PS
The history of the "Y" codes would be really hard to guess.

Apparently weather reporting stations had a two letter code. The airport would use that code with a "Y" in front to indicate that there was a weather station co-located with the airport.

The weather reporting station codes date back to the telegraph station codes. Toronto was TZ.

Apparently Pearson is "YYZ" because "YTZ" is Billy Bishop airport, the one on the islands. So Pearson, now the largest airport in Canada, got the leftover code.

PS
From a quick read of the history Mirabel sounds doomed from the start.

Big expansion of Quebec and Montreal in the 1960s, including Expo 67. European airlines had to land in Montreal.
Dorval got overcrowded (and I suspect they couldn't expand it) so they started planning a replacement.

Provincial/federal fighting over the location. Took a long time to resolve. There was a compromise, which of course meant the final location didn't have any advantages.

Among other things it was far away from anything else and there wasn't much of a transportation network. Some was planned, but never implemented.

Anyway it opened in 1975.

The history I scanned blames new airplanes getting longer range so they didn't need to stop in Montreal for its decline.

I suspect a larger reason was that the PQ (party of Quebec independence) first won provincial government in 1976. Then there was a very close referendum in 1980.

Business fled Montreal and Quebec generally. Mostly they went to Ontario (and Toronto specifically). Montreal was the big business center for a long time. The PQ changed that.

They didn't fly into Montreal anymore, likely one of the reasons the passenger train into Mirabel never got off the drawing board.

Eventually they closed the passenger section. It still runs freight though.

PS: Goose Bay. A nice place to buy fuel, but I wouldn't wanna' live there.

PS

I thought you might gor for MIA meaning Missing In Action. That would be an apt code for an airport used by many congress critters to flee the District of Corruption, but MIA is currently used for Miami International.

Thanks for shining a little light on LED.

Last Canadian airport I flew out of was CYYR.

🛬

PS: I shoulda' used commas. The software eliminated my spacing:

_ . _ _ , _ . _ _ , _ _ . .

PS: Good morning, M. Some of us have discussed YYZ, the airport code and song by Rush (from "Moving Pictures", on of my favorite of their albums), before. I had not figured out that the beat represented the Morse Code for Y-Y-Z _ . _ _ _ . _ _ _ _ . . until I think Adam Smith related this.

The problem Canada's got with their codes is, initial international "C" for Canada notwithstanding (and not on the luggage tags), they start them all with Y's. Y would you limit yourself like this, pun intended. There aren't many good relatable codes you can make. Montreal is YUL, Halifax is YHZ, Ottawa is YOW, Winnepeg is YWG, Calgary is YYC, Vancouver is YVR. Basically all you've got is 2 letters to possibly be initials, but they don't seem to be.

Toronto, YYZ, is a HUGE airport! I guess the name Pearson is not being replaced, as the name Dorval has officially been by Trudeau for Montreal. That doesn't mean everyone has to call it the new name either. Speaking of Montreal again, besides the Montreal/Saint-Hubert Airport (YHU), there is this big white elephant of a place called Mirabel (YMX). It's got 2 12,000 ft runways that aren't parallel and don't cross either, spread apart from north to south... kind of weird.

PS
Often there's history in an airport code, but sometimes there isn't.
At least I can't see how for my local airport, Toronto Pearson Airport. The code is YYZ (or I guess CYYZ, though that's not on the luggage tags).

The name has changed twice, but the code hasn't. There's a song by Rush about it.

For that matter, it has two terminals, 1 and 3. Yes, there was a Terminal 2, but it was demolished so Terminal 1 could expand.

PS: I didn't answer your question, Mr. Hail. I recalled sometime in the 1980s or even 1990s the name Beijing being used by fellow Americans - the ones that knew anything about China - still a real mystery through the mid-1990s.

The AI tells me it was in the 1980s sometime. Maybe that's when the suck-up politicians starting using "Beijing". That name means simply "Northern Capital". I think that's due to the capital being elsewhere for a while during war with the Japs or something...

PS: Ha! First time I've lost one of my own comments in some decades!

Anyway, I feel bad that I failed that quiz, Mr. Hail. Once I learned LED was St. Petersburg, Russia, I didn't connect it with LEningraD before reading that. Now, were it LEN, I would have.

This makes sense and comports with your ideas about the airport codes containing some history. After all, the LAST time the city was St. Petersburg, there was not a whole lot of flying going on in Russia. The Americans and French, and then the British were going gangbusters already. I tried to find info on a previous smaller airfield there, but Pulkova wasn't built until 1932.

Speaking of St. Petersburgs, the one in Florida has a great claim to fame, the site of the very first commercial air service. I remembered some of this. On the first day of 1914, one Tony Jannus flew at least one passenger (I don't know) in a Benoist XIV from the water off of downtown St. Pete 23 miles over to Tampa, landing on the mouth of the Hillsborough River. This first commercial service went on for 4 months, and flew over 1,200 people. (It's not like the big bridge was there yet.

https://foawa.org/the-first-commercial-flight/

I don't think I've ever been at the big one, PIE, but I've landed at Albert Whitted (SPG), right there at downtown St. Pete, and Clearwater Exec (CLW). Tampa has also Peter O'Night field (TPF) and Tampa Exec (VDF), the latter being way east, halfway to Plant City.

Florida is flying heaven and skydive heaven.

PS: Mr. Hail, the big airport in Peking is still PEK, or "Beijing Capital International". A smaller, but still very busy, airport is Beijing Daxing, PKX. It also has international operations. I traveled one time from elsewhere in China to Peking's older reliever airport, which was NAY - Nanyuan - literally, at least to me, "South Money", but I don't know!

I took the subways to stay somewhere and then, took them again to get to the big airport PEK to go home. From my reading, that was just a few years before the PKX aiport opened up and Nanyuan decommissioned.

PS

I've also just learned there is not just a PEK airport but a PKX somewhere nearby in PRC-China's capital region.

When was the switch-over to the Bei-JING spelling again? That's a lot of leftover P's and K's in air-travel world. The Two Centuries of Humiliation continue!

(By the way, one reason Peking was a better spelling was, almost nobody gets the "Beijing" pronunication right, as most people do this "zh"-type sound for the J. The Chinese say a hard J, as in Jemima. The new romanization use of the J doesn't work for us, in many cases.)

PS

Take a look at the airport coded LED and try to figure out why it's coded as LED.

You have my
personal guarantee
that you will not
be disappointed.

PS: Which city should Trump change the name of, if he were to do this, Mr. Hail? That would make a good blog post.

Take one of those Spanish named cities maybe, San Jose becomes San Donaldo?

PS: "PEK is the code for the airport in China's capital." Yes! I've mentioned this many time when people get confused by my use of "Peking" instead of the "Beijing" that's been forced upon us. Screw that.

And, the airport at Guangzhou is coded CAN for, you guessed it, CANton, which is the whole very crowded province of Guangdong in which Guangzhou sits.

However, small airports within the US have changed codes lots. Some were unrememberable numbers with letters - there at least WERE 6,000 airports in the US last I read - but they have changed to all letters and something at least close, when they have a chance. However there aren't nearly so many signs to change, there aren't airlines involved, and they just have get with the FAA about it for the maps. Oh, and you can get out of the plane and if you can't figure out the combo lock to get into the FBO (the business for fuel/snacks, etc.), you just go ahead an pee behind the building.

PS

A big Rubicon left to cross is if Trump tries to rename an actual city after himself. If he did try that, Fox News people would line up behind it, many of them, and say towns used to change names in honor of people all the time in the 19th century and beyond.

There was, at one time, talk of creating a giant green city somewhere in the western-US desert, similar to the Saudi mega-city project, "Neom." Trump endorsed the idea, and called for a million-person capacity for the proposed brand-new US planned city.

I haven't seen any movement on the proposal all throughout 2026. It wouldn't surprise me if DJT tried to name such a city after himself.

PS

It's not just honorary renamings after an individual:

A lot of countries out there have changed actual place-names, spellings, or romanizations, generally for political reasons, between the times airports were named and three-letter coded. In every case I've seen, three-letter codes survive these kinds of renamings. I've always wondered how that can be.

The international airport coding management agency doesn't get swayed by political stunts related to name-changes, so the core of old names often remains, a silent reminded, like a statue from a century or more ago which otherwise wouldn't have gone up in one's own time but which June-2020-style mobs hadn't gotten around to tearing down. So the airport codes and a few other things like that are like a time-capsule.

A great example:

PEK is the code for the airport in China's capital.

PS: If DCA was to change for Ronald Reagan - no point to this - my "MIA" would have been for "Morning In America" Airport, haha. Alas, it's been taken by Miami, Latin America. (They should get rid of the initial "K" that's for US airports while they're at it...)

PS: "They asked Prince Harry to give his own ranking. He came up with this, from best to worst: 1.) Harry Stiles, 2.) Harry Kane, and, tied for 3.) and 4.), Harry Potter and Prince Harry."

Right. He was being modest and yet kind of humorous by putting himself on there at all. WWTHD? What Would Trump Have Done? We well know.

BTW,if I'm not mistaken, Dave Letterman's early show really was a late show too, as it started at 12:30, not a part of my normal waking hours.

PS

"Trump has a complete lack of modesty."

Prince Harry Windsor, of England, was revealed a few days ago to be more publicly modest than Trump.

During the World Cup, they were doing a late-night comedy show talking about the developments in the World Cup of that day. The host was British comedian James Corden (who for some years had a similar show in the US in the 12:30am to 1:30am slot, "the late late show").

On the final show, after the final game of the World Cup, they had on as a guest Prince Harry. It was an interesting thing to see. I'd otherwise never seen Prince Harry speaking in quite this way.

At one point, the host and co-hosts were bantering about how the England player Harry Kane should rank among a list of "greatest Harrys" in history. (They'd done this a few weeks earlier after Harry Kane had gotten in the news, maybe when his late goals eliminated the DR Congo; that's the DEMOCRATIC Republic of Congo, not Doctor Congo.)

The choices they pitched for best Harry: Harry Kane (England team captain at World Cup), Harry Potter, Harry Stiles (singer), and Prince Harry (sitting at the table of this show).

They asked Prince Harry to give his own ranking. He came up with this, from best to worst: 1.) Harry Stiles, 2.) Harry Kane, and, tied for 3.) and 4.), Harry Potter and Prince Harry.

Who know what he really thought (and it was a comedy show), but his ranking of himself at the bottom of the list of famous Harrys is an expression of that traditional Western modesty that Trump lacks totally.