At One Place

Airport codes

104 airport codes with what each one actually stands for. Most of them are not abbreviations of the airport at all — they are inherited from weather stations, railway telegraph offices, military bases and cities that have since changed their names.

The codes that make no sense

74 of the 104 codes here do not begin with the first letters of the city they serve.
Code Airport Where the code comes from
JFK John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York The initials of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, assigned in 1963 when the airport was renamed for him.
LAX Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles LA plus a filler X, added when two-letter codes were extended to three in the 1930s.
ORD O'Hare International Airport, Chicago Orchard Place, the hamlet the airfield was built over, by way of its wartime name Orchard Field. The airport was renamed for Edward O'Hare in 1949; the code was not.
LHR Heathrow Airport, London LondonHeathRow, using the consonants.
CDG Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris The initials of Charles de Gaulle.
DXB Dubai International Airport, Dubai DuBai plus an X used as a separator, following the same 1930s convention that produced LAX.
MCO Orlando International Airport, Orlando McCoy Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command base the civil airport was built alongside.
DFW Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Dallas Dallas Fort Worth. The airport sits between the two cities because neither would let the other have it.
EWR Newark Liberty International Airport, Newark The letters of nEWaRk. The obvious code, NEW, was unavailable because N was reserved.
SFO San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco San FranciscO — the first two letters plus the last.
YYZ Toronto Pearson International Airport, Toronto YZ was the telegraph identifier of the railway station at Malton, where the airport was built; the Y prefix is Canadian convention.
LGA LaGuardia Airport, New York Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor who forced it into existence.
HND Tokyo Haneda Airport, Tokyo HaNeDa, the district it sits in.
LGW Gatwick Airport, London LondonGatWick, consonants again.
HKG Hong Kong International Airport, Hong Kong Hong KonG.
MSY Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, New Orleans Moisant Stock Yards — the land was a stockyard, and before that the field where the aviator John Moisant died in 1910.
IAD Washington Dulles International Airport, Washington A deliberate scramble of DIA, which was too easily misread as DCA in handwriting.
DCA Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Washington District of Columbia Airport — although the runways are physically in Virginia.
IAH George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Houston Intercontinental Airport Houston, its name when the code was assigned.
YVR Vancouver International Airport, Vancouver Y prefix plus VR for Vancouver.
MUC Munich Airport, Munich MUniCh, the English name of the city, not the German München.
FCO Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport, Rome FiumiCinO, the town it sits in, not Rome and not Leonardo.
NRT Narita International Airport, Tokyo NaRiTa, the city it sits in, 60 km from Tokyo.
ICN Incheon International Airport, Seoul InChoN, the city it sits in, 48 km west of Seoul.

United States

Canada

United Kingdom

India

China

Germany

Japan

Australia

France

Italy

Mexico

South Africa

Spain

United Arab Emirates

Argentina

Austria

Brazil

Chile

Colombia

Denmark

Egypt

Ethiopia

Finland

Greece

Hong Kong

Iceland

Indonesia

Ireland

Israel

Kenya

Malaysia

Netherlands

New Zealand

Norway

Peru

Portugal

Qatar

Russia

Singapore

South Korea

Sweden

Switzerland

Thailand

Turkey

Common questions

What airport is ORD?
Chicago O'Hare. The code comes from Orchard Field, the airfield's name until 1949, and outlived the renaming.
What is the difference between an IATA and an ICAO code?
IATA codes are three letters and used commercially — tickets, timetables, luggage tags. ICAO codes are four letters, used by pilots and controllers, and assigned by geographic region rather than by name.
Can an airport change its code?
Yes, but almost never, because it means updating every reservation and baggage system in the world at once. New York Idlewild to JFK in 1963 and Baltimore BAL to BWI in 1973 are the well-known cases, and they are well known because they are so unusual.