SkyWest Flight Numbers

[Stifler's Mom]

I noticed many of your flights are using phonetic letters with ATC, as opposed to the actually flight numbers that Delta assigns. Curious as to why that is?

(Hope that made sense)

 

[TOOL CRIB]

Happens with most airlines. Through flights with 2 segments like PHL-ATL and ATL-SAT may be assigned the same flight number. Flight 100 we'll say. I dunno why they do this... but if the two flights with the same flight number are assigned to two different crews and airplanes, and if one crew is running late and the flights with the same flight number are in the air at the same time... could be confusing. So one of the flights becomes flight 100A instead.

So basically, it just means their flight is running late.

 

[IAPS_degraded]

Here is an example for flight 4077...

Denver (DEN) September 07 09:10am
Salt Lake City (SLC) September 07 10:36am

Salt Lake City (SLC) September 07 11:31am
Fresno (FAT) September 07 12:06pm

It is a through flight number from DEN to SLC to FAT. However 2 different crews and aircraft fly the two different legs. Therefore there is the possibility that the same callsign could be in use by two different aircraft at the same time, if for instance the inbound DEN-SLC were running late. So they change the outbound SLC flights to the last two numbers and a letter. Hence SLC-FAT would then become something like SKW 77G.

edit...Above poster beat me to it...however the callsigns are automatically assigned like this whether flights are running late or not.

 

[Stifler's Mom]

Here is an example for flight 4077...

Denver (DEN) September 07 09:10am
Salt Lake City (SLC) September 07 10:36am

Salt Lake City (SLC) September 07 11:31am
Fresno (FAT) September 07 12:06pm

edit...Above poster beat me to it...however the callsigns are automatically assigned like this whether flights are running late or not.

Thanks, that's what I thought, but I had heard so many of them at once, that I thought there might be another reason, plus some used Zulu and Kilo which I thought was strange, as opposed to just using Alpha.

 

[homerjdispatch]

Some of them also have to do with very similar flight numbers and confusion among ATC and crews.... example SkyWest 6676 and SkyWest 6766.... Also ATC in SLC didnt like having SkyWest and Southwest flying the same time with like numbers.