1937: "IATA Airport Abbreviations"

[uncleroy]

Hover text: IATA stands for International AirporT Abbreviation.

Notably missing from the comic: FML, WTF, and XXX.

[Mutex]

Whenever I fly from London Heathrow (LHR) to Toronto Pearson (YYZ) I always feel Pearson were back of the queue when they were handing out airport abbreviations.

[xaintly]

The actual aiport codes:
(Code in Comic) (Stated location in comic) [Real airport code for that location] > (Real location for the airport code in comic)

AMD Amsterdam [AMS] > Ahmedabad, India
BAE Beijing [PEK or BJS] > Not assigned
ORD Orlando [MCO] > Chicago (O'Hare)
IAD Idaho (Boise) [BOI] > Washington (Dulles)
JFC Jefferson City [No airport] > Not assigned
IUD Washington Dulles [IAD] > Not assigned
FYI Fayettevile [FAY] > Not assigned
LOL Louisville [SDF] > Not assigned
ATL Atalante [Not a real place] > Atlanta
HGM Hogsmeade [Not a real place] > Not assigned
OMW Omaha [OMA] > Not assigned
ANC Ankh-Morpork [Not a real place] > Anchorage
HSV Huntsville > [Correct]
SAN San Diego > [Correct]
SAN San Juan [Puerto Rico- SJU, Argentina- UAQ] > San Diego
SAN San Jose [SJC] > San Diego
SAN San Francisco [SFO] > San Diego
SAN San Antonio [SAT] > San Diego
DWI Delaware International [Not a real airport] > Not assigned
DFW Down for Whatever [Not a real airport] > Dallas (Fort Worth)
DTW Down to Whatever [Not a real airport] > Detroit
TMI Turkmenistan International [Not a real airport] > Not assigned
LAX Las Angalas > Los Angeles
EWR Edwards Air Force Base [EDW] > Newark
PHL Pittsburgh [PIT] > Philadelphia
SWF Sherwood Forest [Not a real airport, London- LHR] > Sacramento Metro
KUL Kingdom of Loathing [Not a real place] > Kuala Lumpur
STL Silent Hill [Not a real place] > St. Louis
BUF Sunnydale [Not a real place] > Buffalo
TBA Tribeca [No airport] > Not assigned
SMH Smithfield [No airport] > Not assigned
BLT Baltimore [BWI] > Blackwater, Australia
YYY Toronto Downtown [Not a real airport] > Mont-Joli, Canada
YYZ Toronto Pearson > [Correct]
MIA Colombo, Sri Lanka [CMB] > Miama
CLT [Censored] > Charlotte
FHQ Fhqwhgads [Not a real place] > Not assigned
FFS Flagstaff Station [Not a real place, Arizona- FLG] > Not assigned
DTF Dartford [No airport] > Not assigned
MDW Midway Atoll [MDY] > Chicago (Midway)
PDX Pordlanx [Not a real place] > Portland
SEA [Indicates Water Landing] > Seattle / Tacoma

[Huindekmi]

A little love for Homestar Runner! Nicely done!

[cct]

Arguably, YTZ could be considered Toronto Downtown. Certainly, that is how the operators want it to be viewed.

[orthogon]

The UK rail network has three-letter codes for all the stations. Looking at the list in the comic, the following codes exist:

ATL: Attleborough
HGM: Higham
ANC: Ancaster
SAN: Sandown
DTW: Droitwich Spa
EWR: East Worthing
STL: Southall
SMH: Stamford Hill
BLT: Blantyre
MIA: Manchester Airport
CLT: Clacton-on-Sea
MDW: Maidstone West
SEA: Seaham

Notice that some airports have their own railway station, but their three-letter codes are not the same as the IATA abbreviation. (MAN is Manchester Piccadilly). Conversely, our corporate air travel provider now offers international rail tickets too, and has invented bogus pseudo-IATA codes for the railway stations. I think London St Pancras International (which is STP in the rail scheme) is QQF or something. The booking site being rather useless, this doesn't actually come up if you search for "flights" from "London". You just have to know.

I do this with currency codes, though I try to pronounce them as words, so that, for example, Swiss Francs are "chuffs".

[Pfhorrest]

Atalantë is a real place! It's the downfallen remnant of Numenor in the seas west of Endor, where the world was sundered by Eru.

In other words, it's the Azores.

[peewee_RotA]

I don't know why, but I found this one particularly funny and wanted to share it at work... yet it's one of the few with an NSFW joke.

So small complaint. Be more like Scott Adams and recognize that a big part of your viewership starts from people posting these on a billboard at the workplace.

[Soupspoon]

"SWF"'s 'real' tag could be DSA ("Doncaster/Sheffield Airport", previously "Robin Hood Airport (Doncaster Sheffield¹)", previously "RAF Finningley"…) or NQT ("Nottingham (City) Airport"), or somewhere like Ossington or Gamston airfields (there being half a dozen small landing spots nearly equidistant from Edwinstowe, generally acknowledged to be the centre of the current Sherwood Forest, so much smaller than its historical extents) that may have ICAO ids, but not IATA ones. And that's just the operational ones I can find. There were a multitude of airfields set up in this area (generally to the east, in the flat lands) during WW2 so as to send the air war over to occupied northern Europe and to intercept the air war being sent over here from there. With a bit of digging (I think I once played paintball at a (relatively-)new-growth plantation location very near Edwinstowe that seemed to have concrete aprons in one section reminiscent of an abandoned RAF station) one could probably find something that was practically "RAF Sherwood Forest", if not exactly.

(A quick Google suggests that a Lord Sherwood was a past Honorary Air Commodore to No. 504 Squadron, of the RAF. But they are associated with Rutland and Cambridgeshire/East Northamptonshire (north East Northamptonshire, to be more precise!).)

Just adding to the information above...


¹ Or Doncaster Sheffield Rotherham Barnsley or suchlike. There was a Sheffield City Airport (SZD), far nearer to Loxley (as in "Robin of", but still not next door) that effectively shut down fifteen years ago due to operational losses (and, possibly not coincidentally, having been passed to the company that was starting up the Robin Hood airport scheme), and Doncaster/etc airport basically serves the area like SZD never did manage to do. For one thing, it's not on an awkward hilly area, and it's not so far from several major road arteries.

[cellocgw]

The actual aiport codes:
(Code in Comic) (Stated location in comic) [Real airport code for that location] > (Real location for the airport code in comic)

Spoiler:

AMD Amsterdam [AMS] > Ahmedabad, India
BAE Beijing [PEK or BJS] > Not assigned
ORD Orlando [MCO] > Chicago (O'Hare)
IAD Idaho (Boise) [BOI] > Washington (Dulles)
JFC Jefferson City [No airport] > Not assigned
IUD Washington Dulles [IAD] > Not assigned
FYI Fayettevile [FAY] > Not assigned
LOL Louisville [SDF] > Not assigned
ATL Atalante [Not a real place] > Atlanta
HGM Hogsmeade [Not a real place] > Not assigned
OMW Omaha [OMA] > Not assigned
ANC Ankh-Morpork [Not a real place] > Anchorage
HSV Huntsville > [Correct]
SAN San Diego > [Correct]
SAN San Juan [Puerto Rico- SJU, Argentina- UAQ] > San Diego
SAN San Jose [SJC] > San Diego
SAN San Francisco [SFO] > San Diego
SAN San Antonio [SAT] > San Diego
DWI Delaware International [Not a real airport] > Not assigned
DFW Down for Whatever [Not a real airport] > Dallas (Fort Worth)
DTW Down to Whatever [Not a real airport] > Detroit
TMI Turkmenistan International [Not a real airport] > Not assigned
LAX Las Angalas > Los Angeles
EWR Edwards Air Force Base [EDW] > Newark
PHL Pittsburgh [PIT] > Philadelphia
SWF Sherwood Forest [Not a real airport, London- LHR] > Sacramento Metro
KUL Kingdom of Loathing [Not a real place] > Kuala Lumpur
STL Silent Hill [Not a real place] > St. Louis
BUF Sunnydale [Not a real place] > Buffalo
TBA Tribeca [No airport] > Not assigned
SMH Smithfield [No airport] > Not assigned
BLT Baltimore [BWI] > Blackwater, Australia
YYY Toronto Downtown [Not a real airport] > Mont-Joli, Canada
YYZ Toronto Pearson > [Correct]
MIA Colombo, Sri Lanka [CMB] > Miama
CLT [Censored] > Charlotte
FHQ Fhqwhgads [Not a real place] > Not assigned
FFS Flagstaff Station [Not a real place, Arizona- FLG] > Not assigned
DTF Dartford [No airport] > Not assigned
MDW Midway Atoll [MDY] > Chicago (Midway)
PDX Pordlanx [Not a real place] > Portland
SEA [Indicates Water Landing] > Seattle / Tacoma

Obligatory: I bet you're real fun at parties.

[Jorpho]

When your flight out of Montreal keeps getting delayed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJVPTZ5af-0

[MrT2]

SWF Sherwood Forest [Not a real airport, London- LHR] > Sacramento Metro

Robin Hood Airport (sadly now renamed to Doncaster Sheffield Airport, Yorkshire) [DSA] is not far from Sherwood Forest.

Having played (or simmed) Flight Sim of various guises through the years though I'm more familiar with the ICAO four letter codes for various airports, which outside of the USA pretty much bear no relation to the IATA codes (many US airports it's just the IATA code with a K prefix, but this is not true for all of them), and also let you identify where the airport is (e.g. first letter K - United States, or first two letters EG - United Kingdom & dependencies).

[Keyman]

ANC Ankh-Morpork [Not a real place] > Anchorage

It's NOT?!?!?

[Jorpho]

A little love for Homestar Runner! Nicely done!

It occurs to me that those marveling at the reference may not be aware that a couple of things have been happening lately.
http://hrwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://hrwiki.org/wiki/Two_More_Eggs

[Kizarvexis]

To bad Randal didn't go for PIE.

http://www.fly2pie.com/

[Pfhorrest]

Something in viewtopic.php?p=4289998#p4289974 seems to be breaking formatting on this page.

[HES]

Something in viewtopic.php?p=4289998#p4289974 seems to be breaking formatting on this page.

It's what happens when you get [spoiler] and [quote] tags crossed

[ObsessoMom]

Once again, Explain xkcd to the rescue!

(The only cultural references I got without help were the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, and Lord of the Rings ones.)

[DpEpsilon]

SMH Smithfield [No airport] > Not assigned

Just as well. "SMH" abbreviating an airport, "Shake My Head", and "Sydney Morning Herald" is pretty darn confusing, as if the overloading of the latter two wasn't confusing enough.

[Muzhik]

You missed one of the classic factual airport abbreviations:

SUX = Sioux City (Iowa)

[whomever1]

I spend a lot of time in the Kingdom of Loathing--who says it's not a real place? My Disco Bandit is level 19!
Also--just for the meaniehead of it--my home airport is LBG.

[Ranbot]

Nice comic... I chuckled.

I'll bet some fun could have been had with Frankfurt/FRA... references to hot dogs or FRAnce come to mind.

[RogueCynic]

The UK rail network has three-letter codes for all the stations. Looking at the list in the comic, the following codes exist:

ATL: Attleborough
HGM: Higham
ANC: Ancaster
SAN: Sandown
DTW: Droitwich Spa
EWR: East Worthing
STL: Southall
SMH: Stamford Hill
BLT: Blantyre
MIA: Manchester Airport
CLT: Clacton-on-Sea
MDW: Maidstone West
SEA: Seaham

Notice that some airports have their own railway station, but their three-letter codes are not the same as the IATA abbreviation. (MAN is Manchester Piccadilly). Conversely, our corporate air travel provider now offers international rail tickets too, and has invented bogus pseudo-IATA codes for the railway stations. I think London St Pancras International (which is STP in the rail scheme) is QQF or something. The booking site being rather useless, this doesn't actually come up if you search for "flights" from "London". You just have to know.

I do this with currency codes, though I try to pronounce them as words, so that, for example, Swiss Francs are "chuffs".

What is the abbreviation for Hogsmeade?

[water_moon]

I spend a lot of time in the Kingdom of Loathing--who says it's not a real place? My Disco Bandit is level 19!

It must be a place, you can be west of it, furthermore it's had an Elemental International Airport for over 3 years! It does not however have a IATA code. Not too sure what EIA is.... but I was wondering why it wasn't KOL and now I know.

Best parking of any airport I've come across.

[da Doctah]

That San Jose one. Is that California or Costa Rica?

(World's largest pair of same-named cities.)

[Mikeski]

That San Jose one. Is that California or Costa Rica?

(World's largest pair of same-named cities.)

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

San Jose, CA (about 1 million people) plus San Jose, Costa Rica (334 thousand), is much smaller than New York, New York (12 million) plus New York, Texas (20 people). I'm sure there are many other pairs like that... Paris, France (2+ million) plus any of the two-dozen-or-so other Parises (Texas, again, for 25 thousand), if you need the cities to be in two countries... Counting "metro area" populations to include suburbs doesn't move the Sans Jose ahead, either.

Or is it land area and not population? I'm guessing some sprawled-out midwestern cities might win over dense Californian ones there, too...

[Soupspoon]

That San Jose one. Is that California or Costa Rica?

(World's largest pair of same-named cities.)

Do you know the way?

(I also had a Disco Bandit, some years ago. Wonder if I can remember the login, or maybe that's why I stopped playing, across machine/browser migrations?)

[Quey]

SWF Sherwood Forest [Not a real airport, London- LHR] > Sacramento Metro

Sacramento Metro is SMF. SWF is Stewart Int'l in New York.

Obligatory: I bet you're real fun at parties.

Well that was horrifyingly rude. Was your meme worth it?

[rmsgrey]

That San Jose one. Is that California or Costa Rica?

(World's largest pair of same-named cities.)

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

I'd assume largest smaller city just from the name of the statistic. Otherwise, you're pretty much just saying "largest city with another city with the same name" and getting caught up in quibbles about definitions of "city".

[da Doctah]

That San Jose one. Is that California or Costa Rica?

(World's largest pair of same-named cities.)

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

San Jose, CA (about 1 million people) plus San Jose, Costa Rica (334 thousand), is much smaller than New York, New York (12 million) plus New York, Texas (20 people). I'm sure there are many other pairs like that... Paris, France (2+ million) plus any of the two-dozen-or-so other Parises (Texas, again, for 25 thousand), if you need the cities to be in two countries... Counting "metro area" populations to include suburbs doesn't move the Sans Jose ahead, either.

Or is it land area and not population? I'm guessing some sprawled-out midwestern cities might win over dense Californian ones there, too...

Population of the smaller city of the pair. That keeps you from counting things like "Canton, Ohio and Canton, China", or "Moscow, Russia and Moscow, Idaho" where some piddling wide spot in the road has the same name as an important world city. The unstated component is that I wanted one US and one non-US city, which immediately disqualified London (England and Ontario).

I got started looking for the answer to that when I guy I worked with said he had a job prospect in Alexandria and I had to ask him "Virginia or Egypt?"

[Mikeski]

So the "biggest city whose name makes you think of someplace else", heh. Makes sense that way.

When I visit relatives in Illinois, I can't say I'm from the "Twin Cities", since that means Bloomington-Normal to them.

"No, The Twin Cities, the one with the MLB team named "The Twins" because of it..."

[Pfhorrest]

I've similarly noted, having lived near both sides of a county line my whole life, that "The Tri-County Area" means different things depending on which side of that line you are. In Ventura County, that means Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties. In Santa Barbara County, that apparently means the San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties.

Basically "The Tri-County Area" is whichever county you're in and its two neighbors (not counting the inland neighbor because nobody lives there anyway, that's all just barren wasteland as far as the eye can see).

[Jarrel]

Surely 'YYY' is Delilah.

[alexriehl]

SWF Sherwood Forest [Not a real airport, London- LHR] > Sacramento Metro

Sacramento Metro is SMF. SWF is Stewart Int'l in New York.

Tacking on to this, while LHR (London Heathrow) is the airport //most// people would fly into to get to London, there are two other airports serving the area as well: LGW (London Gatwick) and LCA (London City Airport). That said, based on the location of Sherwood Forest you'd be better off flying into Doncaster-Sheffield (DSA) [Formerly named "Robin Hood Airport"!, or maybe Manchester International (MAN) or Birmingham (BHX).

[sfmans]

Tacking on to this, while LHR (London Heathrow) is the airport //most// people would fly into to get to London, there are two other airports serving the area as well: LGW (London Gatwick) and LCA (London City Airport).

It’s even worse than that - there’s also London Stansted (STN, more truthfully called Bishops Stortford Airport) and London Southend (SEN, a dog-and-pony show one hour by car or train from anywhere you’d remotely call London).

Many people seem to think that everywhere in England is in London, and the airports aren’t helping ...

[HES]

London Luton (LTN), too.

[Soupspoon]

Many people seem to think that everywhere in England is in London, and the airports aren’t helping ...

London Scotland Airport…

(And that's at least three of us who've mentioned DSA, now. )

[orthogon]

London Luton (LTN), too.

Although for me they are last-resort options (mainly because I live in South London), Luton and Stansted don't really have much less of a claim to be "London" airports than Gatwick, based on distance, as shown in the map below. Gatwick has always been considered a London airport, well before budget airlines started pulling the "<Name of important world city> (not really)" trick: it even has an "L" in its IATA code to prove it.



As the map shows, the real issue is the travel time, which is only weakly correlated with the distance. The 15 minute figure for Heathrow assumes that you're prepared to pay one of the world's most eyewatering train fares for the Heathrow Express, and that only gets you to Paddington, which isn't really in the centre. But it all depends on where you're ultimately travelling to/from. Heathrow is annoyingly disconnected - the Piccadilly line takes forever, and whilst there used to be an express bus to/from Feltham railway station, handy for SW London, that was discontinued, presumably in order to hand a juicy monopoly to the operators of Heathrow Express. However! When Crossrail (a.k.a. the Elizabeth Line) opens, travel to Heathrow ought to get a lot better. Luton doesn't have its own railway station: you have to take a shuttle bus from Luton Airport Parkway, so I'm suspicious of the 24 minute figure.

[sonar1313]

That San Jose one. Is that California or Costa Rica?

(World's largest pair of same-named cities.)

Is that some sort of weighted average, or minimum population per city, or something?

San Jose, CA (about 1 million people) plus San Jose, Costa Rica (334 thousand), is much smaller than New York, New York (12 million) plus New York, Texas (20 people). I'm sure there are many other pairs like that... Paris, France (2+ million) plus any of the two-dozen-or-so other Parises (Texas, again, for 25 thousand), if you need the cities to be in two countries... Counting "metro area" populations to include suburbs doesn't move the Sans Jose ahead, either.

Or is it land area and not population? I'm guessing some sprawled-out midwestern cities might win over dense Californian ones there, too...

The peculiar arrangements in Alaska mean that the winner - probably the worldwide winner - is Sitka, AK plus whichever of the various other Sitkas in the country is biggest.

[Canard]

What is the abbreviation for Hogsmeade?

The real station that stands in for Hogsmeade is Goathland, but this does not have a station code as it's not a mainline station and hasn't been since the 1960's - it's currently part of the North Yorkshire Moors Heritage Railway that runs steam trains as a tourist attraction. If it was still a mainline station it would logically have GOA as its code, as that has not been taken by any other British stations at the moment.