Comment by stackghost
3 hours ago
Root cause:
> American assigns the same flight number to the outbound and return services, with the same aircraft typically operating both legs.
Other airlines don’t do this, and instead assign a different flight number to the return flight.
Alaska does the same too. Especially with their shorter flights, you might have more than 2 of the same flight per day.
Sound like that would be absolute pain if not for customer anyone who just got flight number and wanted to track the process. Or at least I took that as having multiple flights leaving at different times during the day... Couldn't you even have different flights departing at same time with same number in weirdest case?