....BTW, when I read your post I thought of another idea and tried a FT search for "Los Angeles" (with the quotes) and it works. "LA" or "LAX" won't work, and the Google search for "LA" also returns La and la, and there should be a way to go directly to advanced Google search from the search results page like a regular Google search. It is possible to get there from the main Google page or by starting a search from the Google Tool Bar and clicking on Advanced Search. It would then be possible to do an advanced search of FT. I also found that in an advanced search Google recognizes the exact phrase "LA" is the same as "Los Angeles" and "NW" is the same as "Northwest." I don't know if it works in reverse, but I couldn't find any results where that happened.
Perhaps Google's Advanced Search makes use of a dictionary/thesaurus of synonyms, like other "industrial-strength" search engines. (This would be a useful thing for FT search to have as well.)