I’ve noticed in recent years that I tend to think of airports in terms of their IATA codes because it’s the fastest way to enter an airport I commonly use into the various airline booking engines (or aggregators like Google Flights or Kayak).
In other words, if I’m flying from Hartford to Orlando, it’s much more efficient to enter a trip from BDL to MCO (which I know by heart). And as soon as I type the code in, the website fills in the rest of the information which confirms I got it right.
Might be worth mentioning that another area where IATA and ICAO have competing codes is the codes for airlines themselves. As with airport codes, the ICAO codes are longer (three characters instead of two) and more complete. Thus Air Canada is IATA code AC, ICAO code ACA. American Airlines is AA and AAL.
Airlines also have unique callsigns used for ATC communications that are sometimes cool and non-obvious. Republic Airways has the callsign “Brickyard” in reference to its Indianapolis location; the Indianapolis 500 speedway was once paved with bricks and known as “the brickyard”. British Airways is “Speedbird” in reference to the bird logo used by its original incarnation, the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC).
The habit of renaming airports for politicians or celebrities is a PITA.
It also leads to long time residents calling it by the old name e.g. “Dorval”, while new residents who’d never heard of that name call it e.g. “Trudeau airport”. As long as the namesake is alive, you can’t really call it just “Trudeau” without inviting confusion unless there’s already a lot of established context in the conversation.
It gets worse of course with egomaniacs like the late Mayor Daley of Chicago who had stuff all over town named after him. Even once he was dead so there’s confusing him with his stuff, “I’m going to Daley” could be any of a half-dozen very different things / places.
Just say “no” to naming public stuff after people.
It’s even worse when the official code changes to reflect the name change. At least YUL was and remains YUL. When Idlewild became JFK, its airport code changed from IDL to JFK, which must have affected a lot of systems. Today you can still route stuff to IDL – it will end up in Indianola Municipal Airport in Mississippi!
“Lester B. Pearson International Airport, where Mike is still dead!”
(Mike was Lester’s nickname for some odd reason)
If you had a name like “Lester”, what would you prefer to be called? 
According to Wikipedia, he had a brother named Marmaduke. I’d prefer Lester.
Three brothers: Lester, Chester, and Molester.
No doubt the parents had an odd sense of humor. 
About eight years ago, Calgary Airport (YYC) expanded and opened a new terminal for overseas and transborder flights. YYC has never had a name, but local comedians made much of how the new terminal should be called the Stephen Harper International Terminal.
Back in 1970, Lloyd Bridges had a one-season TV show entitled “San Francisco International Airport”. The show was subtitled, “SFX”. I always wondered what idiot thought that up. (No, even then it was “SFO”)
Probably someone who thought ‘X’ meant ‘International’. Which was my point. The individual letters don’t stand for anything. The three-letter combination stands for the airport. Of course as noted, the three-letter identifiers (or four, if you want to be pedantic and add the ‘K’ for U.S. airports) tend to be chosen to suggest the airport’s actual name.
Milwaukee’s code is MKE, pretty straightforward coding there. But us older locals still call it Billy Mitchell, as it was named General Mitchell Field back in 1941, which changed to General Mitchell International Airport in 1986 and finally to Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport in 2019.
Cincinnati is CVG because it’s actually across the river in Covington, KY.
Except that nothing I’ve ever read about the origin of airport codes supports that idea. If that were true, the obvious code for San Franscisco would have been SFX, but it isn’t. Whatever some silly screenwriter or producer may have believed, clearly the folks who actually assign airport codes believe otherwise. Besides, as pointed out earlier, there’s no systematic pattern to IATA airport codes anyway.
With respect to LAX in particular, back in the 1930s and early 40s, “LA” was the code for the airport and weather station. When codes went to three letters, “X” was just added as a filler. Another option might have been to use the last “S” from “Los Angeles” as the filler, but “LAS” was assigned to Las Vegas.
Before the 1930s, US airports used a two-letter abbreviation, and at that time, “LA” served as the designation for Los Angeles Airport.[29] With the rapid growth in the aviation industry, in 1947, the identifiers expanded to three letters, and “LA” received an extra letter to become “LAX”. The letter “X” does not otherwise have any specific meaning in this identifier.[30]
Los Angeles International Airport - Wikipedia
It’s not pedantry. Four-letter codes starting with “K” comprise a completely different code system, that of the ICAO.
An idiot in Los Angeles, who thinks that the entire country is all identical to Los Angeles. In other words, a typical TV producer. It’s no different than having a show set in Chicago, and having a character refer to the major freeway as “the 90”.
You may be misremembering the name of the show. The NBC show with Lloyd Bridges as manager of SFO that aired between 1970 and 71 was actually called San Francisco International Airport.
ETA: I see that you said it was subtitled “SFX”. If so, then what @Chronos said. The producer either didn’t know or care what the real code for SFO was, or assumed his audience didn’t, or somehow felt that SFX sounded sexier. As I said earlier, back in those days the flying public had very little awareness of airport codes. Today we casually use them to check or book flights, but back then few in the general public had a clue what they were.
I love and have been to Maui many times. I just love that its airport in Kahului has the code “OGG”
The reason why only makes sense here.
(It’s named for a Hawaiian Airlines pilot make Hogg.)
Bertram J. “Jimmy” Hogg, a Kauai native and aviation pioneer.
There’s a happy coincidence in the ICAO code for that airport. It consists of the region code “P” for the north Pacific region*, followed by the subcode “H” for the Hawaiian islands. So the ICAO code for Maui is PHOG, coincidentally also paying tribute to Hogg.
* The “K” prefix for ICAO US airport codes only applies to the contiguous continental US.
Hawthorne, a TV show set in Richmond, Virginia, once referred to the local interstate as “the 95”.
Are these comments because the numbers are wrong for the city, or because locals don’t say “the 95”?
Calling highways “the 20, the 132, the 401” is normal where I live.