Hi there
In New Zealand, the IATA flight numbers are often different from the ICAO flight numbers. For instance, the flight known by the airlines as NZ8077 will use the callsign RLK77. NZ5071 will use NZM71. NZ2528 will use EAG528. Air Nelson (RLK), Mount Cook Airlines (NZM) and Eagle Air (EAG) operate solely Air New Zealand sectors, so the flight numbers all begin with NZ.
Recently, all these carrier’s flight have started showing up with the ICAO callsign, but the IATA number. So RLK77 is RLK8077, NZM71 is NZM5071, and EAG528 is EAG2528. This is totally incorrect, and what it’s doing is causing a lot of duplicates:
eg
flightaware.com/live/flight/RLK8077 and
flightaware.com/live/flight/RLK77
are the same flight. One (RLK8077) is estimated, and it will always be estimated because no flight with that callsign exists. The other is the real flight. Interestingly, some flights don’t show duplicates, but still use the incorrect callsign (ICAO callsign/IATA number).
Are FlightAware staff aware of this issue and working on it?