Every day, a little more than 12 million people fly by air around the world. This is a very significant figure that has a direct and indirect impact on many sectors of society, generating a considerable amount of employment and business.
All these passengers move between the more than 42,000 airports and airfields in the world, half of them with regular commercial activity. This implies the existence of a number of common concepts, standards, protocols or procedures that allow this activity to be carried out efficiently and safely.
Passengers and air transport professionals use codes to name airports and simplify their identification. Find out what they look like.
One of the aspects to be taken into account in the set of information that passengers handle is that of the name of the airports.
The name of the airport, The name by which it is usually known does not have a specific technical criterion. It usually responds, in the first instance, to its local or regional toponymy, although in the majority of cases it is accompanied by the name of some illustrious person of the place or some historical reference. For political, cultural or social reasons, the name of the airport is sometimes changed, or a phrase is added, which ends up creating names that are frankly not very usable.
In the course of the 20th century, once air transport was already seen as a relevant activity with a lot of development in the future, two organisations emerged that were involved in several important changes:
On the one hand, the IATA, the International Air Transport Association, created in 1919, as an instrument for cooperation between airlines, which had among its main objectives the promotion of key aspects such as safety, reliability, confidence and economy in air transport.
On the other hand, the ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which was established in 1944 (Chicago Convention) as a specialised agency of the United Nations. Its aims and objectives are to develop the principles and techniques of international air navigation, to establish common principles for the development of the activity and to promote the organisation and development of air transport throughout the world.
In 1947, at a time when, after the end of the Second World War, a significant and sustained increase in air transport was already being felt, the IATA proposed to standardise for commercial purposes the nomenclature of airports by means of a three-letter code and thus facilitate the processes of flight booking, ticket identification, flight schedules or baggage handling systems.
The aim was to make air traffic more efficient, technically more controlled in certain aspects of its operation and more comfortable for all air traffic workers and passengers.
When we look at our boarding passes, the airports of origin and destination are usually very visible with their IATA codes, consisting of three characters, which can sometimes feel random or capricious. But in reality, it is not.
In most cases, the code is formed with a combination of letters corresponding to the large city or metropolitan area served by the airport.
When possible, the first three letters of the name of the main city to which the airport belongs are used. This designation, the most intuitive, is the one we can see in the cases of Madrid (MAD), Mexico (MEX), Guatemala (GUA), Amsterdam (AMS) or Vienna (VIE).
But it is not always going to be so simple. On other occasions, a combination of letters is used that are contained in the name of the city, even if they are not the first three, as in the cases of Ibiza (IBZ), Santiago de Cuba (SCU), Chihuahua (CUU), Prague (PRG) or Florence (FLR). This combination sometimes does not include the first letter, as in the cases of Quito (UIO), Cork (ORK), Almería (LEI) or Marrakech (RAK).
Sometimes the code includes a random additional letter that has nothing to do with the name, such as Los Angeles (LAX), Seville (SVQ), Birmingham (BMX), Malaga (AGP), Dubai (DXB) or Calgary (YYC).
There are occasions when airports take the name of the smallest town, neighbourhood or area where they are located. This is the case of Ezeiza, in Buenos Aires (EZE) or Orly, in the Paris region (ORY).
Finally, there are airports whose code comes from the initials of the illustrious person whose name it bears. Relevant cases are John F. Kenedy Airport in New York (JFK) and Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris (CDG).
Given that each airport is intended to have a unique identifier, When it is not possible to create it in any of these ways, alternatives are used, such as combining the letters of the city and the country, adding an additional letter that has nothing to do with anything, or even resorting to singular names. Among the latter, the case of Jerez airport in Spain is particularly striking, whose code is XRY, which refers to the typical wine of the area, sherry, xerry or sherry.
Another curious case is the airport of the city of San Sebastian, located in the municipality of Hondarribia, but its IATA code is EAS, which comes from Easo, the name the city had two centuries ago.
Ultimately, the aim is to achieve this by facilitate the identification of commercial airports. There are currently some 20,000 IATA codes, of which just over a hundred are repeated, although these are usually small airports with little relevance and no major connections.
For its part, ICAO codes are made up of four letters and their role is more oriented towards use by aeronautical professionals. They are essential for the management of flight operations, air traffic control or route planning.
The formation of these codes is more technical, they are also almost entirely dependent on the geographical location of the airport but have the special feature that there are no duplicate codes.
The first letter identifies the region, a group of countries or particularly large countries: Southern Europe (L), North Central Europe (E), Canada (C), United States (K), Southern Africa (F), South America (S), etc.
The second letter refers to the country, which usually corresponds to its initial, with a few exceptions.
Finally, the last two letters identify the city to which the airport belongs.
In cases where the airport does not have an ICAO code, ZZZZ is generally used for its designation.
ICAO codes are the most widely used by air transport and navigation professionals, essentially because there is no possibility of duplicates. On the other hand, IATA codes are the ones that passengers usually use to know whether they are on the correct route or not.
