Flight Number...

[JALTO]

Just heard a departure from PHL Air Wisconsin 917A...never seen a letter after the flight number.  Anyone have a minute to explain?

Thanks

-J

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/AWI917A

[Tom56]

Chances are another flight had the same number.

[KSYR-pjr]

Looks like there are a few different types of examples of this between Philly and Norfolk.  Check it out:

http://flightaware.com/live/findflight_route.rvt?origin=phl&destination=orf

Purely a guess but I thought it might be some type of repositioning flight for Air Wisconsin aircraft (sans passengers), so therefore instead of an official flight number, the callsign is made up of company name and aircraft N number or some other such set of characters.

When I fly for Angel Flight, a charitable organization that provides free flights to those in medical need, we typically will use a callsign made up of either "Angel Flight" or "Compassion" and the last three characters of our tail id, such as "Angel Flight 45W," which shows up in the ATC computers as, "NGF45W."

FWIW...

[KSYR-pjr]

Nah, scratch my guess.  I just looked on the US Airways schedule and found a passenger flight from Philly to Norfolk matching FlightAware's departure and arrival times and flown by Air Wisconsin.  This flight number, according to USAirways site, is 3917.

[JetScan1]

A lot of Air Wisconsin (AWI) flight numbers now have the added "A" at the end of their callsign. They do it to avoid confusion with similar sounding flight numbers used at the same time by other airlines. This practice has been in use in Europe for a few years now and just recently has appeared in the US. In the Air Wisconsin case it appears when they use it they remove the first number from their flight number and then add an "A" to the end of it to get their callsign. ie: AWI3763 = AWI763A. So far SkyWest (SKW) is the only other US carrier I've noted doing it, in their case they remove the first two numbers and add the "A". ie: SKW3814 = SKW14A. DJ

[tyketto]

It isn't just the commuters that do this.

AWE mainline does this quite often from LAS. One of their flights to KMKE used something like AWE542A, and it was a redeye flight out.

This is done on a regular basis, but for what reason, I do not know.

BL.