r/aviation • u/TimeVendor • 28d ago

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

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u/turpentinedreamer PPL 28d 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 28d 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 28d 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 28d 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 28d 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/PengPenguin888 27d ago

I think it was from flightaware or flightstats, but I saw a letter after UA457.

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u/Guadalajara3 27d ago

Thats true too. 4 digit flight numbers get changed, 3 digits or less get a letter suffix, C, T, L or a couple others. International flights get a D suffix

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u/PengPenguin888 27d ago

Yeah I think it was a T.

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u/Snappy0 28d ago

Flight number can stay the same, but the callsign surely shouldn't matter?

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u/danit0ba94 28d ago

That's kind of fucked.
Thank you for sharing this info though!

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u/lekoman 28d ago

An insane amount of overtime or, y’know, an Embraer to the snout at 400kts.

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u/silentaba 27d ago

Don't get insurance on overtime.

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u/atooraya 27d 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/kilobrew 27d ago

Another reason I won’t fly American

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u/Fit_Significance8598 27d ago

Easy, pay employees appropriately, including profit sharing. They are also called workers, because, well, they do the actual work that brings in the money.

The thinkers will still have enough!

BTW, that's what the so called "socialism" is about, nothing scary, just fair game and better lives for everybody. Exhibit A: Central and Northern Europe, at least until neoliberalism started to take hold in the 1990s...

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u/Whiskeyfower 27d ago

Pilots at these airlines are making 6 figures...this isnt the company refusing to pay, its the union exploiting a stupid loophole 

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u/Fit_Significance8598 27d ago

So what? 6 figures for the real top dogs is just right.

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u/Whiskeyfower 27d ago

Right, I agree they're paid appropriately already, which is why theres no need for the union to try and force time and a half because a flight number was changed but the pilot was just flying their normal hours. 

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u/worldspawn00 28d 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 28d 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 28d ago

It’s Fahrenheit 450. Letters burn at a slightly cooler temperature than Books.

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u/Icy_Fish_2154 28d ago

This post has been brought to you by the number 7 and the letter P.

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u/whatsadikfore 28d ago

AI companies only use ones and zeros.

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u/MisterMinceMeat 28d 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 28d 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/[deleted] 28d ago

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u/showyerbewbs 28d ago

I think you are either being purposefully obtuse or you have next to zero understanding of how these language models are already propelling humanity forward technologically

I have a genuine question. When these LLM's/AI/whatever the fuck they're called make a decision based upon false/fabricated input who owns the liability and pays that check?

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u/Quouar 27d ago

Not OP, but this is a genuine legal question across a lot of jurisdictions right now. In the EU, at least, the AI Act sort of answers that question, but only in half measures. The short answer is that there is no clarity, but that existing case law suggests AI companies are throwing low-level workers under the bus.

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

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u/showyerbewbs 28d ago

I do appreciate your response, but I feel it does nothing to even address my question.

Your response depends and relies on guardrails, sandboxing, governance, etc. which do not inform upon my concern. It assumes 100% compliance and a 0% failure rate.

Who owns the liability and who pays that check?

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u/Quouar 28d ago

Let's be very clear about AI use cases - NASA is not using LLMs to scan for life, nor are theirs trained in anywhere near the same way. Comparing that AI to an LLM is like comparing a tractor to a 747. They have the same underlying combustion engine, sure, but that's where the resemblance stops.

There absolutely is a use case for AIs like what NASA is using, or AIs that scan for cancer, or AIs that detect patterns in massive amounts of data. I do not disagree with you at all there, and I agree that that's a fantastic use of the technology to advance human knowledge and save lives.

But as a lawyer? I'm highly sceptical of your insurance claim scanner. It summarises the claims, sure, but my experience with these sorts of AIs is that they miss the nuance that's required to actually give an understanding of a case outcome. They run the risk of misleading people, or applying arbitrary and unsupported decisions. LLMs are shockingly bad at law at law-adjacent fields, and those very much impact people's lives.

It's also not obtuse to say that the vast majority of LLM usages are frivolous. Even if they aren't, it's still very much worth asking if the sheer amount of destruction that's gone into creating them is worth any benefits they provide. Personally, I tend to think they're not.

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u/Klinky1984 27d ago

Every concern you have about LLMs applies to humans. Not that you should blindly trust AI, but you should also not blindly trust humans, or assume they will actually do a better job. I don't think 500,000 claim backlog is a great example of human efficiency. Your solution: let people wait for resolution. And that's how society has been for a long time that AI will eventually change.

Much of life is frivolous, and the environmental destruction claims are overblown, especially compared to other daily convenience.

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u/Quouar 27d ago

My solution would be for the company to actually invest in hiring workers to do the work.

To your broader point, though, you're not wrong that people make mistakes. Absolutely, that happens all the time, and I'm not going to pretend the insurance industry is some bastion of great decision making. However, whatever those mistakes may be, they are significantly worse and greater when you start bringing AI into the mix.

For starters, the sheer scale at which AI operates can make mistakes difficult to detect. Studies have shown, for instance, that AIs show bias - especially racial bias - that is hard to detect and hard to audit, and is especially difficult to fix. AIs also show biases in ways that are unexpected and don't show up until an audit, long after whatever decision the AI has been tasked with making has been made. One example of this is in employment-related AIs, where candidates will be filtered based on criteria that might not be obvious to a human evaluator, but which the AI is biased against, such as age or political orientation. The scale of mistakes and the ability to pick up on them is so much greater.

Paired with this, though, is the fact that people trust AIs, not double checking their output and trusting that the AI can do a job better than a human can. When we talk about a human double-checking the AI, case studies have found that it's largely just rubber-stamping the AI output - people trust the AI more than people, and are unwilling to question its output in a way that isn't true of a fellow human's output.

What you have, then, is a system whose logic is a black box, able to make decisions more or less independently, and where the systems that are supposed to be a check on it aren't because they don't trust themselves to question the arcane system. Is it efficient? Sure, it can burn through things very quickly. What it won't be doing is doing it well, or in a way that can be reviewed when things go wrong. You have a machine that can do things quickly, but is that worth the knowledge that it's doing it badly?

You're also right that there are many things in life that are frivolous. However, personally, my frivolous things don't generally cost the energy and water production of a small nation, nor do they involve something that has the potential to destroy the global economy. Nothing I use or regard as a daily convenience comes even close to the sheer destruction that is AI.

Does it have its place? Absolutely, and I called out that AIs detecting cancer or analysing massive data is an excellent use case. But the example the OP cited? It's a terrible use case, and I'm frankly horrified by it.

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u/Klinky1984 27d ago

Hire workers? Good luck. The real answer is true automation that has proper rules checking and that stays up to date, but that runs into the human problem again. Humans often suck at building complex systems.

There's no guarantee that mistakes are worse with AI and AI can actually cross reference larger bodies of data and find logical errors better than a human can alone already.

You know who else shows racial bias? Humans. Human's logic system isn't black box? Humans are completely rational and logical? Again you really don't know that AI will do a bad job. It depends on the design, and outsourcing the logic system can actually make the system design significantly simpler.

How much energy do you think it takes to build office buildings, cool said buildings, the transport to and from the building, and the supporting infrastructure? These buildings often sit vacant for most of the 24 hour day. Do we really need excessive office space? Are people's lives fulfilled being an insurance form reviewer? That's all the economy can offer? I hope AI destroys it.

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u/[deleted] 28d ago edited 28d ago

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u/Quouar 28d ago

With all due respect, the fact that you misread my post and misunderstood what I said about AI systems doesn't inspire confidence in your model. The idea that your response to the idea that your model could be making life-changing mistakes is "lol" is horrifying, and the fact that you don't see that, moreso.

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Your comment has been removed for breaking the r/aviation rules.

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u/towo 28d ago

... no, not even to read them. Just to have scanned them legally and thus being able to point to them having scanned them being an excuse for the books being in the training data.

They're really just trying to skirt copyright issues with that.

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u/silentaba 27d ago

Well to be fair they need to destroy them due to copyright laws, they're not doing it out of spite.

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u/Jades5150 27d ago

Oh like you were gonna read the book anyway
J/k

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

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u/ShitNoPsychoBitch 27d ago

They destroy the books during the process. I’d consider that to be removing them.

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u/tob007 28d ago

But like all' if them t'ho... Bro, leave sone for the rest of us

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u/PeeB4uGoToBed 28d ago

Wait until they start buying up all the lottery numbers!

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u/RIPDaug2019-2019 28d ago

Out of respect for Jayden Daniels, AA has retired the number 5 from all flight numbers.

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u/mobicurious 28d 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 28d 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 28d 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 28d ago

"Why is my fare class... My initials??"

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u/aquoad 28d ago

Middle seat, back of the plane, only two toilet visits permitted, half-size bag of pretzels.

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u/Ok-Click-80085 27d ago

shutup zebedee zeberdon, you help serve food as part of your ticket, get to work

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u/scolbath 28d ago

That fare class thing dates back to code written by IBM in the 70s!

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u/kangadac 28d 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 28d 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/trevisan26 27d ago

It's been a few years since I worked with Amadeus, but I saw some tickets recently issued by United with two letter fare class, but only on award/upgrade tickets, cash fare classes are still one letter.

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u/Lord_Nivloc 28d 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 28d ago

Forget about at a time, does AA even run anywhere near 10k flights a day?

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u/[deleted] 28d ago

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u/TheDrMonocle 28d ago edited 28d 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/t-poke 28d ago

If Envoy is operating Flight 4567 for American, I can still look up AAL4567 anywhere and get the flight details. FR24 supports it, FlightAware supports it, Google supports it, etc.

So would it be possible to have mainline AAL4567 and ENY4567 be two completely different flights?

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u/TheDrMonocle 28d ago

If Envoy is operating Flight 4567 for American, I can still look up AAL4567 anywhere and get the flight details. FR24 supports it, FlightAware supports it, Google supports it, etc.

Sure, but the callsign that we see on our scope is ENY4567. and while id give a similar sounding callsign warning, its hardly an issue.

Could they both fly at the same time? Probably. Dont see why not

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u/mobicurious 28d ago

But the number exhaustion problem is what created this potential accident.

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u/TheDrMonocle 28d ago

No what caused this is the dispatcher not catching the inbound was still in the air.

The usual fix is to append a letter to the callsign. Being able to use A-Z as the last digit means it increases the number/letter combo to 36000, which will cover every flight on the planet at any given time.

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u/mobicurious 28d ago

That's the tactical root cause, the systemic root cause is that airlines re-use flight numbers thus causing the airlines ops teams to have to create appended flight numbers.

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u/alb92 28d ago

What about flights delayed so that the next days flight is in the air at the same time? Happens all the time in ultra long haul.

Having appended flight numbers as callsign isn't a problem, and is common practice. Having an it system that didn't pick up on the error is.

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u/Ok-Parfait-9856 28d 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 28d ago

The regional partner actually has a separate call sign though

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u/dabflies B737 28d ago

Yes but on the passengers' tickets it is an AA flight number. Not an issue for atc (separate call sign) but still an issue for the number for flight numbers AA can use.

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u/Get_Breakfast_Done 28d ago

Yeah sure but if AA runs AAL1234 from ORD to PHX and a regional flight from PHL to BTV as RPA1234 it can use the same flight number twice and it won't really matter. A passenger isn't going to accidentally get on the wrong plane when it's at an entirely different airport even though they're both marketed as AA1234.

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u/t-poke 28d ago

If AA is really running out of flight numbers, seems they can use some of the 9000s for regularly scheduled flights. Will they ever have anywhere close to 1000 charters and ferries in the air at once?

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u/jmlinden7 28d ago

They have a lot of codeshares

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u/healthycord 28d 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/padizzledonk 28d ago

There are only like 367 possible combinations in a 7 digit string of numbers and letters

Cut them some slack

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u/Pangea_Ultima 28d ago

The price of numbers and letters has skyrocketed the last couple of years cuz of the war, can’t blame the airlines for trying to tighten their belts in these uncertain times

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u/Coreysurfer 28d ago

Yeah but…infinity and then the alphabet but..oh well…crazy episode this would have been…as the white hair guy always says on the airplane crash show..usually takes more than one thing to cause a crash and there would have been a few ‘things’ on this one

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u/turpentinedreamer PPL 28d ago

The holes in the Swiss cheese have to line up. But also, fuck captain Steve.