Airport ABCs: An Explanation of Airport Identifier Codes (1994)

http://www.skygod.com/asstd/abc.html

by vvviolet • 12 years ago

90 36 12 years ago

gumby• 12 years ago

I love the hidden substructure of trivia like this.

jzwinck3• 12 years ago

Then you will also enjoy the naming scheme for runways, e.g. 22L means 220-229 degrees magnetic heading, Left (runways with no parallel will have no trailing letter).

205guy• 12 years ago

Note that runway 22L is the same as 4R, just with the opposite approach (from the other end, thus 180 degrees around). The 2 names appear at the corresponding ends of the runway.

reacweb• 12 years ago

In airport LFPG, runways 27R and 26R are strictly parallel.

mikeash• 12 years ago

And because the magnetic pole moves around over time, that means runways designations aren't constant. A few years ago, the runway at the airport where I fly had to change from 09/27 to 10/28 because of this.

joezydeco• 12 years ago

The article missed a really juicy one.

"The Federal Communications Committee set aside the 'W' and 'K' codes for radio stations east and west of the Mississippi respectively. 'Q' was designated for international telecommunications. 'Z' was reserved for special uses"

Okay, but why K and W for United States civilian radio stations?

The answer lies in Morse Code:

    A = . -  ->  W = . - -
    N = - .  ->  K = - . -

The US originally requested "A" for "Army" and "N" for "Navy" when applying to the International Telegraph Union (ITU) in 1912.

The civilian stations came out of adding a dash to the end of both of those letters. N became K, A became W.

Animats• 12 years ago

The airport codes are now second level domains under ".aero". Most of them are redirects set up by the .aero promoters, though.

pyre• 12 years ago

Maybe just in the States. E.g. pdx.aero => portofportland.com while yyz.aero => Blank page with "under construction" in the title.

dingaling• 12 years ago

airports around the world are universally known by a unique three-letter code

The 'universality' of the IATA codes seems to be a common misunderstanding as most passengers only fly to airports with scheduled services, therefore they assume all air facilities have such codes.

Only 30% or so of airports and airfields have three -letter IATA codes; all flight planning and ATC is conducted using the four-letter ICAO codes which are almost universal, though ZZZZ is eserved for exceptional cases.

Outside North America the ICAO scheme has some interesting local patterns which permit a reasonable guess to be made as to the location and category of airfield, something the IATA scheme cannot offer; it relies on rote memorisation.

e.g. ICAO code EGAA. E is Western Europe, G is UK, A is the westernmost region of the UK and A is the primary airport in thst region. Belfast International / Aldergrove.

jka• 12 years ago

It's fairly understandable given that those 30% of airports probably carry more than 90% of general commercial passenger traffic.

Certainly enough to build travel booking engines on, as many have proven - but it'd be interesting as a niche project to provide a tool for arranging/searching for more regional airport transport options. Flight-sharing via local airports, for example :)

bengali32• 12 years ago

yes, general aviation tools have to account for ICAO, IATA and abbreviation lookups. (many times the 'K' prefix from the ICAO gets dropped in communications)

FMI see:

http://skyvector.com/ (see text box, upper left)

http://charternation.com/airports/

http://www.airnav.com/airports/

jsmthrowaway• 12 years ago

Did you not make it through the article? The author described exactly that almost the exact same way.

_jomo2• 12 years ago

IATA codes are also often used by ISPs in the domain names of some routers (as can be seen in routers).

I found it actually quite surprising that this is common practice, yet I couldn't find this documented anywhere.

xenophonf• 12 years ago

The Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) used to give advice on naming conventions, and server host names incorporating location information was one of their examples. The pattern was LOC-OR-FUNC-##, or at least that's what we ended up implementing. (I'm unable to find this in current versions of the MOF documentation.) At the time I used IATA codes because I didn't want to come up with my own comprehensive location encoding standard---and because I was operating data centers in cities with international airports. Nowadays we operate data centers or branch offices in some pretty remote spots, so we've had to come up with our own three-letter codes anyway. I hate the arbitrariness of it. Recently, I came across http://www.mnxsolutions.com/devops/a-proper-server-naming-sc..., which suggests using the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations (UN/LOCODE, http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/service/location.html). It still isn't comprehensive enough for our purposes (we operate in some _really_ remote spots), but I like it a lot better than the IATA codes.

_jomo2• 12 years ago

EDIT: I meant "as can be seen in traceroute"

bengali32• 12 years ago

Airport ABCs: An Explanation of Airport Identifier Codes (1994)

Related Stories