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The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

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Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#141

Post by albrewer »

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.

The most confusing ones that people might run into regularly are for sodium (Na) and potassium (K) since the medical conditions for having too much / too little of them are named after the Latin names - (hyper/hypo)natremia and (hyper/hypo)kalemia.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#142

Post by cratermoon »

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…

NOTAMs and METARs are fun, but also the string of characters on a passenger boarding pass, like this one

    M1EWING/SHAUN         E1AAAAA SYDBNEQF 0524 106Y023A0073 359>2180
And for the record, like Python code, the spaces are significant, because the fields have a fixed order and width. (Although there are a couple of places where a field is specified by a number denoting its sized, followed by the contents)

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#143

Post by ratg13 »

taeric wrote: post #135
ratg13 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, but I would assume that SSNs are not re-used.

Is this not the case?

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#144

Post by lostlogin »

xattt wrote: post #90
lostlogin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I could, but it isn’t my format the confuses me, it’s what other people do and what vendors set computers to etc.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#145

Post by thriftwy »

macintux wrote: post #112
makeitdouble wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue if it was to be redone from scratch, we’d settle for hierarchical codes with country namespaces. Probably something like us.lax, fr.cdg, ko.inc, or a combination of country + number HK02, GB231 etc. Simple system get approved when there’s low friction in the ruling comitee, as it was the case when few countries were involved in the first place. Once more that 50 members need to agree on something restrictin…

Country namespaces would violate the implied (or maybe explicit) idea that the codes never change.

When Kazakhstan renamed its capital from Astana to Nursultan it also changed airport code from TSE to NQZ.

Fun thing is that they have since renamed it back but the code is still NQZ. Why it was TSE before that is left as an excercise for the reader.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#146

Post by thriftwy »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #102
blamazon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relative to the infinite recursion of metric paper, it is abject chaos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI

The problem with metric paper is that A4 sucks for printing text—it’s too wide for a reasonable line length at 10 or 11pt, whence e.g. the sprawling margins of the standard LaTeX classes with the a4paper option; and A5 is definitely on the small side. (A single wide margin beside a long text column, like in the Berkeley physics course, Spivak’s Calculus, or Tufte’s books, is one possible way of taking advantage of wi…

Non-metric Letter is even wider and shorter, so it's worse by your description.

I remember Firefox defaulting to Letter format when printing.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#147

Post by tristor »

gkedzierski wrote: post #126
makeitdouble wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue if it was to be redone from scratch, we’d settle for hierarchical codes with country namespaces. Probably something like us.lax, fr.cdg, ko.inc, or a combination of country + number HK02, GB231 etc. Simple system get approved when there’s low friction in the ruling comitee, as it was the case when few countries were involved in the first place. Once more that 50 members need to agree on something restrictin…

Sounds good until you get to the edge cases. For instance, GVA is in two countries at the same time.

> For instance, GVA is in two countries at the same time.

Technically this isn't true. This stood out to me because I've been through GVA and its situation is unique enough I investigated it while I was there. GVA lies entirely within Swiss territory, in fact, it was rather a point to ensure that this was the case in the way territory lines were laid. It does span into two municipalities, however both are within Switzerland.

What makes it unique is the edge of the airport aligns directly against the Swiss/French border, allowing direct access into the airport without needing to technically cross the border (because international airports treat areas past passport control and onto the tarmac as no-man's land). This is especially advantageous for freight, which is why GVA is considered an EU freight hub despite Switzerland not being an EU member state. So trucks delivering freight into France and other parts of the EU can drive directly into the GVA freight terminal from France, without needing to technically "cross the border", however the actual land they are on is within the territory of Switzerland.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#148

Post by someweirdperson »

mschuster91 wrote: post #130
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. Not just regular pilots, but also (here in the EU) operators of drones under A2 classification. And let me tell you, it sucks, particularly if you're from anywhere else but the US and never heard of units like feet, miles and inches and what they mean outside of "this exists, is only used in the US and that's it" once in school. The only thing in a standard…

> anywhere else but the US and never heard of units like feet, miles

The miles typically used in the USA are not the nautic miles used in aviation.

But what's worse, some air speed indicators show different units than knots (nm/h), depending on the origin of the aircraft mph or km/h.

Re: The maddening mess of airport codes [video]

#150

Post by cyphar »

macintux wrote: post #11
cyphar wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, CGP Grey also made a video about that[1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/jfOUVYQnuhw

That’s the same video as the post, unless I’m missing something.

Ah, my bad. I thought the post was a link to the other CGP Grey video about airports[1] because the video about airport codes does talk about airline codes (and GP implied it doesn't). I really shouldn't comment late at night...

[1]: https://youtu.be/qD6bPNZRRbQ

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