i’ve found an answer to something i’ve been wondering about for years without ever quite formulating the question. how airports get their codes. when i’m standing in a check in queue looking at my luggage labels most of them make sense but some of them are just nonsense. they make sense when you follow the story of their allocation through chronologically.

man and ncl for manchester and newcastle always make me wonder if the short versions of the universities domain names (man.ac.uk and ncl.ac.uk, i’ve had both in my email address in the past) deliberately followed the airport codes or not. two of my check in queue musings are why newark is ewr and not something beginning with n (the us navy had already bagsied all the n codes) and why los angeles is lax (which is pretty much what i thought, that the x is just there to make up the numbers.)

[found via web goddess]