Airport Identifiers

bc2209

bc2209

Well-Known Member
Been searching around as to why some airports in the US start with E, P, A, and of course K.

My guess would be possibly who owns or maintains the airport but so far I've come up with nothing.
 
K is the ICAO designated prefix, apart from Alaska, Hawaii with P.

I'm not sure why some are e.g. E25 vs. KWKB, but generally they are uncontrolled. KPAN used to be E61.
 
863px-ICAO_FirstLetter.svg.png
 
Yeah I guess I was more specifically talking about the small non-towered fields such as A39, E25, P08...etc.
 
My only guess is they are non ICAO/IATA - I see Payson has an IATA code. Not sure why.
 
There are far too many tiny little airstrips to give them all 3 alpha characters, therefore they get alphanumeric designations. Usually the letter corresponds with the state it is in. On alpha designated airports usually it is associated with the town it is in/near (as opposed to the name of the airport)
 
Here in the U.S. for smaller, non-towered airports such as E38 (Alpine-Casparis Municipal Airport, Alpine, TX) and E35 (Fabens Airport, El Paso, TX) the "E" meant that those airports fell under airspace controlled by the now defunct El Paso Center. So, at least in those examples, it's an old legacy designation. Under ICAO, those airports would be KE38 and KE35 respectively.
 
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I've always wondered the same thing.

Corona CA was designated with a letter and two numbers (Can't remember what it was). One day it was changed to KAJO. Why? Nothing changed at the airport. How does KAJO match with anything in the surrounding area?
 
Don't know about the CA designation, but here locally TA50 (Cielo Dorado Estates near Santa Teresa, NM) was recently changed to NM05. I assume the TA50 designation had something to do with the field being inside the approach control airspace of a Texas facility — El Paso Tower/TRACON — and that it was changed to NM05 because it's physically located in the state of New Mexico. But that's just a guess.
 
I'm really not sure about the exact answer to your question, but you have to fill out a form and pay some money to get an IATA or ICAO code, so a lot of smaller airports just only fill out the form for an FAA LID. Most of the letters are already spoken for, so you'll get a mixed letter/number combination if you built an airport today and applied for an LID.
 
Not an airport, but OTITI is a fun intersection to as the Mexicans for.
 
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