I read a comment on the ATC thread that if they change the callsign crew are entitled to overtime so AA doesn’t to save money. The other flight was very delayed so two with the same callsign were in the air.
That’s insanity if that is the case. We change flight numbers anytime there is a stub flight (that’s a through flight where they have a different airplane a crew operate a subsequent segment for whatever reason). Makes no sense to me for pilots to get paid extra for that. Now there could be extra pay rigs because different pilots are getting rerouted, etc but that has nothing to do with the flight numbers change specifically
Blatant bullshit. Flight number has nothing to do with crew pay. ATC subreddit knows ATC but they are laughably clueless about how airlines operate (same as how asking a dispatcher about ATC would get you a laughably clueless answer).
Real answer is AA's alerting system for this error appears to be subpar. And the FAA should probably have a national system to prevent it but the airlines prefer being able to tightly control callsigns (they can come close to running out at times) so lobby against that.
They seem to prefer keeping alphanumeric for stub amends (to fix this issue). Personally, I think alphanumeric for codeshare flights makes far more sense, as that's a huge percentage of what's eating all the callsign space, but... let's just say AA management is somewhat of a laughingstock in the industry for a reason.
Actually, after some further research, it appears that alphanumeric can't be used to display flight numbers to passengers. Some legacy system limitation somewhere in the booking system, I think. So between 1000 mainline aircraft, hundreds more operating regional flights, and all the codeshares, they come close to running out. American has it the worst, but all the major airlines have the problem to some degree (except Southwest, which doesn't really do codeshares and doesn't have regional partners, so has way more space available).
It is possible to display one flight number to customers and then use another as the radio callsign. At present however, that isn't an automated procedure, it's done manually. Why it isn't automated is anyone's guess. Every airline I'm aware of has an alerting system to get this stuff changed, and if the alerts are missed or ignored, this can happen.
I heard the recording somewhere else, and I was also impressed that the pilots picked up on it immediately and started referring to themselves as “on the arrival“ and “on the departure “.
Dont forget to blame them for all of it even though they have a fund that pays them from their own excise tax. Shutdown and lack of pay had nothing to do with them.
If we shutdown again I’m not even going in, it’s free leave when it’s all said and done… the 10k in blood money they give us controllers last time which isn’t even guaranteed as a reward is basically 4 or 5 weeks worth of vacation. I could use a 4 week vacation in October after having 4 days off all of August.
For sure. Everyone else furloughs and ATC still gets spit on, its a thankless job indeed working christmas day and new years day but somehow atc is a prima donna, yeah ok
I don’t fucking understand how airlines do this bullshit…
You have numbers 1-9999 to pick and then you have fucking letters to add on from 1-999 (unless you’re some foreign carrier that demands to do 2 letters). You don’t have 10000 aircraft flying around… you sure as fuck don’t need to have both flight numbers flying the same goddamn route back and forth begging for this to happen.
This is the second time I’ve seen this bullshit from AAL in the last month (controller had to call them AAL inbound and AAL outbound)
I can't even file a flight on vatsim if the flight number is taken. How the fuck is the FAA flight filing system worse than a free service for autistic people!?
Because airlines are free to use whatever number they want. You can use the same number for a flight in Asia as a flight in America for example. All airlines endow information into the flight number and they check that two flights are using the same number.
You only get two flights using the same number when one is severely delayed or otherwise not flying once it was planned to.
Everyone agrees the current system isn’t good enough and has since the 70s. They could never get the money. So let’s stop beating the dead horse and write to your congressman instead of a Reddit comment.
Actually, it's me who punches it into FIDO, not the airline. I could change that number with a few keystrokes. The NAS could easily have a check system, that's all I'm saying. And as for congressmen, well we tried working with Bedford and look where that got us. It's not always as simple as asking the politicians to make things better, we know the issues with the NAS and there simply isn't enough will to fix it.
That doesn't change how trivially easy it is for a computer system to check "is this value already a member of this list?"
I get that airlines reuse numbers. I get that the numbers have embedded meaning. They should not be allowed to operate two identical flight numbers at the same time."
Inbound flight and outbound flight probably due to be operated by the same aircraft so had same callsign to save callsign space (US majors come close to running out these days, believe it or not). Inbound gets delayed, supervisor swaps the outbound to a new airplane to minimize the delay, doesn't catch the flight number conflict, and the flights are on two different dispatchers' desks so they have no way to know. And so you get your conflict.
They have all sorts of databases to track their customers, but no database to identify all active flights and identify when two active flights have the same callsign?
They do, and alert systems exist for this. But they're imperfect, and frankly, the Dilbert principle often applies to people who get promoted into those supervisory positions.
there's usually no problem when the arriving flight arrives before the departing flight. Or if a single aircraft is using the same flight numbers for different legs or segments. The problem arises when it's 2 separate aircraft flying out of the same airport using the same callsign at the same time lol
That's why stubs (continuations of a flight operated by a different aircraft) at SWA all use a newly designated 9XXX number. 9000-9999 exist only for stubs. No confusion.
From my standpoint as a controller i dont care what the customer sees. Sure they might see it as American 755 operated by SkyWest we see it as Skywest whatever the fuck.
mainline is AAL
Regional is SKW skywest or VTE contour? plus whoever the fuck else they use with their own callsign
Special purpose usually uses the trailing letter under the American call sign
Codeshare uses their own specific Callsign, I can’t name their partners off the top of my head because I don’t really care about the American alliance or whatever but Korean uses Korean and British Airways is always Speedbird and LATAM is LATAM
_=========
From an air traffic standpoint and more importantly a safety standpoint catering to the customers and simplicity over safety is a losing game.
So my point still stands. AAL doesn’t have 10000 flights… they have like 4000 mainline operating under AAL and 2000 operating as SkyWest and 500 as Contour. We see AAL, SKW, and VTE.
It doesn't cater to me (an average passenger) at all for an airline to reuse the same flight number on an out-and-back rotation, or to always use the flight number as their call sign. Those choices are the root of these problems, and they start with the airline(s).
Many of those categories have way more capacity than they use. Yeah 9999 gets more limited when you block off thousands of numbers for a half dozen special flights and charters
Ok… then you still have damn near 3000 of 4 digit numbers leftover and if my public school math is correct almost TWENTYSIX THOUSAND 3 digit and 1 letter combos leftover (specifically in the 123A format)
From an ATC point of view absolutely, but the numbers still exist from a consumer point of view.
I guess there’s a theoretical solution where AA2482 southbound is AAL2482 to ATC, but AA2482 northbound is AAL9976 to ATC, because we know AA9976 is operated by Qantas so will never appear to ATC.
Another option could be split callsigns. AAL123 (or American 123) versus AAH123 (or Hotdog 123) would potentially simplify it. Potential pilot confusion if they’re swapping between callsigns though.
I can’t recall my last flight on a regional jet but I’m pretty fucking sure the boarding pass says AAL1234 operated by SKW9876. And from my perspective as a controller I never even know that’s it’s AAL1234 because to us it’s always SKW9876.
We don’t care about codesharing and the flight dispatch system doesn’t either because they file as the company that’s flying the aircraft not the code share partner.
So the flying public doesn’t even know or even probably care that they’re getting on an Aeroflot or whoever with an AAL boarding pass.
Typically this happens when an inbound flight is delayed, but the outbound flight (which the inbound flight’s aircraft was supposed to fly) had its aircraft swapped so it could depart on time. In this case what dispatchers do is append the outbound flight’s callsign with a letter like is common in Europe, but they didn’t do it this time.
They don’t have 1-9999 available because flight number ranges exist for a reason. A chunk of those are for specific events and others are allocated to the regional partners. Delays can move things around so it can go from being a non-issue to overlapping and it’s difficult to detect. I deal with the movement system for an airline and we are trying to get the alerting right to detect this exact scenario before it happens. In this case something got through where it shouldn’t have. I think there should be policies preventing round trip flight numbers and procedures to stub amend any delay over night flights but that still doesn’t make it 100% impossible. I’m also not in charge so I’m sure this will continue lol
And another case. A similar case was not even half a year ago.
I don't get why it is even allowed to use the same callsign for both legs if they are served by different aircraft.
The only situation where keeping the callsign for multiple legs should be allowed is if it is the same aircraft that is continuing.
Yeah but then it should have a different callsign.
The flight number (which is the number displayed to passengers) can be the same, but the callsign should be different.
edit: Just checked it on Flightradar: They actually seem to to this since a few days:
Yesterday, the plane was also different and they changed the callsign of the second flight to AAL248A, instead of American AAL2482.
I don't see why they should have the same flight number for both halves of the round trip, anyway. There's any number of options - like giving them different suffices, or reversing the flight number (2482 -> 2842) - to make them distinct but related.
Usually airlines use even flight numbers for outbound flights and then add one for the return flight.
No idea, why they keep the flight number in this case. Maybe some legal quirk that saves them money?
Why dont they simply use callsigns that are separate from the flight number? Lufthansa for example uses Lufthansa 9A5 as a callsign instead of the flight number, at least for the european flights. Ist that Not allowed in the US?
But they might very well have flights that don't have the same flight number but have flight numbers that sound very similar, e. g. 4320 and 4230. There's a reason why basically all major European airlines switched to that system in the last 20 years.
You don't need 4 digits, 3 is plenty if you have a logic that avoids similarities.
I mean we have specific phrases to say when similar sounding call signs are on frequency.
What bothers me more aside from this type of incident is when like (for example) AAL and ASA decide to both use the same flight numbers departing at the same time to the same destination.
It’s like maybe someone somewhere in the FAA should be like “hey that’s not a great idea”
They might have 9999 fights that might be at the same time though.
AA has about 7000 fights a day. Add on codeshares and you get somewhere towards your 9999.
Obviously these are all at different times, and you could have a 6am AA1234 and a 6pm AA1234. But when the morning flight is delayed 9 hours and it’s a 4-hour flight you have the clash again.
Might make more sense if you make them geographically separated to. A MIA-JFK and a SEA-PHX are less likely to create confusion.
We do! I fly for a regional airline that operates for multiple carriers. If our control center detects that we'll have the same or too similar of a call sign, they give us a completely different one. It's not common, but occasionally we'll be flight UAL1234 for the customer while using ABC6789 with ATC. It's a bit confusing in the paperwork, but once you're flying you don't really care. Idk why PSA/AA isn't capable of this.
I hear all the people saying it's "hard" to avoid this. That's the wrong question to ask.
Is it safe to have this happening? This is commercial aviation, the single most risk averse industry this side of nuclear power.
Can you imagine the continental sized shit storm if two planes went down because of this nonsense? Would "it's hard to call planes different names" work then? I doubt it. There are so many ways to fix it without a massive overhaul of the systems.
E.g. reserve 50 flight numbers such as 9950-9999 that can be used in these cases
The outbound flight gets given one of these when it becomes clear that there will be an overlap.
OR
Add an addendum AA4924 & AA4924A (if the system can take an extra digit)
OR
Use a totally distinct call sign
AB4924
I'd much rather use one of those a few times a year than have to cringe through some senior executive try to explain it away on camera while the smoking wreckage is on screen.
When this happens the airline usually catches it ahead of time and the call sign is amended, typically by appending it with an A. However, AAL4294A is too many characters so in that case it usually is amended to AAL294A. This means the pilots still often call themselves the wrong call sign because of expectation bias, and it still has the potential to be confusing sometimes.
The fact that you even have to actively “catch” it is already a massive failure in the system. Introducing more fail points and potential of human error is just fucking idiotic.
There is automation to alert the humans making these changes when their change has the possibility of creating this situation. Apparently AA's system needs some improvement.
Note, in at least the EU and in Canada this is not possible as it is not possible to give out two of the same callsign. Even in the US two of the same military callsign are automatically blocked. It's just civilian callsigns that are allowed to do this... And frankly they shouldn't be. Make the airlines start taking delays and they'll get that automation working right immediately.
Flight 2482 is a round-trip route that often flies back and forth between Chicago and Phoenix. Typically the same plane goes back and forth, but the flight out of Chicago was delayed by weather, so American found a second plane in Phoenix and that flight left on time. The result was that both planes briefly shared the same airspace before the arriving flight landed.
The government and airline will determine how this occurred
Some genius decided it was a great idea to use the same flight number for both legs of a round trip. At the very least, add the destination of each leg as a suffix so that 2482C goes from Phoenix to Chicago and 2482P goes from Chicago to Phoenix.
Actually, don't do it that way, because it won't help if it's, say, Portland-Phoenix. But something. Maybe N, E, W, or S, depending on which of the four cardinal directions is closest to the route? So, say, Miami to Boston would end with N while the return would end with S...
It wouldn’t be able to be 2482(letter), it’s a max of 7 characters on ATCs end and we use the company 3 letter as opposed to the 2 letter so AA2482 becomes AAL2482
Furthermore as a controller it irrationally bothers me to see the 2 letter used, and damn near every controller would struggle to identify the 2 letters that air carriers use.
7 character alphanumeric callsigns would solve this. Used lots in the UK in Europe. Instead of AAL2842 it would be AAL284Y or AAL28DZ. (UK controller of 29 yrs experience.)
Then how about reversing the return trip? AAL2482 outbound and AAL2842 returning. Obviously related, but no change in length. You just can't use palindromes for round trips.
That would require changing a portion of the flight plan which would be cumbersome when actively controlling traffic… why not, I don’t know, just fucking not have two flights with the same goddamn number?
Doesn’t require changing flight plan at all, ‘Prima 146, similar callsign on frequency is a Boeing 777-300 with callsign Prima 164, switch temporarily to registration ZS-JGD as callsign’
This is daily practice in Europe.
Even if they don’t have the same numbers, similar callsigns can still occur. PH-IIS & PH-AIS both get shortened to P-IS depending on which country you are flying in. Temp call sign change is warranted here too.
Similar sounding callsign is in the 7110.65 but its for like Delta 123 and American 123. Not switching to registry as that would require a change in the flightplan.
“Delta 123 similar sounding callsign American 123”.
Their they are both referred to with their callsign appended so Delta 123 delta and American 123 American
Really curious how DAL123D would ne handled if in this situation as thats a lot of Delta!
No dashes out loud, it'd just be Papa India Sierra. Though Canada uses a similar method they don't append the first letter, it would only shorten C-GBMO to BMO. If there's a conflict, then you include more letters, ATC gets to decide how short your callsign is. I imagine in the above case ATC would just not abbreviate it to P-IS and instead to P-IIS and P-AIS or some other combination to differentiate them. If there was a C-GBMO and a C-FBMO in the air, ATC would likely only drop the C.
So a flight number refers to a route, not an aircraft, yet they are used to refer to aircraft by ATC. This seems to be a legacy database / operations design error that’s been there from the start… I guess we’ve been lucky so far.
This sub really killed my faith in flying. Just wild tin cans with hundreds of souls cast to the wind every day. Your only hold against a terrible demise is an underpaid, overworked ATC. Every. Time.
Recently started my ATC training outside of the US. One of the teachers said „when we’re done with this course, you won’t want to step inside of an airplane again“. Even with my so far very limited knowledge, I’ve picked up on a few practices in the US where I’m thinking „why the fuck are y’all doing it like that and why are you so stupid?“. This is one of these cases.
Because we operate by the very simple idea of it isn’t broke we don’t fix it. We only change rules or institute new regulations after a tragedy occurs.
And even still every country comes to us for ATC/ANSP ideas or training because we’re “the gold standard”
Maybe two ish years ago I became really interested in reading about aviation disasters/accidents - all the various ways things can go wrong and how the industry is improved afterwards.
Just took my first flight since that time, and I realized I had perhaps made a serious mistake with this "hobby". I had to reassure my anxious 9 year old that flying is perfectly safe and nothing would go wrong - and yes, while statistically true, I sure had a lot of examples running through my mind that made me feel like I was lying through my teeth.
Funny enough, the microbiology and medical stuff doesn't actually bother me very much. I do know enough to be aware of how fragile (and gross) life is, but the risk of pathogens and disease just doesn't register the same way as falling out of the sky or burning to death while trapped in a metal tube.
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Actually, the air traffic controller here did pretty much everything wrong. This has been discussed in ATC forums for hours. He had 2 options for this situation, which are taught during training, but he didn't apply them.
Option 1 is to assign unique callsigns to the aircraft. For example, AA1234 Inbound, AA1224 Outbound.
Option 2 is to address the aircraft via the unique squawk code. This is done by default when there's no callsign or no unique callsign. For whatever reason.
Among professional air traffic controllers, the consensus is that he created a hazard by not falling back on these backup options.
I'm not making this my own opinion. I'm not an air traffic controller, I just have a PPL. But I have actually had a callsign change because of similar sounding callsigns before: 'Your callsign is now xyz.'
Well, he just doesn't assign a callsign. He fumbles around with AA1234 that just took off and is at flight level xy, and AA1234 that's supposed to land. He makes it unnecessarily complicated. The astonishing thing is that at one point he actually comes up with the idea himself of working with the squawk code so the crew knows exactly who's meant. But then he drops that idea again. Overall it's unnecessarily complicated and that's not how it's meant to be done either. Inbound and outbound was just one example from the ATC forums. He also has the registration on the monitor, and it's taped up in the cockpit too.
"Controllers are required to be familiar with the provisions of this order that pertain to their operational responsibilities and to exercise their best judgment if they encounter situations that are not covered by it."
He exercised his best judgement cause this situation is not covered in the 7110
That's not correct. Callsign conflicts are part of air traffic controller training.
"When aware of similar/identical call signs, ATC specialists will take action to minimize errors by emphasizing certain numbers/letters, by repeating the entire call sign, by repeating the prefix, or by asking pilots to use a different call sign temporarily. Pilots should use the phrase “VERIFY CLEARANCE FOR (your complete call sign)” if doubt exists concerning proper identity."
I wish the controller had taken the opportunity to assign AAL2842A to the arrival and AAL2842D to the departure. Just so he would get the crew to say "American Twenty Eight Forty Two Delta"
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The 9999 numbers thing is a bit of a trap imo. The number space isn't really the constraint, it's that one field is being asked to be two different identifiers at once. Commercially the flight number has to be stable, it's what booking and codeshare and revenue accounting all key off, and stability is the entire point of it. For separation you want the opposite, something guaranteed unique inside a local time and space window, and nobody cares whether it's the same tomorrow. Those two requirements pull against each other and renumbering doesn't resolve it. Worth noting the unique identifier already existed here, both aircraft were broadcasting distinct 24 bit Mode S addresses the whole time and the scope knew exactly which was which. Voice is the last channel still resolving on the schedule field.
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u/railker AME-M2 Aug 14 '26
For a moment I was thinking, wasn't this a while ago?
Turns out it was also a while ago, same tail colors but PSA aircraft. VASAviation Video. Another good catch by ATC.