parse_flight_identifier

com.airsidelabs/aviation-tools · Verify this server

Split a flight designator into carrier and number, and identify the carrier. Accepts the forms that arrive in real message traffic: TK1979, BAW276, "U2 8341", BA02490, BA2490A. Returns the parsed carrier with its resolved airline, the flight number, any operational suffix, which scheme was used (IATA or ICAO), and both normalised forms. Two things this tool will not do. It will not tell you who operated the flight: a designator names the marketing carrier, and a codeshare is invisible in the string. And it will not invent a carrier for a bare flight number -- pass `context` and it will look for an identifier in that text, but the result is capped at 0.6 confidence and returned as a candidate, because inference is not identification. Pass `date` when parsing historical data: the carrier depends on it, since SN2103 was a Sabena flight in 1995 and a Brussels Airlines flight in 2020. A string that parses correctly but names no known airline returns `unresolved` with a note saying exactly that -- the string was read and nothing was identified, which are different achievements. Where a two-character designator matches nothing but its reverse does, the reverse is offered as an alternate and never as the answer. Reading `confidence`: 1.0 means an exact unique match on an unambiguous identifier for the as_of date. 0.7-0.99 means a unique match reached through normalisation, an alias or a historical record. 0.4-0.69 means the best of several plausible candidates and `alternates` is populated -- prefer asking the user over picking one. Below 0.4 is speculative: do not act on it. `status` is resolved, ambiguous or unresolved. An unresolved answer is a real result, not an error: it means this dataset cannot identify the thing, and inventing one would be worse. Every field in `best` has a citation in `provenance`. When the thing exists and this dataset could not identify it, report_unmet_need with gap_kind `unresolved` is how that gap gets prioritised -- report it, then tell the user you could not find it.