What airport is MSY?

Why the code is MSY

Moisant Stock Yards — the land was a stockyard, and before that the field where the aviator John Moisant died in 1910.

The airport authority or a contemporaneous record states this directly.

The airport

IATA code

MSY

ICAO code

KMSY

Airport

Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport

City

New Orleans, United States

Opened

1946

Code origin

Documented

John Moisant crashed there while attempting a distance record on the last day of 1910. The site became a stockyard, then an airport named Moisant Field, and the code was assigned from Moisant Stock Yards. It was renamed for Louis Armstrong in 2001 on the centenary of his birth, and the code stayed — so the airport now carries the name of one man and the code of another.

The other code, KMSY

Every airport has two codes. The three-letter IATA code, MSY, is the one on your boarding pass and your luggage tag, and it is assigned for commercial use. The four-letter ICAO code, KMSY, is the one pilots and controllers use, and it is assigned geographically: the first letter or two identify the region, so every airport in the same part of the world shares a prefix. That is why KMSY looks nothing like MSY.