Comments on: Airport Identifier Codes

Airport Identifier Codes

carter — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 05:37:17 -0800

From LGW to ORD Where do three letter airport codes come from? This guy knows. And: origins of British subscriber trunk dialling codes.

By: jon_kill

jon_kill — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 06:05:15 -0800

YHZ will always have a place in my heart.

By: Eekacat

Eekacat — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 06:16:52 -0800

The morse code for Toronto Pearson International Airport was used as the basis for Rush's song "YYZ". Little known facts you learn when flying Air Canada.

By: amberglow

amberglow — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 06:23:15 -0800

Interesting stuff--our airports are easy if you know the people (JFK, LGA --EWR less so tho), and NYC is great for all the flights leaving from anywhere here when searching (LON too). The Canadian thing is weird tho--why not TOR (or PEA), MON, VAN, CAL, etc? It makes it harder, since there's not a person like in CDG or JFK to remember, and there's no connection to the city or airport name at all.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 07:04:44 -0800

By: triv

triv — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 07:26:46 -0800

thanks languagehat, i knew that i'd seen the skygod site from somewhere on mefi and i couldn't locate exactly where!

By: found missing

found missing — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 07:47:43 -0800

My favorite is ACK.

By: carter

carter — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 08:06:06 -0800

Oops ... well I must have bookmarked it from *somewhere* ;)

By: Shane

Shane — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 09:30:01 -0800

The morse code for Toronto Pearson International Airport was used as the basis for Rush's song "YYZ". Little known facts you learn when flying Air Canada. That's a cool factoid, and I just asked a Canadian where the YYZ airport code came from the other day. I guess at least one initial is still a mystery, though. One 'Y' is for York, one is filler, and maybe the 'Z' was just an arbitrary whim?

By: tetsuo

tetsuo — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 10:10:40 -0800

The new geek pilgrimage, fly to SYN, go from SYN to ACK, and just take a plane home from ACK.

By: ed\26h

ed\26h — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 10:21:38 -0800

The morse code for Toronto Pearson International Airport was used as the basis for Rush's song "YYZ". Little known facts you learn when flying Air Canada. I always thought "maybe Rush mis-typed 'XYZ'" - So, thanks!

By: smackfu

smackfu — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 15:55:29 -0800

I still wonder how Canada got the Y's. No other country got pigeonholed into a single letter.

By: TungstenChef

TungstenChef — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 18:37:52 -0800

I always liked the fact that when I was flying to Singapore I was heading into SIN.

By: Iax

Iax — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 20:33:58 -0800

All of canadas codes start out with Y's and the other two letters in most cases make no sense. there are the exceptions, like YVR for vancouve regional, but most of canada seems to be stuck with odd ones. The y thing is handy for wokring at the airport though. You know which bags coming into the airport are domestic easily. My favorite thing is when a bag showed up with an uncommon tag like IND or FRA, and I would ask co-workers where it was headed and I would get answers like India and France respectivly.

By: jontyjago

jontyjago — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 02:14:56 -0800

It could be worse than heading into SIN, you could be travelling from HVN to HEL.

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 09:00:14 -0800

We probably ended by with Y because the US started the three letter code thing and we were the second adopter. To make it easier they gave us all the codes starting with one letter. The only letter that wasn't used for a first character was Y. Interesting how local experience tints your world view. I'd thought all major countries were assigned a single letter or intial letters pair.

By: Pretty_Generic

Pretty_Generic — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 15:55:32 -0800

I just came back from Aeropuerto de Málaga, Andalucía, España. Its code is AGP. If anyone could explain this it would help me sleep at night.