The airport I mean. Sorry if this has been done but my server is just too slow to use the search feature effectively.
Anyone?
All airports have three letter codes. Since there’s only two letters in LA, they stuck an X on the end.
LA got lucky to have letters close to its abbreviation. Toronto internation, on the other hand, is YYZ (hence the Rush song of the same name).
Yeah, Chicago is ORD for Ohare. Go figure.
That’s because it was called Orchard Park before it was named for the fallen WWII hero.
That’s because the airport was once the military installation called Orchard Field.
Same story in Orlando - MCO, the former McCoy Air Force Base.
Why don’t they change the abbreviations when the name of the airport changes?
Probably because it would require a ridiculous amount of beaurocratic nonsense for very little gain.
Haj
Detroit Metro is DTW. I believe its for Detroit-Wayne County. Of course our other airport(Detroit City Airport-coded DET) is also located in Wayne County, so I don’t know how helpful that is. If anyone is interested(read really bored) this site lists all the codes.
Matsuyama is MYJ…the J is for Japan, maybe?
They couldn’t change LAX.
No matter what they cahnged it to, people wouldn’t use the new name - they’d call it Ex-LAX.
LA? Xlnt, dude!
My personal favorite is MIA for Miami. Based on a great deal of personal experience, it is very appropriate for that place’s code to be Missing In Action.
There’s still a lot of bureaucratic nonsense to go through anyway, I’ll wager, when an airport changes name.
And I think the gain of less confusion and consistancy might well be worth it.
Are there two major airports in Orlando? Because when I worked in reservations the code was ORL. 
I imagine the codes are ingrained into baggage handlers’ and custom officials’ minds, so to jigger around with them could be messy and confusing.
I always figured the X in LAX stood for “leaving”. i.e. “Where are you from?” - “Ex-LA”
I guess that doesn’t really work, but it’s what was in my head anyways.
I just checked this by trying to create a reservation to ORL. It resolved to MCO. So this could just be a case of there being an easy shorthand for ORLando. Interestingly, I then tried to use CIN (for Cincinnati), whose real code is CVG. Gave me an error.
Could Toronto’s original name “York” be a factor in the YYZ designation?
Yeah, you’ve seen the mess with DCA’s renaming. Still, there are fewer problems with changing just the name and not the code than with changing both.
I always thought it was too bad they coiuldn’t come up with a nice evocative name for the place, other than “L.A. International”.
Of course they’d probably still keep the labbreiation LAX.