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The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

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Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#131

Post by BWStearns »

Aviation has all sorts of s/wonderful/terrible naming and encoding going on that's very historically dependent. What's the code for rain? RA of course, makes sense, English is the language of aviation after all. So mist is... wtf, mist is BR? Because brume is mist in French and the French took the lead in aviation for a bit early on because of a US patent battle.

Or transponder codes. It's four digits, but not really, they only go up to 7. Why? Because the system is descendant from WWII IFF systems and 4 octals was good enough for the system design back then.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#132

Post by BWStearns »

stevepeg wrote: post #54
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…

You should try having to read several hundred of them before a long-haul duty! Good luck trying to find the runway closure notam buried among the 400 reports of a crane within curvature-of-the-earth viewing range of an airport, or the 300 reports of birds that were once seen near, or somewhere near the runway. Too hilarious not to share: https://fixingnotams.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Field-Gu...

I saw a NOTAM about increased bird activity that had a 10 day duration. Thanks NOTAM.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#133

Post by jhbadger »

BWStearns wrote: post #131

Aviation has all sorts of s/wonderful/terrible naming and encoding going on that's very historically dependent. What's the code for rain? RA of course, makes sense, English is the language of aviation after all. So mist is... wtf, mist is BR? Because brume is mist in French and the French took the lead in aviation for a bit early on because of a US patent battle. Or transponder codes. It's four digits, but not really…

But that's like anything. Why is the symbol for hydrogen "H"? Well that's obvious. But then iron is "Fe", gold "Au" and lead "Pb", because those were named after the Latin for those elements: ferrum, aurum, and plumbum, that happen to differ wildly from English.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#134

Post by BWStearns »

jhbadger wrote: post #133
BWStearns wrote: post #131

Aviation has all sorts of s/wonderful/terrible naming and encoding going on that's very historically dependent. What's the code for rain? RA of course, makes sense, English is the language of aviation after all. So mist is... wtf, mist is BR? Because brume is mist in French and the French took the lead in aviation for a bit early on because of a US patent battle. Or transponder codes. It's four digits, but not really…

But that's like anything. Why is the symbol for hydrogen "H"? Well that's obvious. But then iron is "Fe", gold "Au" and lead "Pb", because those were named after the Latin for those elements: ferrum, aurum, and plumbum, that happen to differ wildly from English.

Certainly, but we've been doing things with elements for a while now. Aviation is relatively new. It's interesting how quickly naming and process cruft accumulates.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#135

Post by taeric »

ratg13 wrote: post #123
europeanguy wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> leading to insanity like recycling codes after one airline dies, meaning the meaning of the code is time-dependent Why is this insanity? Almost everything in real life is time dependent. I think this is just insanity to devs who want to fit the world to their data model rather than the other way around which is how it should be.

Reusing the same unique identifier another user or business had almost always causes problems. If special access was given to one entity, often that special access remains after the new entity takes over. Often times the new entity gets access to private data of the old entity. It makes record keeping difficult to know who was what entity at any given time. If you haven’t seen the problems caused by doing this, consi…

If you are from the US, I have bad news for you about SSNs. :D

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#136

Post by dietsche »

I enjoyed the complaining about q codes :) as a ham radio operator who does a lot of Morse code, I can tell you that they are far far from dead. QRL, QRZ, QSL and more are heard or sent over the air tens of thousands of times a day.

Also the radio call signs of hams primarily start with either k, n, w, a in the USA. Airplanes have radios, so that’s why they treat those letters in a similar way along with fm/am radio stations

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#137

Post by knotsofunny »

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

The title of the video is mostly to get views. The author mentions in a recent podcast episode he had a video in 2020 with a descriptive title that petered out around 700k views, then changed the title to clickbait "This abandoned shed may yet help end the world" earlier this year and got an additional 4 million views.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#138

Post by Orthanc »

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…

>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.

I think most travelers, including myself until I started working on this project, have never heard of IATA and only know the ICAO codes -- which do seem like a real mess. It's weird to find out then when you look into them that a much better system exists, but it's not the one branded on the outside of all the airports!

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#140

Post by wadkar »

We’re just looking at the manifestation of one of the hardest problems in software engineering - naming things.

There’s no one good answer. Instead we must design our system to be “soft” i.e. malleable - able to evolve as the world evolves.

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