Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 159 posts

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#41

Post by rob74 »

2143 wrote: post #29
SoftTalker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also wondered why cryptically abbrevated things like NOTAMS are still the way they are. It made sense in a teletype/telegraph world where brevity was worth time and money. From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM: A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06 Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005 A)EGLL B)0609050500 C)0704300500 E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN…

> Pilots have to know how to read and understand this stuff. Only justification I can think of is that like mathematical notation, this shorthand, once learned, is unambiguous and conveys meaning better than prose. I don't know if that's really true though. You're correct. It's straightforward for pilots. They can quickly read a NOTAM and understand everything. Also, it's pretty standard and unambiguous worldwide. As…

That would be true in an ideal world, but pilots are also only human, so at least some of them will sometimes misread or ignore all that gibberish. To quote Wikipedia:

> In July 2017, Air Canada Flight 759 nearly crashed into four other airliners as it attempted to land on a San Francisco taxiway misidentified as a runway: the adjacent runway was closed but the information was buried in the NOTAM. As a consequence, in September 2018, from the findings during its investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) stated NOTAMs were unintelligible and ignored, and recommended a more effective information presentation for better relevance. NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt described NOTAMs as "a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to". This led to an ICAO initiative to reform the NOTAM system.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#42

Post by culi »

judge2020 wrote: post #38
spoils19 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they meant to link to this one: https://youtu.be/jfOUVYQnuhw

..which is the same video as the thread. Airline codes are a different beast.

This is a hilarious bit of exposition of how few people actually read/watch the links posted here. Anyways, both IATA and ICAO (as well as FAA) are explained in the video. Y'all should watch it!

It took months of original history just to get an answer to why Canadian airports start with a Y

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#43

Post by culi »

woodruffw wrote: post #2

The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Teletype[2] that are still pushing data around. Not the mention standard meal codes[3], like BLML for "bland meal" and CLML for "celebration cake meal." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system [3]: http…

If you visit an airline on WikiData, they have the FAA, IATA, and ICAO codes pretty well mapped out, but I hadn't ever come across an ACARS entry before. Might be worth mapping out. Example:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8731

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#44

Post by culi »

woodruffw wrote: post #2

The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Teletype[2] that are still pushing data around. Not the mention standard meal codes[3], like BLML for "bland meal" and CLML for "celebration cake meal." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system [3]: http…

the thing that bugs me the most about all this is all caps

Numerous studies have shown by now that SHOUTING CASE is the slowest to read. Humans read words by their shapes not by individual letters. Capital letters lose the distinctive shapes that their lowercase counterparts often have and thereby also become more ambiguous and error prone

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#45

Post by culi »

woodruffw wrote: post #30
acwan93 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptic codes and abbreviations are surprisingly prevalent in more places than you'd expect. Anyone working with EDI documents in medical or retailers has first hand knowledge.

Certainly. Air transportation just holds particular interest for me, given that the codes and abbreviations reflect historical physical constraints: so-and-so many columns, so-and-so many inches of printable space on a ticket, etc. (This is also why I find US banking standards interesting[1].) [1]: https://blog.yossarian.net/2019/12/25/A-shallow-dive-into-th...

Most linters follow the 80 character limit because of the IBM punch card and Unicode and ASCII are also both full of these historical quirks. Many of us deal with these every day. I assume it's the same for people working in the aviation or medical industry

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#46

Post by culi »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #33
woodruffw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of airlines have done refugee flights at one point or another, so I guess they needed a way to tell the ground crew to load whatever special foods were needed.

What 'special foods' would be needed for refugees?

There's also TBML which is for Tech Bro Meals (soylent, mainly)

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#47

Post by cameldrv »

SoftTalker wrote: post #23
woodruffw wrote: post #2

The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Teletype[2] that are still pushing data around. Not the mention standard meal codes[3], like BLML for "bland meal" and CLML for "celebration cake meal." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system [3]: http…

I've also wondered why cryptically abbrevated things like NOTAMS are still the way they are. It made sense in a teletype/telegraph world where brevity was worth time and money. From wikipedia, this is a typical NOTAM: A1234/06 NOTAMR A1212/06 Q)EGTT/QMXLC/IV/NBO/A/000/999/5129N00028W005 A)EGLL B)0609050500 C)0704300500 E)DUE WIP TWY B SOUTH CLSD BTN 'F' AND 'R'. TWY 'R' CLSD BTN 'A' AND 'B' AND DIVERTED VIA NEW GREEN…

At this point it's basically historical/a mild hazing ritual. Everyone involved in aviation knows how to read this gibberish, and the next generation damn well better do the same!

Back in the day, it made sense. Say, back in the 60s, these messages were sent over a teletype at maybe 75 baud or less, roughly 10 characters per second. Now the Telex network was billed differently, but by comparison, at the time, domestic long distance rates could be over $1 per minute during the day, so it was on the order of 600 characters/$1. All the abbreviations probably reduce the data transmission by 80-90% over a fully spelled out transmission.

For things like hourly weather reports from every major airport, the abbreviations probably saved $50/hr or more on Telex charges every hour every day at major airports receiving them. That's not to mention the lower latency from getting weather reports sooner or not needing to install more Telex machines to keep up.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#48

Post by krick »

Maddening mess? Come on, this is silly nitpicking. Airport codes are as clean an logical as it gets with century-old international standards. In fact, most of "maddening mess" in the video can be essentially ignored, which author basically admits by stating closer to the end that these are used by different organizations for different purposes. It is just that story is being told backwards and in a snarky voice for dramatic effect, otherwise it would become clear that IATA codes are pretty much the most natural and logical thing in the world, which would rob author of a passable video topic. There is no real pressure to use ICAO codes instead of IATA codes, and the switch would be quite complicated because of all the legacy in GDS systems, not to mention organizational effort.

From the top of my head, I can come up with only one reasonably annoying thing about IATA airport codes, which is much less than most other legacy standards. While EWR can be used both as a city code and as an airport code, according to every airline in the world airport EWR belonged to the city NYC until this October (because it's "New York metropolitan area", despite being in a different state). This is no longer true, but there still are a couple of other peculiar cases like that in other countries. This is important, because airlines have different rules for fares, exchange rules and stuff for airports in the same city and different cities (like there will be different fares for round-trips and non-round-trips, and the definition of round-trip obviously depends on different airports being in the same city or not).

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#49

Post by krick »

rippercushions wrote: post #3

You think airport codes are bad, try airline codes. The IATA standard is still only two (2) letters, leading to insanity like recycling codes after one airline dies, meaning the meaning of the code is time-dependent, and, even worse, "controlled duplicates" where two airlines are intentionally assigned the same code at the same time , since they fly in different parts of the world and pinky-promise to never overlap.…

Or better try telephone region codes, which are ambiguous when a phone number is written as a consecutive string of digits, without +/()/-/space.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#50

Post by dhosek »

culi wrote: post #44
woodruffw wrote: post #2

The entire world of airline coding (as in "encoding") is fascinating to me: there are all kinds of ancient semi-human-readable formats like ACARS[1] and IATA Teletype[2] that are still pushing data around. Not the mention standard meal codes[3], like BLML for "bland meal" and CLML for "celebration cake meal." [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_teletype_system [3]: http…

the thing that bugs me the most about all this is all caps Numerous studies have shown by now that SHOUTING CASE is the slowest to read. Humans read words by their shapes not by individual letters. Capital letters lose the distinctive shapes that their lowercase counterparts often have and thereby also become more ambiguous and error prone

Except that this isn’t really true. Some writing systems lack the ascenders and descenders of the Latin alphabet and reading still happens. Lowercase letters themselves are a late addition to the Latin alphabet. Most readability studies fail the replication test yet they get repeated as if they were scientific facts.
Post reply on HN