I never realized there were so many confusing ones.
Dallas/Fort Worth(less) International is DFW. Easy enough, everyone refers to this region as DFW.
And Dallas Love Field is, I believe, LUV. Pretty easy there too.
And if I recall, wasn’t the great irony of it all that Reagan slammed down his ironfist during some airport strike during his administration?
I don’t remember the details, but I remember hearing this. I was just a wee lad during the Reagan administration, being born in '81.
Even easier than that. It’s DAL
I remember this well – I was a teen-ager. My summer vacation plans were shot by the strike. The iron fist that Reagan slammed was to fire all the air traffic controllers who went on strike. There is still some question whether this might have been a cause of increases in airplane accidents over the next decade.
Another irony is that the Environmental Protection Agency is now housed in a building named after Reagan.
I made the mistake once of typing in “KCI” instead of “MCI” when looking for flights online, and almost wound up booking a trip to Indonesia! :eek:
well that is the first I had heard of that! I suspect that name was created well after Lt. Moisant became famous. 
There were stockyards out there at one time though. But Lt. Moisant (IIRC a barnstormer after WWI) wasn’t involved in them. Certainly the airport wasn’t named for them.
From their website:
" The proposed new airport was named for John Moisant, an early aviation pioneer, in 1940. The Kenner site was approved by the City and 648 acres was purchased."
see:
There was a proposal to name rename LAX in honor of James Stewart, however there already is a Stewart International Airport in New Windsor, NY, so that idea had to be dropped.
I suppose those of us in the LA area just can’t agree on any one particular person to name something after. The international terminal at LAX is the Tom Bradley Terminal, named after the former mayor.
The problem Los Angeles has is that there has been too much aeronautical history in the area. There have been numerous aviation companies in the area and it may be hard to settle on one there.
The former Burbank Airport, which started out as a test area for Lockheed and then became Hollywood-Burbank and then became Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena is now Bob Hope, whose home was relatively close to the aiport.
I guess Los Angeles is just short on beloved figures.
That’s right, LUV is Southwest Airlines stock symbol.
…And now, for extra credit:
What is Amtrak’s three-letter code for Union Station, in downtown L.A.?
Correct, it’s LAX. No kidding. Nope, I can’t say for sure, but I really suspect that the airfield codes came first.
…Long Beach Muncipal Airport is pretty straightforward, LGB, and it’s just as well they didn’t try to set it up with the original name of the place, Daugherty Field.
So is this why Northwest Arkansas Regional is XNA?
Is there any particular reason for Canada to start with Y, or is it just one of those things? And while we’re at it, very few of the codes for Canadian airports (that I know at least) have any relation to the name of the city or the airport. For example:
Vancouver International = YVR makes sense, but then we’ve got
Toronto Pearson = YYZ
Montreal Dorval (recently renamed Trudeau) = YUL
Victoria = YYJ
Calgary = YYC (I guess that one kind of makes sense, aside from that extra Y)
Where do these ones come from?
No special reason for Canada to start with “Y”, just as the “K” that the US uses really means nothing. It should be considered an honor, because it means that Canada gets Y+3 naming. I believe only the US and Canada have the “letter” +3 honor.
For everyone else’s ICAO identifier they start with the region first, then the country, then the airport (as LSL Guy said a while back).
For example Frankfurt, Germany gets EDDF. E=Europe. D=Deutschland. DF= Frankfurt. Northwestern Europe has the “E” first letter; southern Europe has “L”, Mexico and Central America has “M”, etc.
And (complete nitpick) the airport in Panama (MPTO) is Tocumen Intl. At least it was the last time I flew there!
By coincidence, I stumbled across this just last night:
Airport ABCs: An Explanation of Airport Identifier Codes
Those of us in general aviation have had to re-learn that continental US airports really do have a “K” in front of the identifiers we’re used to using since some of the high-end GPS units have started showing up in our airplanes. If it has a world-wide database of airports you’re going to need the full code to program it.
If I recall correctly, Alaska and Hawaii use a different prefix than K - I think it’s P? Don’t know 'cause I don’t fly out that way. At least I haven’t yet.
The last time I flew in there, Torrillos was still in power and the place was called Torrillos International.
Tocumen was the name of a nearby village and was the secondary name of the airport. I suspect it had been named Tocumen before Torrillos got a swell head & renamed it after himself.
Now that he’s in jail in Miami, I guess the locals gave it the old name back. I haven’t been there or looked it up since the the early 80s.
From the FAA link:
Always wondered where that was.
Hey, don’t sneer. Cincinnati, IA is growing rapidly and soon will spill over the border into the suburb of Covington, MO.
Ordway, IIRC.
Well I’ll be damned. I always thought the “X” in “LAX” stood for “Airport.”
Because, you see, the crossed runways of an airport make a kind of “X” if you use your imagination. That, and I’ve seen shorthand where “X” is used to indicate “airport.” As in, “I’m picking up Aunt Molly at Bloomington X. I’ll be back by 9:30.”
LAX has four parallel runways.