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> 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
by dingaling 12y 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 12y agoIt'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 :)
- bengali3 12y agoyes, 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/ http://skyvector.com/ (see text box, upper left) http://charternation.com/airports/ http://charternation.com/airports/ http://www.airnav.com/airports/ http://www.airnav.com/airports/
- jsmthrowaway 12y agoDid you not make it through the article? The author described exactly that almost the exact same way.
- _jomo 12y agoIATA 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 12y agoThe 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-scheme.html 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 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.
- _jomo 12y agoEDIT: I meant "as can be seen in traceroute"
- bengali3 12y agoSee also ICAO prefix map via wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_Organization_airport_code#mediaviewer/File:ICAO-countries.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_Or...