5 ms·

The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Te

The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Teletype[2] that are still pushing data around. Not the mention standard meal codes[3], like BLML for "bland meal" and CLML for "celebration cake meal." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Air_Transport_Association_code#IATA_meal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Air_Transport_As...

cratermoon 4y ago
UMNR, INFT, CBBG, AVIH, ARNK. Just some off the top of my head.
supernova87a 4y ago
Add to that (what I understand to be) extortionate data rates for ACARS/ARINC messages, that rival data sent to the Hubble / JWST (if you remember that story from a couple years ago).
reaperducer 4y ago
#3 has RFML - Refugee Meal. I wonder what that is.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  A lot of airlines have done refugee flights at one point or another, so I guess they needed a way to tell the ground crew to load whatever special foods were needed.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    What 'special foods' would be needed for refugees?
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      If they're famine refugees, something like Plumpy'nut[1] maybe. If they're religious refugees, something catering to their religious restrictions. MREs if the refugee operation is being assisted by a military or disaster aid organization. And so forth. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
      - nereye 4y ago
        Talking of MREs, some airlines do not allow them as carry on luggage, see https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/items/mres https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/....
        remarkEon 4y ago
        MREs contain a heating packet filled with magnesium pellets and a couple other things, which are used to heat the food when water is added. I'd imagine they don't want those in the cabin, given the gas that is emitted during the heating process.
    - culi 4y ago
      There's also TBML which is for Tech Bro Meals (soylent, mainly)
      - AdamN 4y ago
        Sounds like a backronym
- markdown 4y ago
  Big Mac Meal.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Bread and water
- macintux 4y ago
  Given that the only references I can find online appear to be copies of the Wikipedia entry, I’m a bit suspicious. Two entries were added by an anonymous contributor: CAKE and RFML. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_Air_Transport_Association_code&diff=601576732&oldid=601447628 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_Air...
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  It’s a euphemism for Soylent Green.
- aksss 4y ago
  humble pie
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  RFML seems from United Airlines, and seems to mean: easy to digest. No egg, no dairy, probably no meat? Its for people from places where food isn't processed or where they had not eaten much for a longer time, so a change in diet content and quantity may be problematic for the passenger.
  - macintux 4y ago
    If you have a citation for that, you should add it to the article.
gfaure 4y ago
I've always wondered about the IATA meal code CAKE, and what it might have involved.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  It sounds like you should take a flight on SAS and find out!
- grishka 4y ago
  It's a lie.
SoftTalker 4y ago
I've also wondered why cryptically abbrevated things like NOTAMS are still the way they are. It made sense in a teletype/telegraph world where brevity was worth time and money. From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM: A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06 Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005 A)EGLL B)0609050500 C)0704300500 E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN CL AND BLUE EDGE LGT. CTN ADZ Likewise METARs (weather reports): METAR KTTN 051853Z 04011KT 1/2SM VCTS SN FZFG BKN003 OVC010 M02/M02 A3006 RMK AO2 TSB40 SLP176 P0002 T10171017= Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though.
- 2143 4y ago
  > Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though. You're correct. It's straightforward for pilots. They can quickly read a NOTAM and understand everything. Also, it's pretty standard and unambiguous worldwide. As for the specific example you provided, today is your lucky day! That exact example has been decoded on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR#North_American_METAR_codes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR#North_American_METAR_c...
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    This all seems quite reminiscent of when the US National Weather Service used to issue super-cryptic forecast background summaries, and then slowly non-meterologists started building systems to decode them.
  - rob74 4y ago
    That would be true in an ideal world, but pilots are also only human, so at least some of them will sometimes misread or ignore all that gibberish. To quote Wikipedia: > In July 2017, Air Canada Flight 759 nearly crashed into four other airliners as it attempted to land on a San Francisco taxiway misidentified as a runway: the adjacent runway was closed but the information was buried in the NOTAM. As a consequence, in September 2018, from the findings during its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) stated NOTAMs were unintelligible and ignored, and recommended a more effective information presentation for better relevance. NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt described NOTAMs as "a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to". This led to an ICAO initiative to reform the NOTAM system.
acwan93 4y ago
Cryptic codes and abbreviations are surprisingly prevalent in more places than you'd expect. Anyone working with EDI documents in medical or retailers has first hand knowledge.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Certainly. Air transportation just holds particular interest for me, given that the codes and abbreviations reflect historical physical constraints: so-and-so many columns, so-and-so many inches of printable space on a ticket, etc. (This is also why I find US banking standards interesting[1].) [1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2019/12/25/A-shallow-dive-into-the-American-banking-system https://blog.yossarian.net/2019/12/25/A-shallow-dive-into-th...
  - culi 4y ago
    Most linters follow the 80 character limit because of the IBM punch card and Unicode and ASCII are also both full of these historical quirks. Many of us deal with these every day. I assume it's the same for people working in the aviation or medical industry
culi 4y ago
If you visit an airline on WikiData, they have the FAA, IATA, and ICAO codes pretty well mapped out, but I hadn't ever come across an ACARS entry before. Might be worth mapping out. Example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8731 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8731
culi 4y ago
the thing that bugs me the most about all this is all caps Numerous studies have shown by now that SHOUTING CASE is the slowest to read. Humans read words by their shapes not by individual letters. Capital letters lose the distinctive shapes that their lowercase counterparts often have and thereby also become more ambiguous and error prone
- dhosek 4y ago
  Except that this isn’t really true. Some writing systems lack the ascenders and descenders of the Latin alphabet and reading still happens. Lowercase letters themselves are a late addition to the Latin alphabet. Most readability studies fail the replication test yet they get repeated as if they were scientific facts.
- aksss 4y ago
  In a sea of lowercase prose, all caps stands out from the rest.
tighter_wires 4y ago
I have done work integrating real time systems with flight data in all of these encodings and telex for a large intl travel company that does contracts at an airport you have flown at. A lot of legacy systems are using very early web protocols like SOAP or old encodings e.g. Telex messages.
pelagicAustral 4y ago
Absolutely hellish indeed. I had to write a parser for some kind of custom IATA PAXLST [0] (passenger list) that was coming from an ancient automated email system and I was dumbstruck by the weirdness of it all while reading the documentation. UNB+UNOA:4+SWAIR+NZCS+080708:0545+000000011' UNG+PAXLST+SWAIR+ NZCS+080708:0545+11+UN+D:05B' UNH+SWCA749+PAXLST:D:05B:UN:IATA' BGM+745' NAD+MS+++WILLIAMS:JANE ' COM+41 22 797 2025:TE+41 22 788 4689:FX' TDT+20+SW679' LOC+125+GVA' DTM+189:020322' LOC+87+BOS' DTM+232:020322’ DTM+189:020322' LOC+92+ATL' DTM+232:020322' DTM+189:020323' LOC+130+SFO’ DTM+232:020323' NAD+DDU+++WINDSOR:ELIZABETH:R' ATT+2++F' DTM+329:720623' LOC+178+NCE' LOC+22+ATL' LOC+179+MEX' LOC+174+FRA’ NAT+2+CHE' RFF+AVF:RXDWWH’ DOC+P+564SBB41' DTM+36+051215' LOC+91+FRA' DOC+V+VV258DD7' DTM+182+021212' DTM+36+0421201' LOC+91+:::MARSEILLES’ CNT+42:1' UNT+33+SWCA749' UNE+1+11' UNZ+1+000000011' [0] https://www.iata.org/contentassets/18a5fdb2dc144d619a8c10dc1472ae80/2010-api-guidelines-final-version-mig-release-date-25-11-2010.pdf https://www.iata.org/contentassets/18a5fdb2dc144d619a8c10dc1...

cratermoon 4y ago

UMNR, INFT, CBBG, AVIH, ARNK. Just some off the top of my head.

supernova87a 4y ago

Add to that (what I understand to be) extortionate data rates for ACARS/ARINC messages, that rival data sent to the Hubble / JWST (if you remember that story from a couple years ago).

reaperducer 4y ago

#3 has RFML - Refugee Meal. I wonder what that is.

woodruffw 4y ago
A lot of airlines have done refugee flights at one point or another, so I guess they needed a way to tell the ground crew to load whatever special foods were needed.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  What 'special foods' would be needed for refugees?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    If they're famine refugees, something like Plumpy'nut[1] maybe. If they're religious refugees, something catering to their religious restrictions. MREs if the refugee operation is being assisted by a military or disaster aid organization. And so forth. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut
    - nereye 4y ago
      Talking of MREs, some airlines do not allow them as carry on luggage, see https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/items/mres https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/....
      - remarkEon 4y ago
        MREs contain a heating packet filled with magnesium pellets and a couple other things, which are used to heat the food when water is added. I'd imagine they don't want those in the cabin, given the gas that is emitted during the heating process.
  - culi 4y ago
    There's also TBML which is for Tech Bro Meals (soylent, mainly)
    - AdamN 4y ago
      Sounds like a backronym
markdown 4y ago
Big Mac Meal.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Bread and water
macintux 4y ago
Given that the only references I can find online appear to be copies of the Wikipedia entry, I’m a bit suspicious. Two entries were added by an anonymous contributor: CAKE and RFML. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_Air_Transport_Association_code&diff=601576732&oldid=601447628 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=International_Air...
doctor_eval 4y ago
It’s a euphemism for Soylent Green.
aksss 4y ago
humble pie
PurpleRamen 4y ago
RFML seems from United Airlines, and seems to mean: easy to digest. No egg, no dairy, probably no meat? Its for people from places where food isn't processed or where they had not eaten much for a longer time, so a change in diet content and quantity may be problematic for the passenger.
- macintux 4y ago
  If you have a citation for that, you should add it to the article.

gfaure 4y ago

I've always wondered about the IATA meal code CAKE, and what it might have involved.

woodruffw 4y ago
It sounds like you should take a flight on SAS and find out!
grishka 4y ago
It's a lie.

SoftTalker 4y ago

I've also wondered why cryptically abbrevated things like NOTAMS are still the way they are. It made sense in a teletype/telegraph world where brevity was worth time and money. From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM: A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06 Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005 A)EGLL B)0609050500 C)0704300500 E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN CL AND BLUE EDGE LGT. CTN ADZ Likewise METARs (weather reports): METAR KTTN 051853Z 04011KT 1/2SM VCTS SN FZFG BKN003 OVC010 M02/M02 A3006 RMK AO2 TSB40 SLP176 P0002 T10171017= Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though.

2143 4y ago
> Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though. You're correct. It's straightforward for pilots. They can quickly read a NOTAM and understand everything. Also, it's pretty standard and unambiguous worldwide. As for the specific example you provided, today is your lucky day! That exact example has been decoded on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR#North_American_METAR_codes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR#North_American_METAR_c...
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  This all seems quite reminiscent of when the US National Weather Service used to issue super-cryptic forecast background summaries, and then slowly non-meterologists started building systems to decode them.
- rob74 4y ago
  That would be true in an ideal world, but pilots are also only human, so at least some of them will sometimes misread or ignore all that gibberish. To quote Wikipedia: > In July 2017, Air Canada Flight 759 nearly crashed into four other airliners as it attempted to land on a San Francisco taxiway misidentified as a runway: the adjacent runway was closed but the information was buried in the NOTAM. As a consequence, in September 2018, from the findings during its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) stated NOTAMs were unintelligible and ignored, and recommended a more effective information presentation for better relevance. NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt described NOTAMs as "a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to". This led to an ICAO initiative to reform the NOTAM system.

acwan93 4y ago

Cryptic codes and abbreviations are surprisingly prevalent in more places than you'd expect. Anyone working with EDI documents in medical or retailers has first hand knowledge.

woodruffw 4y ago
Certainly. Air transportation just holds particular interest for me, given that the codes and abbreviations reflect historical physical constraints: so-and-so many columns, so-and-so many inches of printable space on a ticket, etc. (This is also why I find US banking standards interesting[1].) [1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2019/12/25/A-shallow-dive-into-the-American-banking-system https://blog.yossarian.net/2019/12/25/A-shallow-dive-into-th...
- culi 4y ago
  Most linters follow the 80 character limit because of the IBM punch card and Unicode and ASCII are also both full of these historical quirks. Many of us deal with these every day. I assume it's the same for people working in the aviation or medical industry

culi 4y ago

If you visit an airline on WikiData, they have the FAA, IATA, and ICAO codes pretty well mapped out, but I hadn't ever come across an ACARS entry before. Might be worth mapping out. Example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8731 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8731

culi 4y ago

the thing that bugs me the most about all this is all caps Numerous studies have shown by now that SHOUTING CASE is the slowest to read. Humans read words by their shapes not by individual letters. Capital letters lose the distinctive shapes that their lowercase counterparts often have and thereby also become more ambiguous and error prone

dhosek 4y ago
Except that this isn’t really true. Some writing systems lack the ascenders and descenders of the Latin alphabet and reading still happens. Lowercase letters themselves are a late addition to the Latin alphabet. Most readability studies fail the replication test yet they get repeated as if they were scientific facts.
aksss 4y ago
In a sea of lowercase prose, all caps stands out from the rest.

tighter_wires 4y ago

I have done work integrating real time systems with flight data in all of these encodings and telex for a large intl travel company that does contracts at an airport you have flown at. A lot of legacy systems are using very early web protocols like SOAP or old encodings e.g. Telex messages.

pelagicAustral 4y ago

Absolutely hellish indeed. I had to write a parser for some kind of custom IATA PAXLST [0] (passenger list) that was coming from an ancient automated email system and I was dumbstruck by the weirdness of it all while reading the documentation. UNB+UNOA:4+SWAIR+NZCS+080708:0545+000000011' UNG+PAXLST+SWAIR+ NZCS+080708:0545+11+UN+D:05B' UNH+SWCA749+PAXLST:D:05B:UN:IATA' BGM+745' NAD+MS+++WILLIAMS:JANE ' COM+41 22 797 2025:TE+41 22 788 4689:FX' TDT+20+SW679' LOC+125+GVA' DTM+189:020322' LOC+87+BOS' DTM+232:020322’ DTM+189:020322' LOC+92+ATL' DTM+232:020322' DTM+189:020323' LOC+130+SFO’ DTM+232:020323' NAD+DDU+++WINDSOR:ELIZABETH:R' ATT+2++F' DTM+329:720623' LOC+178+NCE' LOC+22+ATL' LOC+179+MEX' LOC+174+FRA’ NAT+2+CHE' RFF+AVF:RXDWWH’ DOC+P+564SBB41' DTM+36+051215' LOC+91+FRA' DOC+V+VV258DD7' DTM+182+021212' DTM+36+0421201' LOC+91+:::MARSEILLES’ CNT+42:1' UNT+33+SWCA749' UNE+1+11' UNZ+1+000000011' [0] https://www.iata.org/contentassets/18a5fdb2dc144d619a8c10dc1472ae80/2010-api-guidelines-final-version-mig-release-date-25-11-2010.pdf https://www.iata.org/contentassets/18a5fdb2dc144d619a8c10dc1...