Okay, I get the first two letters…obviously. Los Angeles. But where does the X come from? What does it stand for? Or is there another language where X means air or airport or something like that?
Or maybe it’s really, really simple and I’m just not seeing it?
The individual letters don’t technically mean anything. U.S. airports are assigned three-letter identifiers. (Technically, there’s a prefix letter; but it’s never used in practice. I’m guessing there are prefix-plus-three identifiers for foreign airports as well. Some airports have letter-number combinations.)
Usually the identifier is similar to the city or airport name so as to make it easy to remember. For example, Lancaster, CA’s William J. Fox Municipal Airport is WJF, San Diego is SAN, Las Vegas is LAS, Santa Monica is SMO, and Los Angeles International Airport is LAX. Some are a little more obscure, such as New Orleans, which is MSY (for Moisant International), or rather obscure, such as L71 for California City.
So the ‘X’ doesn’t really stand for anything; but ‘LAX’ identifies Los Angeles International Airport.
Trying again…
Even better…how did Toronto’s airport get the code YYZ? (Yep, that’s where the Rush song came from.)
The fun one is why Chicago-O’Hare is ORD. 
(hizz)Onor Richard Daley? 
And Sioux City Iowa is SOY. Go figure.
Orchard Place/Douglas Field
In case anyone doesn’t feel like taking Johnny’s word for it, the airport’s site agrees with him in their FAQ:
That’s actually from the website of Los Angeles World Airports, which owns and operates the Los Angeles International, Ontario International, Palmdale Regional and Van Nuys Airports.
Isn’t ORD derived from Orchard Field, or something like that (what it was called before being renamed O’Hare)? I’m relying on my memory here…
Tell me more about this prefix. Couldn’t seem to find any mention in the links so far.
From the FAA link:
Because if they changed it now they’d have to foolow it with (EX-LAX)? :dubious:
brad-d’s link is why Portland, OR is PDX - it used to be PD. Also, N codes were originally reserved for Navy facilities, so Norfolk and Newark had to start 1 letter in with their codes.
There are many small airports with 1 or even 2 digits in their 3-character codes, due to a limited supply of letters but they rarely have airline service. B19 is Biddeford, Maine, for just one example.
The standard list of major US airports with nonobvious codes:
ORD - Chicago O’Hare, used to be Orchard Field
MSY - New Orleans, former site of Moisant Stock Yards
MCO - Orlando, formerly McCoy Air Force Base (ORL is an older field nearby)
CVG - Cincinnati, nearest city is Covington, KY (CIN is a small field in Iowa, don’t know why)
IAD - Washington Dulles, scrambled “International Airport Dulles”. Originally DCI, but sounded too much like DCA (originally DC), Washington National
SNA - Orange County, nearest city when built was Santa Ana
A number of codes refer to the airport’s name, not the city’s:
BDL - Hartford, Bradley Field
SDF - Louisville, Standiford Field
TYS - Knoxville, Tyson Field
BNA - Barnes Nashville Airport
SWF - Fort Myers, South West Florida
The biggest wild card in the US has to be MCI - Kansas City International, formerly named Mid-Continent International. When they abandoned the name, Wichita grabbed it and renamed *their * airport, ICT, Mid-Continent International, even though the code stayed in KC.
What I’ve always wondered is why a couple of places haven’t named their airports. Most cities name their airports…Lindberg Field (SAN), JFK which used to be Idyllwild, LaGuardia, O’Hare, Lambert (St. Louis), and so on. But LAX and SFO are just LAX and SFO.
Airline pilot here …
There are actually two (and a half) independent coding systems. One is sponsored by the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Orgranization) and is the governmental designator for airports. The standard has 4 letter/numbers per airport.
All US airports start with K, all Canadian start with C. In other parts of the world, the first letter designates a region (eg M = Central America), the second letter designates the country within region (eg P = Panama) and the last 2 letter/numers designate the specific airport (MPTO = Torrillos International, the airline airport serving Panama City, Panama).
The half-system is the FAA system, which is simply the ICAO designator without the K. For Canadian airports, they drop the C. As a separate matter, most (all?) Canadian ICAO designators have a 2nd letter of Y, which represents a leftover from the system used before the current ICAO system was standardized in the 1950s.
The other system is the IATA (International Air Transportation Association) system. That is used by airlines and give a 3-letter code to all airline-served airports worldwide. IATA codes are not used for ATC purposes, but are used for all airline-to-customer and airline-to-airline purposes.
For US airports, the IATA designator is the same as the FAA designator which is the same as the last 3 letters of the ICAO identifier. So simple, so far… But for non-US airports the IATA designator may have bear no resemblance to the ICAO.
For example, when you fly to London Heathrow, your ticket and baggage tags and whatnot say you’re going to LHR. That’s the IATA code. Meanwhile, up in the cockpit, we’re going to EGLL , the ICAO code for Heathrow. That decodes as Europe, Great Britain, London Area, airport L.
Apparently we’re about to run out of codes and they’re adding a 4th character to the FAA codes, and hence a 5th character to the ICAO code.
AFAIK, the IATA is doing fine on codes for now, but they’ll eventually need more, particularly in areas like China & India that only got 2 letters to work with because they weren’t big players back in the 1950s when the coding scheme was laid out.
All this gets further muddied (for pilots at least) by the need to have designator systems not only for airports, but also for every radio beacon on Earth (thousands), and every pre-defined navigational fix (tens of thousands) on Earth. Fortunately for the customers, they don’t have to mess with this stuff.
Because it costs a ton of money. Think about all the road signs, signs around the airport, any public transportation signs, things like that. Plus all of the FAA charts that would have to be changed. I work in the Instrument Approach branch and just for LAX we have sixty odd charts. That’s only the names of the charts, that’s not all the places where the airport name would show up on the chart.
Airport idents do not have to be three letters anymore. There are some airports that have a combination of four letters and numbers, though the majority of the ones I have seen are private airstrips though. I don’t know of any with four that have come through the office, though now I’ll be on the lookout for some.
Naming can be a real p.i.a. Firs,t as Edward the Head pointed out, there’s the expense and hassle of changing a name. Second, there’s the problem of people not knowing whether they’re flying to John Wayne Airport, Orange County Airport or Santa Ana.
Finally, there’s inertia. There were two references in this thread To Moisant Airport in New Orleans. Actually it’s now Louis Armstrong International Airport. When you got to Newark, do you think you fly in to Newark International or Liberty International? Then, when you take the shuttle to DC, are you going to Washington National or Regan National?
By the way, here in St. Louis we call our airport:
Lambert Field
Lambert Airport
Lambert St. Louis Airport
Lambert International Airport
Lambert-St. Louis International Airport
St. Louis International Airport/Lambert Field
Actually, the SY of MSY stands for Stock Yard, because the land on which the airport was built used to be a stockyard.
Also, if LAX or SFO were to be named after a person, who should it be? There would be a huge battle over who deserved the honor. When Joe DiMaggio died, the city of San Francisco wanted to name a playground in North Beach (where he lived as a child) after him, but his lawyer thought it an insufficient honor. He wanted something like SFO or the Bay Bridge named after DiMaggio.