IATA Airline Designator
IATA airline designators, sometimes called IATA reservation codes, are two-character codes assigned by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to the world's airlines in accordance with the provisions of IATA Resolution 762. They form the first two characters of the flight number.
Designators are used to identify an airline for all commercial purposes, including reservations, timetables, tickets, tariffs, air waybills, and in airline interline telecommunications. There are three types of designator: unique, alpha/numeric, and controlled duplicate.
IATA maintains two policies to deal with the limited number of available codes:
- after an airline is delisted, the code becomes available for reuse after six months;
- IATA issues "controlled duplicates".
Controlled duplicates are issued to regional airlines whose destinations are not likely to overlap, in such a way that the same code would be shared by two different airlines. The controlled duplicate is denoted here with an asterisk (*) following the code and in IATA literature as well.
Read more about this topic: Airline Codes-0
Famous quotes containing the words airline and/or designator:
“My job as a reservationist was very routine, computerized ... I had no free will. I was just part of that stupid computer.”
—Beryl Simpson, U.S. employment counselor; former airline reservationist. As quoted in Working, book 2, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“Let’s call something a rigid designator if in every possible world it designates the same object, a non-rigid or accidental designator if that is not the case. Of course we don’t require that the objects exist in all possible worlds.... When we think of a property as essential to an object we usually mean that it is true of that object in any case where it would have existed. A rigid designator of a necessary existent can be called strongly rigid.”
—Saul Kripke (b. 1940)