Flight number

A flight number (international english flight number ) is an ordinal number that is used to identify a flight.

Flight numbers have up to four, rarely five places in the rule. To facilitate the assignment of a flight number to an airline, IATA code or rarely the ICAO code of the actual carrier is prefixed. Leading zeros are usually given for reasons of appearance at the three-digit flight numbers below areas, but can also be omitted. The flight number is both operationally used, for example in air traffic control, as well as guidelines for the passengers on scoreboards and travel documents.

Flights that require a change of aircraft, are specified in the rule is not as same flight number while during stopovers a continuous flight number is common. Through code-sharing, it is possible that a flight has not only one but several flight numbers.

Many airlines use for their flight numbers a system that reserved the certain speed ranges, for example, for intercontinental flights or round-trip flights assigns a particular numbering scheme. Other airlines, in turn, create the flight numbers by dividing different regions and different speed ranges.