You have ever flown by plane? Have you ever seen those pieces of paper that stick us to suitcases? Have you ever wondered what they are for and how to read them? Here, then we will explain it here. THE airport codes as you may have noticed they are all 3 letters. The code is used to assign a short name to airports around the world and then figure out where those suitcases will go, for example.
THEInternational Air Transport Association also called IATA for short, every three years it updates and publishes the new airport codes on the IATA Airline Coding Directory. Which are really many, just imagine how many airports there are in Italy and in the world.
The 3-letter code is the airport destination code of the baggage. They are currently available 17.576 codes and 323 of them are assigned to more than one airport, rightly so. This system, active since 1930, allows (as far as possible) each city to choose its own identification code, trying to avoid the combinations already used by other airports.
Many airports use the first 3 letters of the name of the city where the airport is located (such as MAD for Madrid, EDI for Edinburgh, etc.), others use an identification code (BCN for Barcelona, PRG for Prague, etc.), others use a 2-letter abbreviation taken from the city name and add a third one, usually Q or X (like AYQ for Ayers Rock, GRX for Granada).
There is no fixed rule, in fact some cities take the first three letters of their city such as Madrid for example that uses MAD, others take the first two letters and a third letter of your choice as well as Bologna, with BLQ, finally there are those who use identification acronyms such as classic Barcelona with BCN.
There is also another type of code to classify airports: ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization). It is a 4-letter code (more rarely two letters and two digits), where the first letter indicates the geographical area, the second identifies a nation on the continent, and the last two identify the location and the airport.
