San Francisco International Airport (SFO): Why is San Francisco International Airport abbreviated as SFO?
Most airports in the US have a three-letter International Air Transport Association (IATA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAT…) code, which is an identifier used to refer to the airport in online booking and consumer-facing operations. These codes don’t often end in I (for International) or A (for Airport) because most codes would be entitled to end that way and it would leave us fewer codes to use [see below for some exceptions]. Instead, a system of abbreviations similar to postal abbreviations for US states has been developed, where the final letter of a name can be used in its abbreviation. So I suspect the O in SFO comes from the final letter of ‘San Francisco’. The pages linked to below refer to many examples where letters throughout the airport name (not necessarily letters near the beginnings of words) are used in the abbreviation. One example is EWR for Newark. Nevertheless, there are exceptions to the rule of “no I’s or A’s to mean the obvious things”. The original code for D
A very simple way to decifer the airport codes, is you’d need to know the names of many of them to get it. In Canada all airport codes start with Y and have only a coincidental relevance to the city they serve. YYC – Calgary, YVR – Vancouver, YYZ – Toronto… The rest of the world has a seemingly more logical approach, though, as some posters noted with many codes taken and can’t be repeated, some make more sense than others. Also as city names change, the codes won’t, for ease of everything. See BOM – Mumbai (formerly Bombay), SGN – Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Many make sense if you give it a quick thought, SFO is a good example, LAX another, AMS…take your best shot. At the end of the day there’s no perfect answer beyond the fact that everytime an airport is opened it needs a 3 letter code, as more open we run out of options, some make sense, BOS – Boston some don’t TXL – Berlin Tegel.
