After reading the article, for some reason I am finding the following fact profoundly distressing. Surely there are more than 1000 active airlines worldwide‽<p>> <i>Every airline has a 3-digit IATA numeric code. 098 = Air India. British Airways is 125. IndiGo is 526. These codes predate the familiar 2-letter IATA codes (AI, BA, 6E): they were used when teletypes could not reliably transmit letters and numbers interchangeably.</i>
The IATA has 367 active airlines.<p>Bear in mind that this doesn't apply to charter airlines, only public passenger ones.<p>Given there are about 200 countries in the world, you'd need 5 large airlines per country, which is a lot! Most of them don't have any and rely on other countries. Still more have a single national carrier.
IATA-registered airlines - it seems there are 370,<p><a href="https://www.iata.org/en/about/members/airline-list/" rel="nofollow">https://www.iata.org/en/about/members/airline-list/</a>
Also not mentioned, they’re not unique across time: six base-36 characters is only 2 billion possibilities, wouldn’t surprise me if the largest GDS would blow through the entire space within a year. <<a href="https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/smartpointcloud/Content/Learn/16History/RetrievePast.htm#:~:text=A%20booking,been%20purged%2E" rel="nofollow">https://support.travelport.com/webhelp/smartpointcloud/Conte...</a>> suggests they get purged after a week, and recycled.<p>I wonder what fraction of the space is occupied at any given time.
Interesting post. One detail I don’t see is how the ROE info actually tells you what currency to convert to. I see the exchange rate calculation but how do you know what the final units are?
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