The airport code identifiers that differentiate thousands of landing sites spread across every continent, from major hubs to small heliports, are a vital part of the aviation ecosystem, helping passengers and their bags move seamlessly around the world.
The International Air Transport Association’s (IATA) location identifiers are made up of a three-letter code and cannot include numbers: a historical naming convention linked to an earlier coding system for weather stations situated at airports in North America, which were in place before IATA location codes were used.
They are used by commercial airlines for ticketing, reservations, baggage handling, pricing and communication purposes. But they are not just a practical solution for an industry working across borders and in multiple languages. Rather, a handful of IATA's 11,000 or so identifiers have become important place names in their own right, with New York’s JFK, and Los Angeles’ LAX among those to have been embraced by aviation enthusiasts and occasional fliers alike. In order for IATA to assign an identifier, a code has to be requested by an airline flying to the desired location – an airport cannot directly apply for a code with IATA.
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