3 letter Airport Codes : The Ultimate Guide ( 2022 )

What are the 3 letter airport codes ?

The world airport codes are abbreviated to “three letter location code“, which is formulated by the International Air Transport Association (IATA).

IATA supports aviation with global standards for airline safety, security, efficiency and sustainability.

And to do achieve that goal,  IATA has developed a unified code for countries, cities, airports and airlines in the world.

In IATA code system, normally three letters are used to represent a airport name.

So that’s how “3 letter airport codes” or “three letter location code” comes.

Where can 3 letter airport codes be used ?

As a very important part of international shipping abbreviation,

the 3 letter code is widely used in international air transport since it is a awesome way to speed up the whole shipping process.

Cargo Labels

You can find cargo label with three letter airport codes put on the every box.

This job is requested by airline and carried out by forwarder.

The idea is to facilitate the airport cargo station operators to sort and handle the cargo.

The bar code can be scanned and airway bill information uploaded to airline’s system when booking.

Later you can find the corresponding same cargo information when tracking status online.

Airway Bills

Airport codes are also listed on AWB, the most important documentation for air shipping.

See the real-time air waybill sample : HKG or DME are given to express the POL ( Hongkong ) and POD ( Moscow )

Surely, the POL and POD airport code are the same as the cargo labels as above.

Othersise, cargo is wrongly shipped.

Status Tracking

For most airline compaines, they provide both full airport name /city name and corresponding 3 letter airport codes in their query system.

Next time, when you search the flight status online,

Instead of input a long city name , you can just input its code if you remember.

For example,

when you wrongly spell or forget how to spell “San Francisco”,you can just input ” SFO”.

Pretty cool, isn’t it ?

List of of freight airport codes

According to the search locations code data from IATA, there are more than 9088 codes.

So you need to learn all ? Definitely Not.

There are 3 reasons :

1. Airports can be divided into military airport, civil airport and even private airport based on the purpose. Most of which you need to consider is civil airport.
2. For international trade importers, usually you only need to care about the major freight customs airport which standard for the “International Airport” with customs and other regulatory agencies. You don’t need to care minor airports, which means service is unavailable. No routes, No flights.
3. Those three letter location codes include city codes and airport codes. Some are the same, and some cities don’t have airports.

So in short, only less than 3 hundred airports common are common used in international shipping.

And here is FreightPaul featured freight airport code system.