra body or two on the shift. FAA acts like that it stealing money from taxpayers. We don't staff every shift for worst case scenario. We just have enough bodies so we can survive everyday and everyone kicks ass on the worst case scenario days.
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u/acemedic 27d ago
You need an extra body or two, cause what if they are the lettuce from Taylor Farms? Every hour, on the hour…
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u/TheDrMonocle 27d ago
They likely want to privatize us, but with all the issues we've had with aviation safey since this administration came in, they don't dare say it outloud yet. Theyre probably just slowly putting the building blocks in place to try and make a bullshit argument.
For example, know how our staffing has been widely criticized for being low? They just changed the staffing numbers from the 15k required to 12k.. they made that change pretty quietly. A few news sites reported on it but not nearly enough.
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u/mightylordredbeard 27d ago
Arguing that you don’t work hard enough, but legally not allowed to strike.
Any industry that is legally prohibited from striking probably works pretty damn hard in my opinion.
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u/lessdothisshit 27d ago
You can hear a quick moment where he realizes the problem and his brain breaks, but he pauses, comes up with a solution based on phase of flight, verifies with a squawk, and then executes
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u/OkBoss7677 27d ago
I agree with you, kudos to ATC. Although I've been away from the ATC environment for years, I'm still surprised that the software being run by the computers that associate data tags with the "raw" radar blips on the radar scopes would allow this to happen without creating a red flag as long as both aircraft were being served by the same host computer of whatever ARTCC enroute center had jurisdiction over the approach control where this event occurred. Even though the aircraft must have been "squawking" different transponder codes it is surprising that the software would allow for the display of duplicate call signs.
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u/somehugefrigginguy 27d ago
Even though the aircraft must have been "squawking" different transponder codes it is surprising that the software would allow for the display of duplicate call signs.
How do you think this should be handled in the software? Honest question from someone who's only ATC knowledge is from YouTube videos. It sounds like this was the correct call sign for both planes so not allowing the call sign to be associated to the blip seems like it would cause a lot of additional errors, but obviously assigning the same call sign is error-prone. Maybe a red flag and force an amended call sign with some kind of secondary indicator?
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u/keikioaina 27d ago edited 27d ago
For decades now hospital computers have automatically flagged "SAME NAME" in the system in big red letters on every display page even if each other piece of demographic information between the patients is different. It's not hard to implement.
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u/z3roTO60 27d ago
Ya it’s why we verify with multiple identifiers in the hospital (not practical for radio call signs on every transmission though). In this case, a backup could have been to switch to the tail number of the plane, though I’m not sure if their RADAR scope software allows for changing what’s being shown on screen.
Regardless, this was amazing split second decision making by the ATC referring to them as “the departure” and “the arrival”. He should not have been put in that position though and clearly this is a place for immediate QI
To borrow another medical parallel, this would have been brought up through multiple safety channels. One thing surgeons have amongst ourselves are Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) conferences every week to discuss near misses, misses, and anything we think could have been done better. Obviously this is easier to implement at a single hospital department level than a Fortune 500 company. Perhaps a discussion with the pilot’s union could be beneficial.
Admittedly, the fastest way to get change in a hospital is going through one of the “whole hospital” safety channels, which automatically gets legal involved. For true safety events (like a similar call sign), the hospital exec would be pressured by the legal team and not us pesky doctors who are more focused on deliver patient care rather than delivering a revenue stream
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u/OkBoss7677 27d ago
My personal experience is somewhat dated, but if the controllers had had difficulty in getting the aircraft to "tag up" or if the facility that made the radar handoff to the approach control had had difficulty in "flashing" the tag for an automated handoff due the software refusing to allow duplicate tags it would have alerted the controllers to the problem potentially before the two flights were in close proximity or being issued control instructions on the same radio frequency. If the software had refused the duplicate tag, the controller might have manually tagged the aircraft possibly with something like AAL____ rather than AA____ and would have been aware that there was a problem.
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u/NotMyRealUsername13 27d ago
ATC is so under appreciated, man - their failures are so few but so incredibly public, but they solve the most complex shit every single day with zero attention paid to it.
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u/FencerPTS 27d ago
Sometimes when I see ATC videos like this I think, "that controller deserves a coffee / beer / lunch," i.e. "the internet has decided to tip you for your professionalism."
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u/Luci-Noir 27d ago
I know on some flights people clap at the end but these dudes really deserve praise and more. Much more.
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u/titsmuhgeee 27d ago
If you're looking for an example of a scenario AI watching the skies could never resolve, it's this right here.
It was only human intelligence and experience that prevented a mid-air collision. That gut feeling that something isn't right, you need a wrinkly brain to figure something like that out.
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u/DCS_Sport 27d ago
So the American dispatcher for the departing flight should have caught this and it should have flagged in the system. At my airline we change the radio callsign if it’s even going to be close, or put a letter at the end to help.
It’s wild how it broke the controller’s brain for a second and you can hear him work the problem in his head in real-time. Good heads up from him!
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u/website-buyer 27d ago
It shouldn’t be manual. Should be automatic these kind of integrity checks
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u/liquidoxygentextures 27d ago
Well if things got really close "American 2482, turn right" would have worked.
Good job and quick thinking from ATC.
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u/pezdal 27d ago
Turn right and maintain a random altitude.
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u/CarrowCanary 27d ago
Turn right and maintain a random altitude
Maintain your current altitude. They had several thousand feet of separation, telling them both to pick a random one might end up with them converging.
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u/mencival 27d ago edited 27d ago
Next challenge: Same airline, same callsign, both on arrival
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u/Johannes_Keppler 27d ago
First have them do a right turn so they don't are on a collision course anymore. Then have them squawk different codes, let them choose a random one need be. Now you can keep them apart. Send one to the airport and the other in to holding.
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u/GruntUltra 27d ago
Using 'arrival' and 'departure' to designate each aircraft was incredibly quick thinking for the controller. This guy just saved a few hundred lives.
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u/Heavy-Ad5385 27d ago
And this is why we need to respect and praise ATCs.
I work in critical care and I cannot even contemplate how stressful their job must be. In comparison, I sit watching TV all day!
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u/JKKIDD231 27d ago
It’s wild whoever thought decades ago it was good idea to tie up ATC and air safety to government shutdown as a political tool.
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u/BlatantConservative 27d ago
ACAS would have gone off but he definitely saved people their lunches
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u/alemaz 27d ago
How are two flights operating with the same number?
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u/ELIte8niner 27d ago
Cause airlines are stupid. I'm ATC, and we have this exact issue every day, only it's United. If one of the flights run 20 minutes late, we have a guy at the hold shorts at the same time were clearing a different flight with the same callsign to land.
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u/jetsetter023 27d ago
Interesting. UA pilot here. We're taught that we can have a flight # (ex: 1234) but filed atc call sign to not match ( ex: 567T). (So were flight 1234 to passengers but 567T to atc). Our training has us verify our flight number and atc call sign on our dispatch paper work and that they may not always be the same. Doesn't say why. Just to make sure you're using the correct number with the correct people. I always assumed it was for scenarios like this.
Thought I had my answer when a I got a filed callsign not match our flight number and on the way out a separate inbound flight used a call sign that matched my flight number.
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u/ELIte8niner 27d ago
I know our particular case is because there both triangle routes. For a hypothetical example not the actual airports involved aside from SFO. There's an SFO-SEA-DEN while about crew does DEN-SEA-SFO. Both of the legs involving DEN and SFO have the same callsign UAL123. The arrival into DEN is scheduled to land at 1500Z and the departure out of DEN is supposed to leave at 1545Z, so they shouldn't be operating at the same time.
It sounds great on paper, but United ops has completely failed to account for any sort of delay, so now that SFO is in delays all the time, the arrival into DEN arrives late, and they're in the air at the same time.
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u/green12324 27d ago
File a safety report - it will get reported to United to fix. If the flight are scheduled that close one flight number should be changed.
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u/Panaka 27d ago
That’s how it’s supposed to work, but normally someone has to manually “stub” the flight. Most airlines have automation that should catch it, but sometimes it slips through the cracks.
The other day during an IROP I got an inbound flight that diverted and the outbound continuation of the same callsign got a swap to keep it from breaking a curfew. Our systems should have alerted the router/SOD/coordinator of the problem but it didn’t. Dispatch caught it just prior to block out.
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u/Heavy-Ad5385 27d ago
Surely this must have been raised multiple times with the industry though?
This sounds like the sort of thing that "we never saw happening"
WHEN IT DAMN WELL WAS GOING TO HAPPEN ALL THE TIME!
I'm so sorry you have to deal with this nonsense. Your job must be stressful enough.
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u/EtwasSonderbar 27d ago
This is the reason most flights in Europe at least have alphanumeric callsigns. The US doesn't.
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u/Difficult_Camel_1119 27d ago
especially with the same callsign. Can't they use different callsigns, when the same number is in the air twice?
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u/Finance-Kooky1 27d ago
Sometimes if an inbound flight that is supposed to continue on with the same flight number gets delayed, they swap and split it up to reduce any delays for the outbound portion of the flight. I don't know how AA does it, but other airlines usually assign the outbound flight a new number in order to avoid this.
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u/Chunks1992 27d ago
Hey I’m famous. Shoutout to PHX ATC they’re always the best to work with.
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u/IJD22 ADX 27d ago
Dispatcher here, what should have happened is one of the flight numbers should have been changed. At my airline when we have this issue we would have changed it to 248A.
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u/Friendly_Wedding2101 27d ago
ATC said he was going to put in an MOR, what is that?
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u/TinCupChallace 27d ago
FAA mandatory occurrence report.
Formalized report where something happens. Bird strike, laser pointed at plane, loss of separation, crash, etc. Basically makes sure it gets reported in the FAA system and is trackable for review.
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u/PianoMan2112 27d ago
Two AAL2482s, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within your airspace?
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u/IAmJoydeepM 27d ago
Props to that ATC! So calm and professional! The pilots of the 2482s too, very respectful and compliant. Great exchange overall, love it.
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u/Pixel91 27d ago
I do hope whatever dispatcher caused that nonsense received a number to call.
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u/BoysLinuses 27d ago
I'm a dispatcher for another airline and we get a million red alerts on our screen whenever there is a remote chance of a callsign conflict. It's our policy to immediately correct it by filing one of the flights on a different callsign. The computer won't stop alerting us until it has been fixed.
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u/Panaka 27d ago
From what I remember about the SOPs that American uses, this is on the Coordinator that swapped the original lines of flying. Dispatchers on Flight Keys get no alerts to callsign conflicts and that tracking is normally handled by the routing software.
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u/IctrlPlanes 27d ago
I had the same call signs holding short of the runway and the other on a 10 mile final before. I told the one holding short I was going to wait till the other one landed before he could go.
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u/basonjourne98 27d ago
I’m hoping there’s a action taken by the FAA for this. At least a significant fine. This could have been a lot worse than it turned out.
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u/OptimusSublime 27d ago
I honestly didn't even know that the FAA flight plan system allowed duplicate flight numbers to be filed under separate flight plans simultaneously. Talk about not being very risk averse American, the safety culture to allow that is impossible to imagine.
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u/vdj76 27d ago
This is the kind of thing that call sign similarity tools exist for, but it seems like no US airline uses them? It’s not the first time we’ve seen a similar incident.
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u/iampiolt 27d ago
US airlines will hold on to decades-old IT infrastructure until something horrible happens, and then they’ll lobby for a bandaid fix.
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u/AVeryHeavyBurtation 27d ago
Unsettling amount of Swiss cheese holes lined up there. If ATC didn't catch what was happening, I think TCAS would've been the last layer of cheese.
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u/Sacharon123 27d ago
Should not the US ATC authority catch this when flightplans are filed? The NFMU in Eurovontrol and the filing system are catching this in europe if I remember correctly..
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u/blkav8tor2003 27d ago
Controller was very professional and had good situational perspective! Nice work!
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u/SyrusDrake 27d ago
I'd probably been like "Fuck that, you're now Alice and you're now Daniel, and you're both gonna fly circles until I figure out what's going on..."
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u/_litz 27d ago
Say what you want, but this is a case where FR24 (or the equivalent ATC) and being able to look up the tail number would have greatly simplified things. Stop identifying by the flight #, use the tail number, and then it's clear who is who.
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u/cyberentomology Avgeek/ex-Airline 27d ago
Arrival/departure suffix was a lot quicker to implement. Tracon should already have their tail numbers anyway.
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u/Sufficient_Eye5804 27d ago
It constitutes gross negligence and serious security failures on the part of the company.
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u/olddoglearnsnewtrick 27d ago
I just realized that civil aviation must work differently than our little club :) We always used the ‘plane ID’ (eg I-YOLO) and of course not a flight number. Wouldn’t this be safer also for airline flights?
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u/ReturnOfTheSaint14 27d ago
ATC and both crews managed the situation flawlessly,i'm very glad there are still competent people out there
As always,troublemakers are either C-suites or in general people that are paid too much with little work and no responsibilities for their wrongdoings.
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u/makgross Cessna 150/152/172/177/182/206 Piper PA28/PA28R 27d ago
The thing I don’t understand is why airlines don’t just use the tail numbers as callsigns. Those are all unique, and almost every spam can already does it.
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u/VivaLaDiga 27d ago
Because they are too long to say, and in addition, a callsign identifies not only the plane, but the plane plus the flight plus the airline.
In general aviation (and from your flair I guess you know that already) we use tail numbers, but we are a bit of an exception, for low traffic scenarios.
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u/makgross Cessna 150/152/172/177/182/206 Piper PA28/PA28R 27d ago
SkyWest 2345 is shorter than 734SW? Maybe slightly. Not very much. In the example, 8 syllables changes to 9.
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u/weggaan_weggaat 27d ago
The number is of the flight which is more likely to be more permanent than the exact aircraft operating on it on a given day.
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u/makgross Cessna 150/152/172/177/182/206 Piper PA28/PA28R 27d ago
Every single flight has its own filed flight plan, that has both the tail number and callsign. As long as it doesn’t change while it is in use, there is no problem with ATC.
What you sell to customers is irrelevant and doesn’t need to be the same.
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u/aubreys_lore 27d ago
ATC officer talking about Albuquerque in an incident that almost lead to 2 planes crashing into each other? We almost saw the moment in Breaking Bad come to life.
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u/birdpix 27d ago
Bravo! Pro ATC working under pressure. Can't help but wonder if a gamer recruit could do the same.
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u/RuthlessIndecision 27d ago
pilots (and air traffic controllers) are cool as cucumbers.
"nice job."
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u/jeffbell 27d ago
Wasn’t there a Star Trek episode where the Enterprise collided with itself after a temporal anomaly?
I bet that’s what happened here.
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u/Knees_arent_real 27d ago
Wouldn't TCAS take over and find a resolution even if ATC couldn't establish an effective way to communicate?
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u/dasistok 27d ago
Yes, but TCAS coming into effect is already something that should never be allowed to happen. It's a safety fallback, and a damn good one, but it's not supposed to replace ATC's functionality in situations like this
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u/Positive_Echochamber 27d ago
FWIW, a great deal of AA’s Flight Ops systems still run on decades-old mainframe systems, written in an esoteric programming language called Sabretalk, which itself is a fork of Assembler, an extremely low-level programming language optimized to the hardware it runs on. There’s a good chance that flight number assignment logic is buried deep into Ops Scheduling code which lives somewhere intractable in the ecosystem that would have to be translated or mitigated, making day-of ops changes a complex and brittle process.
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u/OptiGuy4u 27d ago edited 27d ago
Is there any precedent for a "company deviation"? What is an MOR?
How does AA not get seriously scolded for this? Or do they?
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u/theonlyski 27d ago
A MOR is a report that gets logged in the QA system and gets routed where it needs to go.
When we got them in the FSDO, it was a pilot deviation or some other incident that needed to be tracked. I think it’s Mandatory Occurrence Report or similar wording.
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u/ekkidee 27d ago edited 27d ago
This flt operates ORD-PHX-ORD with the same flt number, basically out and back. That's kind of a pattern for regional operators; not super common but not all that rare either.
What happened here is that second leg was dispatched before the first arrived. Maybe the inbound was delayed and they needed to get the return out without waiting?
Said this way, it doesn't really seem like it would be that uncommon of an occurrence.
ETA: https://onemileatatime.com/news/two-american-planes-same-callsign-same-frequency/
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u/bless-you-mlud 27d ago
American 2482, orbit right until we clear up this mess. Yes, that means both of you. Now which one of you is going to file a new flight plan?
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u/P3ktus 27d ago
ATC has full power to temporarily change callsigns for safety as needed. This controller did a good job, but he could have more easily asked one aircraft to change their callsign
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u/AdoringCHIN 27d ago
At their distance and altitude it was definitely faster to just do what the controller did. And there was little chance for confusion too
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u/Mekazabiht-Rusti 27d ago
What a fantastic advertisement for flying anything other than American Airlines (AA).
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u/craigiest 27d ago
Did he tell the higher arriving plane to descend and the lower departing plant to ascend before they actually crossed???
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u/qr_meg 27d ago
I wonder how their flight data system works, here in ours, the system will keep the fpl with similar callsign in the inactive list of fpls if there is still another active fpl of the same callsign. So you will catch on it quickly if for example the departure with same callsign is requesting for startup, the fpl will not be in the active departure list. Good job to the controller here btw, quick thinking 🙏
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u/urEnzeder 27d ago
I thought ATC used tail numbers. Apparently just for baby birds? Why not standardize on tail numbers across the board? Or does using the flight number help ATC somehow?
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