Airport Code Lookup

Two separate systems for naming the same airports. IATA codes are three letters and are what a ticket, a boarding pass and a baggage tag carry: FRA, JFK, LHR.

ICAO codes are four letters and are what flight plans, air traffic control and aviation weather use. They are regional: EDDF begins with E for northern Europe and D for Germany, KJFK with K for the contiguous United States.

An airport can have both, one, or neither. Small airfields often have only an ICAO code, and many have neither.

• A code, in either system: FRA or EDDF. The answer says which one it was.
• A name or a town: Frankfurt, Heathrow. Airports with scheduled flights come first.
• A coordinate pair, latitude first: 50.0267, 8.5584. The nearest airports come back with the distance to each.
• Two codes for a route: FRA-JFK, FRA JFK or FRA to JFK.
• The dice looks up a random example.

A route gives the great circle distance, the shortest path over a sphere, in kilometres, nautical miles and statute miles. Nautical miles are there because that is the unit a flight is planned in.

The bearing is the initial one, the direction to set off in. On a great circle the direction changes along the way, so a compass at the far end reads something else. Frankfurt to New York starts out at 294 degrees and arrives heading roughly south of west.

This is the distance through the air between two points on the ground, not the distance a particular flight covers.

• No flights, no schedules, no fares. This names airports and measures the ground between them.
• No airline codes. LH is an airline, not an airport, and is not in here.
• No metropolitan codes. LON and NYC stand for every airport of a city and are a separate IATA list this data does not carry.
• Closed airfields keep no code, so a code cannot lead to one. A coordinate search leaves them out.
• Runways, frequencies and navaids exist in the source but are not held here.