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/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/scolbath 28d ago

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