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The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

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Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#71

Post by aksss »

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

In a sea of lowercase prose, all caps stands out from the rest.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#72

Post by gibolt »

krick wrote: post #49
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.

With the plus, isn't every number and prefix/suffix unique across countries?

I have no idea if that holds true not knowing if a country code is attached.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#73

Post by fragmede »

krick wrote: post #48

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 d…

You might (not) enjoy CGP Grey's video about runway numbering https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD6bPNZRRbQ then, instead.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#74

Post by allarm »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #69
allarm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many countries (if not all of them) use localized numbering format - short numbers to hit the local destinations (intra-city calls), numbers with city prefixes to get to the numbers in a different city within the same country, specific prefixes (i.e. 00) for international calls, etc. The most convenient way of processing this mess is to rewrite the numbers (called/calling) on the ingress, into e164, and then processi…

There's many places where you can skip the area code or similar when dialling, but I think the original poster was thinking of systems where the actual numbering has variable-length components.

Variable length is solved by inter-digit timeout - pbx is waiting for a couple of seconds, then decides that the caller has finished entering the number and processes the collected digits according to the existing rules. Simple as that.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#77

Post by PurpleRamen »

reaperducer wrote: post #7
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…

#3 has RFML - Refugee Meal. I wonder what that is.

RFML seems from United Airlines, and seems to mean: easy to digest. No egg, no dairy, probably no meat? Its for people from places where food isn't processed or where they had not eaten much for a longer time, so a change in diet content and quantity may be problematic for the passenger.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#78

Post by agurk »

Symbiote wrote: post #60
skrebbel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say this as if it’s a universal thing, like IATA codes, but I assume it’s a quirk of some particular country? My region code definitely does not have this. Sounds pretty nuts to me btw, how does that work when you turn it into standard E.164 format like “+123456789”?

Britain has different length area codes. 020 is London, 0121 is Birmingham, 01234 is Bedford, 015396 is Sedburgh, population 2700. The local part of the number is 8, 7, 6 or 5 digits accordingly. I never found this to be a problem. If you're dialing locally from a land line, you usually know the local code. For national or international dialing it doesn't matter. Occasionally people put the space in the wrong place,…

> Occasionally people put the space in the wrong place, like 0207 77777777 for a London number

To expand on this, the codes have changed a lot over time. London used to have separate codes for inner and outer London, which at their last iteration were 0171 and 0181. These were replaced in 2000 with (020)7 and (020)8 respectively. At this point it still made sense, if inaccurately, to group the first four numbers. There was also some perceived prestige with having an inner London number.

In 2005 (020)3 was included due to a shortage of numbers and (020)4 for the same reason in 2019. With the portability of numbers and the extra ranges it no longer makes sense to group the first four - and the number of people who want to infer location from a landline number is probably much lower these days anyway.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#79

Post by miniwark »

And the winner of all look like to be the Sembach Kaserne in Germany of course!

Formerly 'Sembach Air Base' and 'SEmbach AnneX', and it's a military air base, so normally it would not need an IATA code... In fact this nice code seem to have disappear from the official list... to bad :-(

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#80

Post by agurk »

grishka wrote: post #16

Also interesting how old this system is and how everything is assigned once and never updated. Saint Petersburg airport is LED because the city was called Leningrad at the time the codes were assigned. Aeroflot, the largest Russian airline, has code SU, most probably because Soviet Union, and because it was the only Soviet airline.

One I always liked was Finnair's AY, as its original name was Aero oY. OY being Finnish for Limited Company, like AG in German, or AB in Swedish.

As both Finish and Swedish are official languages in Finland that allows for the cleverly named lock company ABLOY. This stands for AB Låsfabriken Lukkotehdas OY, i.e. "Corp. Lock Factory Lock Factory Corp." in Swedish then Finnish.

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