Thursday 2 January 2020

iata

Via Pasa Bon’s inaugural curated links of the decade, we enjoyed this visual registry of airport codes assigned by the International Air Transport Association, with an explanation of the three letter geo-locater especially helpful for when the decoding the directory designation isn’t always so straightforward.
The –X appended at the end of many aerodromes and a few feeder train stations is a marker for older stations that retained their original US National Weather Service name for consistency with the new naming conventions and many cities have retained their historic call-signs as a flag-of-convenience: SGN for Ho Chi Mihn City (formerly Saigon), TSE for Astana (formerly Tselinograd now named Nur-Sultan) or LED for Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) for example. The Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport serves three Switzerland, France and Germany and has the codes BSL, MLH and EAP.