"David Brooks" wrote in message
...

In addition, I thought we understood that at some time (presumably
after an appropriate timeout), some FAA computer decides to delete
the flight without human intervention. I just wanted to be reassured
that is an exception to the the "nothing happens". Otherwise I
suppose you'd quickly run out of available squawk codes and
eventually memory space.


Yes, the flight plan is deleted from the computer without any human action.
Understand that this happens at the end of the line for any particular
flight, there's just no reason to retain the information.