Hi everyone,
Can someone ID this aircraft’s operator? It’s an A332 en route from Frank Pais Intl to Manchester Intl. The operator is “Turkish”. Could this be Turkish Airlines?
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/TCX31L
Thanks for the info!
JetBlast 
Not sure. That could either be an A330 with a Turkish reg, which may or may not be owned by Turkish airlines, or an actual airline flight by Thomas Cook Airlines according to the FAA’s airline contractions.
It’s Thomas Cook regular scheduled. The TCX… flight number confuses the software into thinking it’s a TC- registration.
Pat got it. Since there is a letter appended to the end, FlightAware thinks it’s a Turkish registration instead of an ICAO flight number.
Don’t know how easy this would be to implement, but…
With just a few exceptions (N,HK,JA) all national registrations are 5 alpha characters (with a dash in there somewhere), so if an identifier is more than 5 characters or contains numeric digits then 99% of the time it’s a flight numbers not a registration.
There are a million exceptions to every rule, so it’s hard, but we’re aware of the limitations and will keep improving the identification system.