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IATA airline designators are used to identify an airline for commercial purposes in reservations, timetables, tickets, tariffs, air waybills and in telecommunications. A flight designator is the concatenation of the airline designator, xx( a), and the numeric flight number, n( n)( n)( n), plus an optional one-letter " operational suffix "( a). Therefore, the full format of a flight designator is xx( a) n( n)( n)( n)( a). After an airline is delisted, IATA can make the code available for reuse after six months and can issue " controlled duplicates ".
Controlled duplicates are issued to regional airlines whose destinations are not likely to overlap, so that the same code is shared by two airlines. The controlled duplicate is denoted here, and in IATA literature, with an asterisk(*). An example of this is the code " 6Y ", which refers to both Mid Airlines, a charter airline in Sudan, and Med Airways, a charter airline in Lebanon. IATA also issues an accounting or prefix code. This number is used on tickets as the first three characters of the ticket number. The IATA codes originally based on the ICAO designators which were issued in 1947 as twoletter airline identification codes.
ICAO airline designator
The ICAO airline designator is a code assigned by the International Civil Aviation Organization( ICAO) to aircraft operating agencies, aeronautical authorities, and services related to international aviation, each of whom is allocated both a three-letter designator and a telephony designator. These codes are unique by airline, unlike the IATA airline designator codes.
The designators are listed in ICAO Document 8585: Designators for Aircraft Operating Agencies, Aeronautical Authorities and Services.
ICAO codes have been issued since 1947. The ICAO codes originally based on a two-lettersystem and were identical to the airline codes used by IATA. After an airline joined IATA its existing ICAO-two-letter-code was taken over as IATA code.
So in the 1970s the abbreviation BA was the ICAO code and the IATA code of British Airways while non-IATA-airlines like Court Line used their 2-letter-abbreviation as ICAO code only.
A- Z of Flight
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