Random Airlines

How this random airline generator works

Press Generate and you get an airline. Turn up the Number box for several at once, no repeats. Copy takes them.

Ansett Australia. Swissair. Aeroflot. 40-Mile Air. Qatar Executive. Regent Airways.

Some of them will sell you a ticket this afternoon. Most of them chose a name, painted it on a tailfin, believed in it, and stopped.

The alphabet ran out in 1982

When you book a flight, the code on your ticket is an IATA airline designator. Two characters. AA is American. KL is KLM. FR is Ryanair.

Two characters give you a few hundred usable combinations, and the world has rather more airlines than that.

So in 1982 the International Civil Aviation Organization introduced a separate three-letter system, which became its official standard in November 1987. Delta is DL to IATA and DAL to ICAO. Both codes refer to the same airline, and airlines carry both.

IATA never adopted the longer codes. Its own standard allows a third character, and it has never issued one, because the reservation systems that airlines have run since the 1960s cannot cope with it. A twenty-year-old standard sits unused because of software older than the standard.

Instead, IATA expanded sideways. Once the letter pairs ran out it began mixing letters and digits, which is why EasyJet is U2 and JetBlue is B6. A code that looks like a joke is a symptom of an exhausted namespace.

The code outlives the airline

Here is the part that says something about the industry.

When an airline is delisted, IATA makes its two-character code available for reuse after six months. The name goes. The livery goes. The staff go. The code goes back into a drawer, waits half a year, and is issued to somebody else.

And when a code cannot be freed, IATA issues a controlled duplicate: the same two characters given to two different airlines whose routes are unlikely to overlap. The code 7Y has belonged to a charter airline in Sudan and a charter airline in Lebanon at the same time. The system tolerates the collision because the alternative is running out.

Meanwhile the codes that survive stop matching their airlines. AY was issued to a company called Aero OY. That company is now Finnair, and it is still AY. FI was issued to Flugfélag Íslands, which is now Icelandair, and it is still FI. The designator is kept through a rename, because changing it would mean changing every ticketing system on Earth.

So the two letters on your boarding pass may be an abbreviation of a company that has not existed under that name since before your parents were born.

Every airline has three names

There is the name on the aircraft. There is the code on the ticket. And there is the word the pilot says on the radio.

That third one is the radiotelephony designator, or callsign, and it exists because two letters read aloud over a bad radio link is a good way to put an aircraft in the wrong place. So each operator gets a spoken word, assigned by ICAO, and it does not have to resemble the airline's name at all.

Most of them are sensible. Some are not. A Canadian company registered as 611897 Alberta Limited flies under the callsign DONUT, which is recorded, in earnest, in the open airline database.

Somewhere a controller has said, entirely straight-faced, "DONUT, cleared to land."

Most airlines do not last

Nobody has a definitive count of the world's airlines, because it depends on whether you mean scheduled passenger carriers, cargo operators, charter firms, or anyone holding an air operator's certificate.

What is not in doubt is the shape of the industry. The open airline database maintained by the OpenFlights project lists 6,162 operators and marks 1,255 of them as active. Four out of five names that have ever flown are names that no longer do.

Ansett Australia. Swissair. Air Berlin. Monarch Airlines. Thomas Cook Airlines. Every one of them was, at some point, obviously permanent.

Airlines are formed constantly and most of them die, because the business has enormous fixed costs, thin margins, a fuel bill it cannot control, and a customer who will change loyalty for eleven pounds. The survivors are a thin crust on top of an enormous graveyard.

Generate twenty names and read them slowly. That is what an industry looks like when you write all of it down.

Ways people actually use this

• Test data. Enormous, varied, and full of the punctuation and accents that break address fields.
• Fiction. You need a plausible defunct regional carrier. You will find one.
• Quizzes. Show the name, ask the country. Then ask whether it still flies. Nobody gets that one.
• Learning the codes. Look up the IATA and ICAO designators of whatever you generate. The gap between them is usually a story.
• Not for booking. Obviously.

Getting more out of the filters

• Contains is a plain substring search. Type Airways, Airlines, Aviation, Cargo or Jet and watch the naming conventions of an industry sort themselves out.
• Type Air and you will get most of the file, which tells you something on its own.
• Type a country name. Many airlines carry one, and the results are a small history of that country's aviation.
• Type a number. 1, 2, 4. The oddities live there.
• Starts with and Ends with compare a single character, so give them one letter.

Questions people ask

How many airlines are there in the world?

Nobody has a definitive count, because it depends on whether you mean scheduled passenger carriers, cargo operators, charter firms or anyone with an air operator's certificate. The OpenFlights database lists 6,162 operators and marks 1,255 of them active.

What is the difference between an IATA and an ICAO airline code?

IATA designators are two characters and are used commercially, on tickets and timetables. ICAO designators are three letters, issued since 1947 and standardised in their present form in the 1980s, and are used operationally, in flight plans and air traffic control. Delta is DL to IATA and DAL to ICAO.

Are airline codes reused?

Yes. IATA can reissue a two-character code six months after an airline is delisted, and it also issues controlled duplicates, where two airlines with non-overlapping routes share one code.

Why does Finnair's code start with A?

Because AY was assigned to Aero OY, the company Finnair used to be. Designators are usually kept through a rename, so a great many codes no longer resemble the name on the aircraft.

What is an airline callsign?

The word a pilot uses on the radio, assigned by ICAO. It exists because spoken letters are easy to mishear. It need not resemble the airline's name, which is how a numbered Canadian company came to be called DONUT.

References

1. Airline codes
2. IATA numbers and codes explained
3. ICAO aircraft operator and radiotelephony designators, SKYbrary
4. OpenFlights airlines database