See a pattern? Welcome to EGLL! (Photo by In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images) London’s other big international airport is EGKK, and looking at the other airports in the London area, EGSS is Stansted, Luton is EGGW, and London City EGLC.
Thus, London Heathrow is EGLL: where E for Northern Europe, G for Great Britain, and LL identifying Heathrow.
In either case, the second letter often, although not always, also overlaps with a Flight Information Region (FIR), that is, the different zones in which the global airspace is divided for navigational purposes.
#Iata city codes code
(Z, U and Y respectively, if you’re wondering.)Īs a rule of thumb, the second letter of the code designates the country or, in the case of large countries, a specific area within that country. Africa, in turn, is divided in four large regions, and some very large countries, such as China, Russia or Australia, have a “region” i.e. Europe, for example, is divided in roughly two zones - North, using “E” as identifier, and South, using “L”. Zoom in a bit, though, and the system gets a little more complex.įor a starter, regions are delimited in a somehow arbitrary way. That’s because the first letter designates a “region,” the second letter designates a country and the remaining two represent a specific airport. The ICAO system has a distinct advantage: It identifies an airport’s location, anywhere in the world. So you’re far more likely as a passenger to encounter the former - but you’re far more likely to impress an aviation enthusiast if you know the latter. The four-letter ICAO codes appear in technical documents, such as flight plans. When do you use which code? Roughly: the three-letter IATA codes are used by airlines for commercial purposes and in passenger-facing activities. While ICAO is an international organization under the auspices of the United Nations, IATA is a trade association that looks after the interests of the airline industry.Įach of them came up with its own code system, based on its own separate logic, to identify airports around the world. You may be forgiven for mixing them up: after all they are both based in Montreal and often work on the same issues, but they are two beasts of a rather different nature.
So of two major aviation organizations were created that would play a major role in the consolidation of civilian aviation over the decades: ICAO and IATA. When World War II was ending, governments came round the idea that the nascent commercial aviation industry could do with a higher degree of standardization. To better understand the jumble of letters and codes, we have to travel a few decades back in time. What’s up with that? Here’s all you need to know. Sometimes you’ll bump into those mysterious four letters on forums where frequent flyers hang out, such as Flyertalk, or maybe a friend of yours who’s an especially hardcore aviation geek will refer to plain old O’Hare as KORD. Those are the four-letter codes used by ICAO, the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization, to identify airports instead of the more common three-letter designations used by IATA, the International Air Transport Association. And what about EGLL, YSSY and MMMX? You know them better as London Heathrow, Sydney and Mexico City. And tomorrow, when the airplane you’re on will fly from Paris to Tokyo’s Haneda airport, that flight plan will say the destination is RJTT, not HND. The boarding pass in a pocket of the jacket a flight attendant just hung up in the closet for you says, of course, JFK to CDG: the familiar three-letter codes that every frequent flyer knows.īut just a few feet ahead of you, on the flight deck, the flight plan in front of the captain’s eyes says your destination is LFPG. They are also fundamental to the smooth running of hundreds of electronic applications that have been built around these coding systems for passenger and cargo traffic purposes.You’re sitting in first class on an Air France Boeing 777, headed from New York JFK to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. IATA Codes are an integral part of the travel industry and essential for the identification of an airline, its destinations, and its traffic documents.
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