What does the F stand for in QF?

[tdimdad]

Out of interest, why is the IATA designator for Qantas marked as 'QF'? What does the 'F' stand for in it?

The question stems from a lounge agents question (in a Menzies run lounge which serves all airlines at that airport). She had to manually key in the FF membership details from the boarding pass and select which airline's program I belong to. She said that she often confuses Qatar and Qantas and had to confirm which one it was.

Qatar has QR which sounds pretty logical. But how come Qantas has QF? Or is that just a random lucky price in an IATA code raffle?

 

[eric2011]

Lets keep it clean...

 

[aikman]

Guide to abbreviations [Why the F in QF?]

Fuzhou Airlines is called FU which at least makes sense. Their home base is FOC airport.

 

[justinbrett]

Guide to abbreviations [Why the F in QF?]

Which doesn’t actually answer the question (yes the IATA code is QF but QF is old enough to have picked a code way back, not be allocated the dregs like new airlines today)

The main reason is it wasn’t always QF. It was EM from the time the IATA codes were created (1947) through to around 1960. EM stood for Empire, as it was known as Qantas Empire Airways.

I have no idea why QF was chosen - I think QA was available (it was only taken in 2013 by an airline in Yemen). Perhaps the F was for federal (rather than Empire) as it was done at the time of nationalisation. I have no idea.

Similarly BA was BO (for BOAC) and they later changed to BA.

 

[eric2011]

What about....QF as in Qantas Flight

 

[justinbrett]

What about....QF as in Qantas Flight

That’s the most commonly held belief but it’s just people reverse engineering the code, I’ve seen no evidence.

Plenty of airlines include the word flight when saying their flight numbers (eg United Flight 93) so not sure why Qantas felt the need to include it in their code.

 

[Duffa]

I'm not going to speculate. Will get moderated!!

 

[Skyring]

Some discussion here.

 

[whughes3]

I have no idea why QF was chosen - I think QA was available (it was only taken in 2013 by an airline in Yemen). Perhaps the F was for federal (rather than Empire) as it was done at the time of nationalisation. I have no idea.

QA was in use for a long time before 2013; was originally some obscure airline in Mexico IIRC.

Aerocaribe - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Lynda2475]

What about....QF as in Qantas Flight

Rightly or wrongly I've always thought of it as Qantas Flight when booking a flight i.e QF1 or reading a boarding pass.

 

[Dr Ralph]

Flight.

 

[Melburnian1]

Lets keep it clean...

Yes, without reading your contribution, my thought too, especially given the immense unpunctuality of 2023, admittedly way after the designator commenced usage.

 

[jpp42]

I don't think airline executives in the past had any idea the two letter codes would be so commonly used in customer facing information. They were probably seen as backoffice details back in the 1940's when first assigned . For all we know, the second character F was assigned totally randomly and no one bothered to ask IATA for a better one at the time because they just didn't care.

There is precedent for changes, BOAC changed BO to BA when they became British Airways, and Virgin changed from DJ to VA when the latter became available. But many others have not changed, like AY which references an old name of FinnAir. I suspect for Qantas the difficulty of changing would be pretty high so they haven't bothered to grab QA when it was available as there's probably little marketing benefit, and large costs in changing.

 

[Himeno]

It doesn't mean anything. It, just like every other IATA and ICAO code, is just what is available when assigned.
"QF" is just the assigned IATA shorthand for Qantas Airways.

 

[RooFlyer]

My 2 bobs worth: F for flight; while others may have been available, this was was good as any!

QT ("Qan-Tas") would have been OK euphonically (only taken by another since 1973, as far as I can tell)

 

[justinbrett]

It doesn't mean anything. It, just like every other IATA and ICAO code, is just what is available when assigned.
"QF" is just the assigned IATA shorthand for Qantas Airways.

The codes are selected though and they usually do mean something, at least they did nearly 60 years ago when QF first started being used. There were far fewer airlines back then. Starting with a Q meant even more codes were sill available (compared to S for example, eg SQ for Singapore, and that was much later in 1972).

F may well not mean anything, but that’s the question - why was F chosen? QA, QN, QT, QS would all have made more sense and presumably at least one was available.

QA was in use for a long time before 2013; was originally some obscure airline in Mexico IIRC.

Aerocaribe - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

But even they were founded 12 years after QF was in use.

Rightly or wrongly I've always thought of it as Qantas Flight when booking a flight i.e QF1 or reading a boarding pass.

Flight.

But the flight number is just one context of the airline code, albeit the most common for the general public. It stands for the airline as a whole, so doesn’t really make sense for it to mean flight when talking about things like interline agreements,

Also the F is in the ICAO code - QFA, presumably the A is Airways, so Flight really doesn’t make sense in this context.

 

[LittleFokker]

Floccinaucinihilipilification​

 

[Scarlett]

Fysh

I have no actual information but it’s as good a guess as any other…

 

[Quickstatus]

Should have been GF based on the way it treats some of its passengers.

 

[Captain Halliday]

F means fast.

Or is that the other mob?