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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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