Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
September 10, 2007 at 10:03
filed under travel
As someone who has done his share of traveling, I’ve always been interested on how airports got their three letter codes. Pictured is my bag tag from Fukuoka, a city on the most southern island of Japan, Kyushu, where I got the chance to travel a few years back. It’s on my long list of places I’d like to go / return to but back to the airport codes.
The Montreal based IATA (International Air Transport Association) assigns these codes since 1945 and they have their roots in the weather control stations which existed previously on these locations. These three letter signalers are only the codes we, the general public, get to see. The actual codes used for flight planning and air traffic control are regulated by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and are generally the same as the IATA codes but with a one letter prefix: C for Canada, K for the US, L for Southern Europe, E for Northern Europe, etc…
It is also the IATA who assigns the two letter airline codes such as AC (Air Canada), SQ (Singapore Airlines),etc …
The airport codes go from ABE (Allentown/Bethlehem/Easton, Pennsylvania) to ZRH (Zurich, Switzerland) and while many cities simply get to use the first letters of their name (MIA – Miami, BOS – Boston, LON – London, SYD – Sydney, etc…), some letters have been reserved: N is for US Navy use only, W & K are for radio stations (based on if they are East or West of the Mississippi is how they are assigned), Q is for international communication and Z has been reserved for special use. This explains why cities such as Washington, DC do not have airport codes with letters related to the city but rather to the name of the airport (IAD – Dulles International Airport), and Charles de Gaulle – CDG – in Paris also comes to mind.
Canada has a particular situation as we got to use the letter Y for our airports – and I’m still not sure why – but we’ve got the very intuitive YYZ (Toronto) and YUL (Montreal) to go with YVR (Vancouver), YQB (Quebec City) and YYC (Calgary), only to list a few. I’ll let you know when I get the chance to return to the beautiful beaches of the prefecture of Fukuoka!
Comments are closed.
Alex
Un petit bonjour de SEA.
Je n’aurais pas le temps de faire un tour à YVR cette année … dommage.