Airport Codes in Posts
Aug 23, 2008 | 1:14 am
#46
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Currently in Bloomington, IN, but Normally NYC, CDG, and even POZ or wherever FT takes me.
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Posts: 14,081
Am I the only who almost never has to look up airport codes???
Aug 23, 2008 | 7:00 am
#47
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: SAN
Programs: UA Plat / AA Gold / Delta Silver
Posts: 417
Oct 13, 2008 | 6:28 am
#48
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: CLT
Posts: 7,249
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
Oct 13, 2008 | 7:52 am
#49
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Germany
Programs: Miles & More, Amex
Posts: 678
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 
Oct 13, 2008 | 7:54 am
#50
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Germany
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Posts: 678
Oct 13, 2008 | 1:32 pm
#51
Moderator, Hilton Honors
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: on a short leash
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Posts: 71,445
Not me. I had to look up the code for GBZ the other day.
Oct 13, 2008 | 8:55 pm
#52
Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 242
Cool! Thanks!
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)
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)
Oct 17, 2008 | 7:06 am
#53
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Indian Harbour Beach, Fla, USA
Programs: AA Lifetime Plt
Posts: 1,986
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.
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.
Oct 18, 2008 | 2:02 am
#54
Original Poster
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: SAN
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Posts: 260
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.
Oct 22, 2008 | 8:24 pm
#55
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