Odd vs even flight numbers

4/10/2022 10:57:49 PM

There is no industry standard, written or otherwise, for the way that flight numbers are allocated. Some airlines will have published or unpublished standards for how flight numbers are allocated – sometimes these will be strictly followed, whilst other times they will only be loosely followed.

As a few examples…

Australian airline Qantas uses ranges of flight numbers to designate a number of things, but the most important of these is that flight QF1 to QF399 are international flights, whilst QF400 and above are domestic flights (not including codeshare flights which start around QF2600).

Qantas DOES follow the odd/even pattern you described for international flights, with odd flight numbers being used for flights departing Australia, and even flight numbers being used for flights arriving in Australia. eg, QF7 from Sydney, Australia to Dallas, USA is an international flight (<400), departing Australia (odd).

For domestic flights, South/West bound flights have odd numbers, whilst North/East flights have even numbers. Some ranges can also designate the type of aircraft normally flying on a route. eg, QF1501 is a south-bound route that would normally be flown by a QantasLink Boeing 717!

Germany’s Lufthansa Airline goes the other way when it comes to even/odd flights – even numbers designate a flight out of Germany, whilst odd designates a flight to Germany. Lufthansa flight numbers also often designate the destination of the flight. eg, flight numbers LH400-499 are flights to North America. Thus LH458 is a flight to (even) North America (4xx) – in fact it’s from Munich to San Francisco.

For domestic flights, Lufthansa flights out of Frankfurt airport always appear to be even numbers – although I’m not sure if that is always the case or just the vast majority of the time.

United Airlines does not follow an even/odd flights number rule. For example, the two UA flight from San Francisco to London Heathrow today are UA901 and UA948 – one odd, the other even! United did historically follow a geographic model for international flight numbers, with UA8xx being flights to Asia Pacific/Oceania, UA9xx being flights to Europe, etc, and whilst many flights do still followed these conventions, many do not. For example, UA1 to Singapore, and UA98 to Melbourne, Australia.

Some airlines (especially those that use odd/even numbers for direction) will follow a "sequential" numbering scheme where the return flight number is one higher than the outbound flight, whilst others will not. For example, the return flight to LH458 mentioned above is indeed LH459 (SFO-MUC). Same for UA2 (SIN-SFO) and UA99 (MEL-LAX). However again this is not strictly followed by all airlines – the return flights for United’s two London flights mentioned above (UA901 and UA948) are UA900 and UA949 which are sequential but in opposite directions to each other, whilst the return flight for United’s UA863 (SFO-SYD) is UA870!

Credit:stackoverflow.com‘

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Hello,My name is Aparna Patel,I’m a Travel Blogger and Photographer who travel the world full-time with my hubby.I like to share my travel experience.

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