What do the airline abbreviations of the first two letters of the flight number stand for?

Flight number: Generally, the first two letters or the combination of letters and numbers represent airlines, which is a two-word code stipulated by the International Aviation Association.

Airline code is a two-letter code designated by International Air Transport Association (IATA) for global airlines, which consists of two initials of flight code. IATA also adopts the three-letter code 1987 issued by ICAO.

The two-letter airline code list is used for reservation, timetable, ticketing, tax, air waybill, publicly released timetable and radio communication between airlines, and also for airline applications. IATA distributes three kinds of two-character airline codes: unique English number, unique number with English number and controlled duplicate code. Codes are used for airline identification for various commercial purposes. These two-letter airline codes were designated by IATA in accordance with the provisions of resolution 762.

Extended data:

Source of airline code list

Airlines apply to IATA (International Air Transport Association) and use it after approval.

Because domestic airlines were established late, most of the codes have been used by other airlines, so they can only use the two-character codes of domestic airlines, and some of them are even, so it is very irregular. For example, Sichuan Airlines is 3U, Xiamen Airlines is MF, China Eastern Airlines is MU and so on. Meaningless.

The code CA of China International Airlines was the code that China Civil Aviation continued CAAC (there was no airline in China at that time, but only the Civil Aviation Administration of China, all domestic flights started with CA, and Air China used CA after the establishment of airlines after the civil aviation reform), while foreign airlines could apply for a code with strong correlation with the airline name if they applied early.

For example, American Airlines is AA, United Airlines is UA, Air France is AF, and Japan Airlines is JL.

Every airline has a code in International Air Transport Association (IATA). There are two kinds of codes: two-character code and three-character code, of which two-character code is the most commonly used, in which MU is the code of Eastern Airlines, and MU is not the English abbreviation of Eastern Airlines.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Airline Code List