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What do the letters after a flight number mean?

The letters are the airline code, or the numbers universally recognized to represent the name of the airline in shorthand. Some are obvious—AA is American Airlines, for example.



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Operational flight number suffixes (example: 353R or 928W) usually indicate that the flight is an unscheduled, ad hoc flight from an amended flight plan, such as air taxi, cargo, or otherwise not regular passenger flights.

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2.1 When a flight experiences a significant delay (i.e. 24H) into the next day, there is potential for two FPLs to exist with the same callsign. To alleviate this, airlines might append the suffix “D” in Item 7 of the FPL after the flight identification.

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O&D: Short for “origin and destination” – No connection between points. Otherwise known as a flight leg, or segment. This used in managing travel booking and fulfilment. Also used in air operations related to arrivals and departures.

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The convention seems to be that the window seats will be A and F, and the aisle seats C and D. So, where there are only two seats on each side, B and E are not used.

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Alpha, Bravo, Charli, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, PaPa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. Pilots pronounce numbers similar to regular English, with a few exceptions: The number three (3) is pronounced “tree.”

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The P indicates a positioning flight.

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An aircraft crashes in the Florida Everglades, killing 103 passengers. After the wreckage is removed, salvageable parts from the plane are used to repair other aircraft.

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The 'F' suffix stands for Freight. It can vary from day to day. e.g.today's and tomorrow's BA193 to Dallas are passenger (and freight) flights but the following day (23rd) it's BA193F denoting freight only. Note the ATC callsigns are unchanged (BAW31F).

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On many aircraft, the rightmost seats have letter designations HJK, skipping the letter I. This is because each seat has a row number followed by letter; letters that may be confused with numbers (I, O, Q, S, or Z) must be avoided, usually for people with dyslexia.

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We used to skip 33 on certain maps to make the [final] row standardized, but the end row is no longer standardized, a United Airlines spokesperson told Travel + Leisure. In short, the reasoning behind having a unanimous seating map is a math equation of sorts.

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Occasionally, aircraft with a seating structure of 2+2 may letter the seats as ACDF to keep with the standard of A/F being window and C/D being aisle on short-haul aircraft (which generally have 3+3 seats).

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The boarding priority will be D1, D2 (employees and eligible travelers), D2R (retirees), D2P (parents), D3 (buddy passes), AAC (active non-owned affiliate airline personnel), ONE (oneworld personal travel), D4 (OAL company business travel), ZED (routine interline personal travel).

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