Six Characters
Comments
Procrastes
bbanyc
I wonder why they didn't go with the IMF Special Drawing Right, which is used in many other international contexts. (Including aviation - the liability limits under the Montreal Convention are in SDRs.)
chrismorgan
Also not mentioned, they’re not unique across time: six base-36 characters is only 2 billion possibilities, wouldn’t surprise me if the largest GDS would blow through the entire space within a year. <https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/smartpointcloud/Conte...> suggests they get purged after a week, and recycled.
I wonder what fraction of the space is occupied at any given time.
Procrastes
There used to be a story going around, possibly apocryphal, that the process to reset them used to be entirely manual and generally unknown to the rest of the organization. There was a big problem the week the person who had that task retired. Someone around here was probably there if it really happened and can add some color.
Mordisquitos
After reading the article, for some reason I am finding the following fact profoundly distressing. Surely there are more than 1000 active airlines worldwide‽
> Every airline has a 3-digit IATA numeric code. 098 = Air India. British Airways is 125. IndiGo is 526. These codes predate the familiar 2-letter IATA codes (AI, BA, 6E): they were used when teletypes could not reliably transmit letters and numbers interchangeably.
lexicality
The IATA has 367 active airlines.
Bear in mind that this doesn't apply to charter airlines, only public passenger ones.
Given there are about 200 countries in the world, you'd need 5 large airlines per country, which is a lot! Most of them don't have any and rely on other countries. Still more have a single national carrier.
decimalenough
Two-letter codes are assigned to anybody on request, but three-digit codes are assigned only to full IATA members.
The three-digit code is used primarily for ticketing (it's the first three digits of a ticket number), and as an airline you only really need it if you're going to do complex interop things like ticketing another airline's flights. Most low cost carriers like Ryanair are not IATA members, and even Southwest only joined last year.
ks2048
IATA-registered airlines - it seems there are 370,
addaon
Also, not every airline has a 3-digit code. e.g. Aero Republica has the two-alphanum designator P5, but doesn't have a 3-digit.
NewsaHackO
Very interesting article. However, almost didn't open due to the vague title. I was expecting something about short DOS names
croisillon
Related: 49 comments, 5 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730712
hamburglar
Interesting post. One detail I don’t see is how the ROE info actually tells you what currency to convert to. I see the exchange rate calculation but how do you know what the final units are?
gregschlom
I suspect it's this part:
"This ticket was priced in GBP, not INR. Because the journey originated in Manchester, the fare is denominated in the currency of the origin country: the United Kingdom."
So: the currency is the one for the country of origin.
A half-joking comment I once heard from someone who was part of the group that established the NUC. It stood for "Not US Currency," but tracks the dollar because that compromise was the only thing everyone could agree on. The first stablecoin.