Airport codes

Every stream title on this site has a few capital letters in it: LAX, HND, KSFO, RJTT. They are airport codes, and there are two sets of them. Once you know which is which, stream titles and flight trackers get much easier to read.

Two codes for every airport

IATA codes have three letters. They are the ones on your boarding pass and baggage tag: LHR, AMS, SXM. The airline trade body hands them out, and they are built for passengers and ticketing. There is no real system to them. Most come from the city or airport name, and the rest have a story.

ICAO codes have four letters. Pilots, controllers and flight plans use these, so you'll hear and see them in ATC streams and on tracking sites. Unlike IATA codes they follow a pattern: the first one or two letters tell you the region or country. That's why Heathrow is LHR to a passenger and EGLL to a pilot.

Stream channels tend to put both in the title, which is why you'll see things like HND/RJTT or ZRH/LSZH.

Reading the ICAO prefix

You don't need to learn them all. These are the ones that cover the airports on this site:

The American K is the handy one. For almost any big US airport, the ICAO code is just K plus the IATA code. It doesn't work elsewhere: Haneda is HND but RJTT, and nothing in the first tells you the second.

The codes that need explaining

Most codes are obvious. These are the ones from our list that aren't.