Why is EVA Air's IATA code "BR"?
 

What's the history?

Assigned by IATA.

Why the letter choice though? "B" and "R" seem random at first glance.

It seems at that time (very late 1980s or very early 1990?), that was what was available. It was originally for British Caledonian. Mandarin got AE, which was originally Air Europa.

The original Corporate Identity was done by a British firm and their original reservation system was supposedly more related to the BA system (all these systems were kind of related, I think they got their own copy, not hosted by BA). Not sure if that had any influence of getting that code.

Y F Chang was supposed to be pretty superstitious - I don't know if he had the 2 letters evaluated by the fortune tellers :D

Do airlines get to request their preferences (from existing codes) from IATA when they request? Is there a "vanity airline code" fee :D

It could be that "R" is for "rong" in "Changrong," their Chinese name. But then "CR" would have also been available, it seems it was never used by any airline. Possibly "CR" could be associated with a "CRash" so it was avoided. And then "B" was the letter next to it... But this is all a figment of my imagination. I'm not aware of any substantiated theory how they ended up with this code, if there's one I'd love to hear it.

Most codes don't seem to be random. Even recently Lufthansa got "4U" ("for you") for its low-cost subsidiary Germanwings. On the other hand, many newer airlines, especially in the AP region, seem to have meaningless codes, so maybe it is just random for them.

An even better example is Singapore Airlines which requested SQ so that it would be consistent with the airline's commitment to superior quality.

They missed EV by two years. Express Jet came in 1986. Eva in 1988. But now if EV winds down, Eva may ask for EV under the controlled duplicate system in six months.

Given that Eva is evergreen, they could have asked for EG, but a JAL subsidiary already had that.

I doubt they'll change it. They passed on the Evergreen name when the US airline named Evergreen folded.

That is a lot of work. I doubt they'll change it since BR/Eva Air is now "established".

There were precedences in the past. US Air used to be AL and it took them many years and efforts to change to US (and then name change to US Airways happened).

some airlines , especially older airlines , were given a specific code if it help to match their public name , or the initials of the parent holding/company or even the country in case of some national carriers

some simply don't/didn't care and took/take what is available , that's the case for new airlines , as the IATA code is not much advertised , many airlines have very little interest to it , but it can help pax in order to easily recognize their flights if it match the name of the airline

as others said , there are examples of new airlines reusing codes of defunct airlines , due to the limitations (2 characters with only latin alphabet and/or digits) or historic reasons ... example = SN is the code for Brussels Airlines , inherited from SabeNa after their bankruptcy