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-   Suggestions (https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/suggestions-387/)
-   -   Airport Codes in Posts (https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/suggestions/685770-airport-codes-posts.html)

the_traveler Jun 21, 2007 10:16 am
Originally Posted by IceTrojan (Post 7905774)
OP probably expects everyone to know what UCSF stands for?
Doesn't that "Uncle Charlie in Santa Fe"? :D

cranndarach Jul 6, 2007 3:03 pm
Originally Posted by IceTrojan (Post 7912662)
The alternate codes aren't confusing at all... if anything the posters are the ones to blame if they are ambiguous. When I say NYC, I really do mean LGA/JFK/EWR.
HOU is the only one that is slightly confusing in that it seems to refer to both HOU the airport and HOU the city with the airports HOU and IAH. Despite this I too somehow manage to get by.

flyaddict Jul 6, 2007 8:46 pm
First of all Welcome PMan74 to FT.

Secondly I agree with you and IceTrojan. If I want to go to New York City, my routing would be going to NYC. I don't care which airport and have plenty of times flown into one and left through another one.

There are plenty of multiple airport areas. Kepp it open where exactly to fly to. Everybody knows the different airports in the area.
But I have to agree that HOU doen't really help as a description.

Efrem Jul 9, 2007 7:51 pm
:confused:
Originally Posted by dcutcher (Post 7909816)
...Worse, my credit card statement has an odd mix ---LAX CHI YTO--of conventional and non- codes. All the more curiously because NO-one conected with any tix I charge uses those #$%^ codes, not aircarrier reservations staff, not airport staff, and certainly not well-seasoned FT-ers.
Sooooo, WHERE do they come from?
(But I don't really want to know.:mad:)
The fare basis for tickets is usually based on metropolitan area. For fare calculation purposes, what the airline's computer needs to know is CHI. It doesn't care if it's ORD or MDW, so those are converted to CHI before ticketing. Having to store the same fare for every place that can be reached from more than one airport in/near a city would waste space, waste processing time, and create another opportunity for errors. Since your credit card bill shows the end result of fare calculation, the general city codes may show up there. (These codes are not "non-conventional" or "non-standard." They are as conventional as the codes for individual airports, are fully standardized, and refer to a precise list of specific airports - though FTers who don't know this, or aren't anal about it, may not always use them precisely.)

Regarding Safari 3: the widget works fine for me with the 3.0.2 beta. I don't know if it stopped working during the brief interval I had the 3.0.1 beta, but if it doesn't work for you and that's what you have, get the new version.

windwalker Aug 22, 2008 11:28 am
Back to the top with this useful script
Just got a new laptop and had to do some searching to find it

Here is new location
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~abuckley/

Look for scripts towards bottom of page

notsosmart Aug 23, 2008 1:14 am
Am I the only who almost never has to look up airport codes???

;)

drewnyc Aug 23, 2008 7:00 am
Originally Posted by notsosmart (Post 10247215)
Am I the only who almost never has to look up airport codes???

;)
and I like looking up the few codes I don't know.

Also, using the codes and all the other acronyms helps keep the riffraff out of FT. :)

gj83 Oct 13, 2008 6:28 am
I kept getting a broken link to the greasemonkey script. Here is a direct link to the file http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~abuckley/airports.user.js

Scrooge McDuck Oct 13, 2008 7:52 am
Originally Posted by ttjoseph (Post 7912804)
There is nothing ambiguous about NYC/WAS/CHI/LON/PAR et cetera. These are city codes that each refer to all of that city's major airports, not any single airport. Like 3-letter airport codes, they were assigned by IATA. They are widely used and perfectly conventional (especially on FT). There are few of them relative to airport codes, and to my knowledge no new ones are being assigned; simply complaining on this thread about how bad they are has probably caused you to learn all the ones you are likely to need :)
I run a webpage with a query engine for the airport codes and I can tell you from my own experience that it is quite a mess with these airport codes. Most of todays problems are related to the history for each airport. Just a few examples to stress out the problem:

              Scrooge McDuck Oct 13, 2008 7:54 am
              Originally Posted by notsosmart (Post 10247215)
              Am I the only who almost never has to look up airport codes??? ;)
              No you are not alone. :) But I do not know all codes (about 10.000). Does anyone? :D

              Kiwi Flyer Oct 13, 2008 1:32 pm
              Not me. I had to look up the code for GBZ the other day.

              JoeJetplane Oct 13, 2008 8:55 pm
              Cool! Thanks!

              Originally Posted by ucsf_med (Post 7628609)
              Hello. It would be nice if a mouseover popup with decoded airport name could be automatically incorporated in posts. For example, someone talks about their PDX-MSP-CLT trip, if I didn't know what airports those were, I would move my mouseover the 3 letter code and a small popup says "Portland" or "Minneapolis." It would have to identify three letter words in CAPS to trigger the link generation. This would save the 15-30 seconds it would take to open your favorite airport code database and search it in a different window...

              EDITTED
              Solution for Macs:
              If you use Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), you can use the Dashboard widget [ttjoseph] wrote to quickly look up 3-letter airport codes and 2-letter airline codes:
              http://ll.cx/files/Airport%20Codes.zip

              Solution for PC's (Firefox):
              http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~abuckley/airports.html
              (you must download Greasemonkey first if you don't have it installed, see link)

              greggwiggins Oct 17, 2008 7:06 am
              Do Like Newspapers Do
               
              One solution might be to encourage posters writing with airport codes to use the journalistic convention for the use of acronyms, even commonly known acronyms. That's to write the full name the first time, followed by the acronym (in parentheses), followed by the acronym alone in future references. I've tried to do that in my posts.

              So what would be "A report from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT)...but DOT had no response to the complaints." could be done in a similar manner as "I flew into Chicago's O'Hare Airport (ORD). Now, due to road construction, leaving ORD by car is much harder than..."

              Using airport codes in the titles of posts would be allowed for space reasons, just as newspapers put acronyms in headlines.

              ucsf_med Oct 18, 2008 2:02 am
              Just updated the links on the first post. They should be working again. I love this script, I find it useful every time I read FT, even though I've been a regular for a few years now.

              the_happiness_store Oct 22, 2008 8:24 pm
              Originally Posted by Kiwi Flyer (Post 10513734)
              Not me. I had to look up the code for GBZ the other day.
              Originally Posted by ucsf_med (Post 10539224)
              Just updated the links on the first post. They should be working again. I love this script, I find it useful every time I read FT, even though I've been a regular for a few years now.
              Great script and I added GBZ to it. ^:)


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