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The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

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Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#81

Post by tow21 »

agurk wrote: post #78
Symbiote wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The…

Actually, London used to have one area code, "01".

Then at some point it was split into inner & outer, and there was endless one-up-manship about whether you had an inner or outer London code. (obviously, inner London was posher)

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#82

Post by remarkEon »

nereye wrote: post #56
woodruffw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're famine refugees, something like Plumpy'nut[1] maybe. If they're religious refugees, something catering to their religious restrictions. MREs if the refugee operation is being assisted by a military or disaster aid organization. And so forth. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut

Talking of MREs, some airlines do not allow them as carry on luggage, see https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/whatcanibring/... .

MREs contain a heating packet filled with magnesium pellets and a couple other things, which are used to heat the food when water is added. I'd imagine they don't want those in the cabin, given the gas that is emitted during the heating process.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#83

Post by hef19898 »

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…

You answered your own question. Being able to read those things is part a pilot's training and daily job. Complaining about this from the outside is like me critizing Python or something else I have not the slightest clue about.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#84

Post by FL410 »

hugh-avherald wrote: post #55
2143 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> You're correct. It's straightforward for pilots. They can quickly read a NOTAM and understand everything. Pretty sure most pilots would disagree. They're a mess.

Yup. Nothing like an AD AP CLSD stuck right in the middle of 53 different unlit tower NOTAMs

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#85

Post by hef19898 »

miniwark wrote: post #79

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 :-(

Ah yeah, those nice codes! Back the day a place I worked at used four letter codes for warehouses, and they had a lot of those. Someone realized the implications once the alphabetic list hit ANA..., you guessed it. ANU.. was skipped then. Was kind sad, we had all kinds of fun imagining how we wouod comment on all the screw up of those places in the weekly meetings...

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#87

Post by hef19898 »

kzrdude wrote: post #76

Strange title for an otherwise interesting video. Why expect anything else than an organic growth with interesting quirks? It's more fon to appreciate it than deride it

But deriding those things one basically knows nothing about makes you look so smart and funny. And it drives clicks and views. In reality, it is just uneducating, shallow and lazy.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#88

Post by SilverBirch »

This type of thing clearly just doesn't tweak me the way that it tweaks some people. I'm not convinced you could end up with a great way of assigning airport codes today, even if we completely started fresh and we assumed no new airports are ever created. In fact, in a lot of cases the weird corner cases are often situations where you can ask "Would it have been better to stringently apply the rule, or to bend the rule for ease of use?". Does it makes sense for London to have a LON code? Hell yeah! I live in London, I far prefer being able to go "Hey, let's just assume I can go from any London airport", because I know that LGW and LHR serve different destinations, I can get to either fairly easily.

It's not maddening for anyone other than someone who wants simple consistent rules. But simple consistent rules isn't the aim, and even if it were the aim, you wouldn't achieve it without serious problems. Let's just What3Words all the airports shall we, that's consistent.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#89

Post by xattt »

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.

I am looking forward to a dystopian future where a region will be assigned a 911 or 112 area code if they pinky promise to never have an emergency.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#90

Post by xattt »

lostlogin wrote: post #68
krick wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or just the date. The dumb game of dd/mm/yy versus mm/dd/yy when you live in a dd/mm/yy country is infuriating.

Write the month as a three letter code and your ambiguity is solved.
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