airports

Airport Codes, Decoded

This is too cool: Airportcod.es,В a site dedicated to the backstories of airports’ three-letter abbreviations.

Airport Codes

I’ve always loved searching for flights and discovering my final destination’s airport code. Some are self-explanatory: LHR, MIA.

Others have made me think, whaaaaaaaaa??—likeВ MSY for New Orleans, EZE for Buenos Aires. (Click the images below, if you’re curious!)

MSY

EZE

I’m glad that I now have an easy place to go to demystify them. Airportcod.es currently hasВ 369 airports from 91 countries, and the sites’ designers/developers, Lynn Fisher and Nick Crohn are adding more each day.

Awesome Aerial Views of Airports

I don’t particularly enjoy the in-flight experience, but I do have an affinity for airplanes. They are, after all, the vessels that can take us anywhere in the world.

I have a pretty bad case of wanderlust, at the moment, so I’m particularly loving Holding Pattern , a wonderful Tumblr that showcases awesome aerial views of airports. It’s a side project from Lauren O’Neill, a Brooklyn-based designer and art director.

As she describes it:

During layovers, I often find myself observing the activity on the runway and thinking that I’d love to see this from above. With a creative block on a project, I took to google mapping airports and was enamored by the beautiful satellite shots on my screen. Since then, wanderlust has often inspired me to get lost in the satellite imagery of various destinations even when I’m glued to my desk.

O’Neill seeks out and crops all theВ Holding Pattern В images—and they’re stunning to behold:

RVV, French Polynesia, via Holding Pattern

RVV

CPH, Denmark, via Holding Pattern

CPH

MAD, via Holding Pattern

MAD

BOS, via Holding Pattern

BOS

ATL via Holding Pattern

ATL

(Images viaВ Holding Pattern ; found via Chris Guillebeau)

Runways of the World

This is pretty astounding.

Using data from ourairports.com, James Davenport,В a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at the University of Washington, plotted the locations of 45,132 runways around the world. The result: a map of the world.В (I know it’s a little hard to see, so please click on the image to view the high res version.)

airports of the world

As Davenport puts it:

Think about that number for a moment: there areВ at leastВ 45,000 places to land an airplane!В These range from small dirt fields to LAX, and the data seems to be more complete in the USA. Still, runways on every continent, seemingly every country.

Incredible!

I wholeheartedly agree.

(Image by James Davenport)