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One Typo, Wrong Continent

CGP Grey2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2022–2025
YouTube
explainer · general · evergreen · 2022–2025 on HN

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

HN people point to it as a fun summary of how messy airport codes are, especially in threads on aviation falsehoods and code collisions.

Aviation & aerospace engineeringLanguage & linguistics#airportcodes#aviation#iata#naming

3 comments from Hacker News

@Titan21892025-06 · in “Falsehoods programmers believe about aviation”

Great Summary of how messed up Airport Codes are by CGP Grey ▶ this video including (attempts at) a few in-depth reasons for why these quirks exists

Recommends View on HN
@simplyinfinity2022-12 · in “Airport Runway Names Shift with Magnetic Field”

CGP Grey did a couple of episodes on runways[0] and airport codes[1] that are just fascinating and worth the watch [0] link [1] ▶ this video

Recommends View on HN
@shagie2024-11 · in “Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code”

CGP Grey The Maddening Mess of Airport Codes! ▶ this video I'd rather deal with designing tables to properly represent names.

Cites View on HN

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