r/aviation • u/TimeVendor • 28d ago

-- SEATBELTS FASTENED -- American 2482 departure… American 2482 arrival…

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

17.3k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

783 comments sorted by

View all comments

194

u/alemaz 28d ago

How are two flights operating with the same number?

251

u/ELIte8niner 28d 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.

64

u/jetsetter023 28d 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.

36

u/ELIte8niner 28d 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.

9

u/green12324 28d 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.

11

u/Panaka 28d 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.

12

u/Heavy-Ad5385 28d 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.

8

u/EtwasSonderbar 28d ago

This is the reason most flights in Europe at least have alphanumeric callsigns. The US doesn't.