What airport is ORD?

Why the code is ORD

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.

The airport authority or a contemporaneous record states this directly.

The airport

IATA code

ORD

ICAO code

KORD

Airport

O'Hare International Airport

City

Chicago, United States

Opened

1944

Code origin

Documented

The site was a Douglas Aircraft plant building C-54 transports, and the strip beside it was Orchard Field — hence ORD, assigned before the war ended. In 1949 it was renamed for Edward "Butch" O'Hare, a Navy pilot awarded the Medal of Honor, and the code stayed because changing an assigned code means reprinting every timetable and retraining every controller. It is the most-asked "why does this code make no sense" question in aviation, and the answer is simply that the code is older than the name.

Codes it used to have

The other code, KORD

Every airport has two codes. The three-letter IATA code, ORD, is the one on your boarding pass and your luggage tag, and it is assigned for commercial use. The four-letter ICAO code, KORD, 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 KORD looks nothing like ORD.