Posted on by Teamtravelstudy

Ever wondered what are those codes you see at airport ?

 

 

Travel has become an integral part of our lives and we travel for varying reasons from work related to leisure travel. They say travel can be an experience in itself since the amount of things you learn and see by travelling to places and knowing people can never be experienced by simply learning something in theory. We all travel to airports and you may have noticed at airports and while booking for flights most of the cities, airlines and airports are denoted by codes. Ever wondered what these codes are? We will try and explain what these codes exactly are and how they work.

The codes that you see are codes which are designated by ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) to various cities, airport, and airlines to facilitate ease of operations. The frequently used coding system can be divided into two parts airport/city codes and airline codes.

 

City/Airport Codes :- The Coding system can into existence in the 1930’s in the United States, prior to 1930 travel industry employees used two-letter National weather system codes to denote cities, however, this in following years became very difficult to manage and there was a need for a more reliable system hence the 3 letter coding system came into existence. For a normal person, the coding system may seem like a useless hassle, however, the coding system has solved a number of problems for the airline industry and travellers alike. The coding system has become even more relevant in today’s modern world as the airline industry today is completely globalized and we can travel from one corner of the earth to another in a matter of hours. Also, the numbers of cities that are connected by air travel have truly skyrocketed. Imagine if there was no coding system and you had to travel from Houston to Birmingham. Some people may not know this there are two Birmingham’s and both have an airport. The only issue is one is in Alabama, the US and the other is across the Atlantic in the UK. Although we may assume that the traveller may mention the country while booking, however, there is a high chance that something may go wrong like the baggage ending up at the wrong place or the worst scenario would be travelling to an unintentional country. Birmingham was a simple example, imagine if you were travelling to San Jose, there are at least 9 cities with the same name and there is a high possibility that you may book yourself to Bolivia instead of California that would be certainly a different experience. Here is where the coding system becomes significant the code for Birmingham Alabama is BHM whereas for Birmingham UK is BHX so now we can easily decipher where we want to travel and it is easily understood for baggage sorting department to tag your baggage to the correct destination.

Now some of you may be wondering how do they derive at these codes, Well most of the derivation is quite simple like for example the airport code for Atlanta is ATL the first three letters of the city that’s easy right but then why is Minneapolis MSP and not MIN well because there are two reasons, number one MSP stands for Minneapolis and St Paul together and the other being there is a city airport in Australia by that code. Likewise, there are cities with multiple airports like Houston which has two airports Hobby which was built earlier is HOU resembling the first three letters and IAH which stands for Bush Intercontinental airport which was built later. Similarly, there are airport codes which are completely different from their current name as some cities were renamed after the airport codes were implemented and since they could not change the airport code as per the new name the original airport code stayed. One of the prime examples of such a city in St.Petersburg in Russia its airport code is LED which is nowhere close to St.Ptersburg and neither L or D is present in the word Petersburg however since the city earlier was known as Leningrad after Lenin (not john) the city airport code is LED and not PET or something similar.

Likewise below are a few more cities with unusual names.

(extract taken from wikipedia)

 

I hope this has been helpful to you and has simplified your doubts on airport codes. If you want to know more city codes we recommend you go to the source itself https://www.iata.org/publications/Pages/code-search.aspx

Shortly we will be back with another article soon until then goodbye and please keep on commenting and coming back for more information on travel, we will keep on deciphering more interesting things for you as always. If you find time do like us on Facebook if you have information or pictures or want to share something on travel you may write to us at admin@talearnings.com and we will post it on your website if it works.

 

 

 

 

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