✈️ The Maddening Mess of Airport Codes! ✈️

There are thousands of airports connecting cities across countries and continents. Yet, with just three letters from AAC and BBI to YYZ and ZZU, both me and you and our bags root round the world as unambiguously as practically possible: airport codes.

If you fly, you know them as part of the planning on your tickets, trackers, and tags, and even as part of the port itself as big, big branding. It's impossible not to wonder, bored on a long haul with only in-flight entertainment, about potential patterns peeking through, like all the Canadian Y airports.

Why Canada and why everyone? How do all these codes code? Well, neighbor, to find the answer, we need to divert this flight to YUL, the Canadian city that's capital of codes: Montreal. Where is headquartered IATA, the International Air Transport Association? It's not a governmental organization, more an independent aviation agency for airlines, where they work to make airports and airplanes increasingly interoperable using humanity's most exciting and powerful yet oft-maligned as dull tool: standards.

One of which is the IATA airport code: three letters to identify every airport in the world, from the most connected to the least. All are coded so companies can communicate clearly and concisely complicated connections to carry their customers and their bags. And actually, the code I had to created isn't only for airports; rather, technically it's a location code for all kinds of transportation interchanges, like plane stations that connect to train stations.

Okay, let's try not to get distracted by efficient infrastructure—easier said than done. Here's how the IATA code is supposed to work: one airport, one code, which is unique because airport names are not booking passage to Portland. Cool? That could be Oregon or Maine or Victoria, Australia. Ambiguity is the enemy.

International flying creates communication connections between every language on Earth, so the IATA code helps when you don't speak Greenlandic or Odia but still need to book a flight to Kangarless Sac via Bob Bainware. I'm so sorry, Greenland and India. Instead of Mongolian pronunciation, it's just SFJ via BBI—much clearer, not just for you but also for the ground crew getting the bags through.

Ideally, the IATA code comes from the first three letters of the location, like with Gibraltar, where Gibraltar Airport is given GIB, GIB, Gibraltar. So, going to Cork, it'll be C-O-R, Cork, Ireland. Oh, that didn't work; seems Cordoba, Argentina, built their airport first and got COR ahead of Cork, so, uh, ORC for Cork. Tough noogies.

ORC, Germany? That's an adorable town name you've got there, but you're going to need to pick something else for your code. Thus, a single code collision kicks off a consistency cascade as airports compete for clear codes. So, if your local airport has an odd three letters, there's probably a rival port that picked previously.

This is one of the major things IATA does: coordinate everyone's code preferences, which means dealing with not just individual airports but all the aviation agencies in different countries, some with their own design desires for inter-country code consistency. Such as Canada, who clearly claimed all the Ys, thus picking a Y1 at random. At least you know roughly where you're going to go. Oops, no, that didn't work.

YKM brought us to Washington, USA, and since we're here, we might as well talk about the FAA. In America, the Federal Aviation Administration, daughter of the Department of Transportation, is given the job of assigning all American airports an American airport code. Yes, the FAA actually has her own set of three-letter codes, but we're not going to talk about it because it means in America there's one airport, two codes, and for simplicity, I'm sticking to this story: one airport, one code, right?

Right now, FAA has letters she'd really rather American airports not use. Please, no NQWKZ or YN reserved for the Navy. For OMG, is it aircraft carriers? No, they use an unrelated and additional system that we're also not going to talk about. The Navy N is given to Navy bases with air airports, so American airports like Nashville that seem like they should start with the letter N were encouraged to pick something else, like B for But Asheville.

There is also A for the Army and the Air Force, although not all the A's, so there's a bunch of A airports like Albuquerque, Aberdeen, Anchorage, Amarillo, and Augusta. Next, QFAA once avoided because of—checks notes—Morse code? Wow, really? There's a set of three-letter international Morse codes that begin with Q for quickie communications that are still used. I guess so because of 1800s telegraph slang, American airports shouldn't start with the letter Q.

Next, K and W FAA advises against because FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, daughter of no one—she's an independent agency—assigns K and W for U.S. civilian broadcast stations. So, that thing where on the radio, they say KMAD Action News or WDUL Public Airwaves? Yeah, they all start with a K or W, which is actually location information. K days are in the west and W's in the East, except for the Middle, where it's both.

FCC, why did you do it this way? Well, since you coded those codes first, FAA discourages airports from starting with those letters, even though broadcast codes are four letters, not three. And there you know, radio stations—not airports and definitely not weather stations. Of course, they're not weather stations. Why would you even say that? No reason; it won't come up later, don't worry.

Moving on, Z is reserved for air route traffic control centers themselves. And why know why? Because Canada, of course! Yes, I understand that's not an explanation; we'll get to it later. That's America's preferences for airport codes, but other countries exist, and their aviation agencies don't care at all which letters the United States avoids.

So, while Banashville was building her big, big branding, Nassau grabbed the end to get NAS for the Bahamian capital. There's no shortage of airport codes that start outside the U.S. with America's reluctant letters. And also because FAA's precedence aren't laws, you can find American exceptions like NEW KEK WAK, QUI G, and ZIV. Boy, that was fun to say!

Let's end the video with more of that, shall we? And that new must particularly burn Newark, New Jersey, who had to go with URK for Jersey instead. Right, finishing this thought: every country and their agencies has their own wacky preferences for letters and wants to ignore every other country's preferences.

And IATA's job is to coordinate between them, the result of which is IATA airport codes have no satisfying system at all, which is so sad for a standard. And the story of one airport, one code also falls apart even within IATA because of mega codes for mega cities. Example: London, which has six international airports—Heathrow, Gatwick, City, Luton, Stansted, Southend—LHR, LGW, LCY, LTN. Oh, they all start with L. No, STN is SEN. But there's a mega code for them all, LON, which you can use while searching for flights landing in London but don't care where, even though these airports are ages apart.

LON is the international city megaist mega code, but there's also Moscow, MOW, and Stockholm, STO, with four airports each and more with two or three like NYC and BUE. And then code-wise is the most exceptional airport: Euro Airport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg, an airport so nice they coded it thrice, MLH, BSL, EAP. How this happened is France and Switzerland both wanted an airport here-ish near the German border and teamed up.

France provided the land; Switzerland the capital. Germany has nothing to do with this, and the pair co-built the port, constructing duplicate and separate everythings. So, it was effectively two airports run by two countries with two runways and two sets of rules and thus needed two airport codes, depending on which side passengers could connect through.

And one mega code if it didn't matter. But all of this doesn't mega matter now because the two airports mostly act as one anyway. Thus, one airport, three codes, and there are plans to run a railway through for epic intermodleness, so it could become one airport, four codes or five codes. I mean, why not at this point? So, yeah, an airport isn't uniquely identified by one code, and there's no location information coded in this location code—not even a checksum letter.

What is this, a social security number without a checksum? If you are planning a flight to CGP airport in Bangladesh but typo the incorrect CPG, you'll end up in Argentina instead. Again, but at least the chance of a Switcheroo like that must be pretty small. After all, a three-letter code means 17,000 permutations—way more than the actual number of airports, which is only 40,000 airports worldwide.

How can that possibly be true? Well, it's time to introduce you to ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, daughter of the United Nations, who also lives in Montreal with IATA. It might seem like they're the same, but IATA actually only covers what we might call the standard commercial airports you'd find searching for flights normally, while ICAO covers what she calls aerodromes, which is everything from the world's busiest passenger airport in the always unlikely-seeming Atlanta, Georgia, down to rarely used runways on ranches in Texas of which there are an absolutely absurd number.

So, with all those aerodromes to account for, ICAO uses four letters, which gives—wow!—a lot more options. Thanks, exponentials! And she also uses the extra space to add location information. Finally, in ICAO's system, the first letter of an airport code is roughly where on Earth it is. P is for airports in the Pacific—one letter to cover flying over the most terrifyingly empty half of the Earth.

Try not to think about it as you look down into the endless abyss before arriving at South America’s, then M for Middle America and K for Continental America. C sensibly is Canadian America. And flying over the pole, we get to U for used to be USSR. Yes, that's actually the name. Look, what makes standard standard is their stubbornness. Just because a gigantic country collapsed is no reason to change what millions of flight computers know in their code and pilots in their brains.

After ICAO's first letter, there's also a bunch of second subletters—well, except for America and Canada, who skip that. But don't worry, moving on. As an example: if your airport starts with an F, it's in Southern Africa. If the next letter is A, that's South Africa, and the last two letters are for the airport. So Cape Town gets CT.

For a fact, of course there are some exceptions like Antarctica—the continent's no one owns but all the cool kids want to claim. Aerodromes here are supposed to use the code for the countries claim they're in, such as Williams Field, which is American run but uses NZWD because it's in the Kiwi claim. But also, lots of Antarctic aerodromes use pseudo codes. No, we're not going to talk about what that means, which start with a T and end with a number like 27 for Troll Airfield serving Troll Research Station, which runs on Troll Time.

Norway, is that you? I knew it was! But you really should be using EN for Europe. Norway, and TR is free for trolls. It's so perfect! And yes, the 27 means there are at least 26 other runways in Antarctica. I was surprised too, but this, along with all of the ranches, is how you get to crazy numbers of aerodromes. And yes, ICAO has more exceptions to this system that we're going to skip, but I can't resist just one more, which is region J.

Looking at the map, you won't be able to find it because J is Mars. When the rover arrived at Jezero Crater, ICAO gave the historic landing location the code JZRO. Okay, but that's it for exceptions. So, to sum up, the story of one airport, one code was just that: a story. Tons of airports have at least two, and when they do, the ICAO code is what computers and pilots know to plan where the plane needs to go, and IATA is what passengers say to get on their way.

But if ICAO exists with a more comprehensive code, why is IATA at all? So, IATA isn't about you; it's about your bags. At an airport, you as a human walk to your connecting flight, but your bags below need a lot of logistical assistance. Before IATA, there was just like a handwritten tag saying "please get me where my owner is going," written in potentially every language on Earth. So, you can imagine how often that went wrong.

So IATA used codes to make life better for bags, with bag tags with big clear codes to get those bags cleanly through connections across countries and companies. And the original plan was that train stations with IATA codes would also let you check in your bag there and it would be part of the automatic connection too. But that mostly doesn't happen now because of logistical difficulties, which is the same reason that the IATA code is a club that's too annoying to attend to.

So, if your bag's final destination after connecting at Austin is one of the many random ranch airstrips, the ground crew is not going to swap your bags onto the tiny crop duster for you. Ditto if you're connecting through Argentina to Antarctica anywhere. Those tiny airports know I had a code for you, and without an IATA code, your bag depends on you to get it all the way through.

And that's what IATA is actually for. That big, big branding you see is for your bags, and because of the tag, it became what customers know, which brings us back to the start. Oh, sorry, Canada! I know I've been avoiding answering the whys, but it's just so much more complicated than expected.

There's a tale that the Ys are an old system for if Canadian airports had a weather station: Y for "yes," weather station, and W without. And since pilots want to know the weather, that explains all the Ys, but also the few oddball Canadian Ws. But investigating the truth of that story took eight months of my life, which I will now give to you as an extremely compressed executive summary.

Working backwards, the American and Canadian IATA codes, created in the 1950s, come from the last three letters of ICAO codes, created in the 1940s. The first letter of ICAO codes comes from the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union's codes, created in the 1910s for radio stations, which used K for America and CY for Canada.

So K and CY into four letters and back down to three leaves Y for Canada. Here is where you would reasonably ask why CY for Canada, but that goes all the way back to telegraphs and beyond, so it's a story for another time. But for now, for this video, YY for Canada because of radio call signs, because of a lot of other things, because of U.S. and Canada coordinating that for flights within North America. It really would be Y for "yes," Canada.

Mostly, well, that was a lot of bureaucratic history. So let's finish with the final fun IATA codes promised from before, starting with a city with a sensible-looking SUX until you say it out loud. But to her credit, totally owns that branding for airport merch. Good for you, Sue!

And there's also Beaches International Airport, Summer Break Central. Their top two picks for codes were picked so to help the, uh, confused collegiates find their connections. The agencies agreed on ECP to stand for "Everyone Can Party," which is awesome branding. But you'd never know because Beaches doesn't bother. Geez, ECP, you could learn a thing or two from Sue.

But now everyone can party on this round-the-world flight of IATA codes, entertaining to say out loud. Ready? Fab, Boo, Eek, Cow, Wow, Poo, Gag, Bro, Butts, Got, Hot, Pie, Yum, Um, Mom, Dad, Mad, Run, Fun, IOU, FAQ, OMG, LOL.

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Thank you.

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