Canadian Airport Identifiers

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mciupa

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A discussion was brought up about how to display airports and their identifiers. The consensus is to follow the three letter IATA (e.g.YYC) instead of four letter ICAO (CYYC)

so.. instead of CYYC Calgary International Airport it will be..

Calgary International Airport - YYC

I'm going to sweep through the provinces and make sure that we are in keeping with the decision and hope I don't orphan any WIKI pages in the wake.
 

mciupa

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I'm going to sweep through the provinces and make sure that we are in keeping with the decision and hope I don't orphan any WIKI pages in the wake.

I've done all but those in BC,NS,NB,PEI,NL which I don't have DB permissions for.
 

hfxChris

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Nothing like change for the sake of change.. this will orphan existing wiki pages by the way.

Will the FIR/ACC pages be renamed as well?
 

Jay911

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I respectfully believe that the smaller airports i.e. CEN3, CNU8, etc., should be left with the preceding "C"; if you look at Wikipedia, those are not IATA identifiers but rather Transport Canada IDs. Those airports have no IATA IDs.
 

Deziel0495

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Made the changes to PEI, however for some reason I am unable to change Moncton.
 

mciupa

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Nothing like change for the sake of change.. this will orphan existing wiki pages by the way.

Will the FIR/ACC pages be renamed as well?

Let me know which Wiki pages had articles orphaned and I can redirect them to restore the pages.
 

mciupa

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I respectfully believe that the smaller airports i.e. CEN3, CNU8, etc., should be left with the preceding "C"; if you look at Wikipedia, those are not IATA identifiers but rather Transport Canada IDs. Those airports have no IATA IDs.

Good point. :)

I've restored them to the smaller airfields.
 

QDP2012

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Consistent format please

Good evening all,

For consistency, please seriously consider following the same format that is used in the US section of the RRDB, which is:


Airport Name (FAA) County (ST)


where FAA is the FAA callsign, and ST is the State abbreviation.

Please note that the callsign is surrounded by parentheses, not preceded by a hyphen.

In the specific example mentioned in earlier posts, the result would be:


Calgary International Airport (YYC) Calgary County (AB)‎


Maintaining such consistency in the DB also helps in the Wiki with how templates are designed, and how page-names are kept consistently formatted.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Best Regards,
 

novascotian

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I am not commenting on the change but rather on the strange state of airport identifiers in Canada. I mean in addition to the fact that Canada is I think the only country that restricted itself to use IATA codes starting with Y or a few X's. Everybody else gets to choose three letters that make some sense or as close to sense as possible. Why on earth Toronto has to be YYZ instead of TOR or something along that line is beyond me. I wrote a couple of years ago to Transport Canada about this and some other issues and got a very nice reply that said no one now knew why Canada had done this long ago.

Also it was mentioned above that the small Canadian airports don't have 4 letter ICAO codes and instead have those three letter and 1 number local identifiers. This is true but there are lots of exceptions. This is another area where Canada is in disarray. There are quite a few miniscule airfields in Canada that have next to no traffic that have four letter ICAO codes. Examples are Fairmont Hot Springs CYCZ, Eureka CYEU, Cowley CYYM. Then there are bigger and busier smallish airports that do have scheduled air services and other facilities that still have the local identifier and because they do have scheduled service have a three letter IATA code. An example is Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island... it is CAT4 but for IATA it is XQU.

Getting back to the ICAO four letter codes we often think of Canadian ones always being CYxx but there are a few that are not. Most of the exceptions are CZxx (such as Masset BC . CZMT) but I am sure I have seen one or two that are C something else. Go figure why they couldn't give Masset and the others a CYxx ident, unless of course they are all gone.

Sorry for the diversion but might be interesting sidelight in this thread.
 
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