I was sitting in the jump seat of a 737 once — long story involving a friend who’s a captain and some very specific FAA rules about who can sit there — and noticed the flight plan paperwork didn’t say LAX anywhere. It said KLAX. Four letters. I asked about it and got a ten-minute explanation that honestly changed how I think about airport identification. Turns out, the codes passengers use and the codes pilots use are completely different systems.
What the Four Letters Actually Mean
ICAO codes — that’s International Civil Aviation Organization — follow a geographic structure that three-letter IATA codes completely lack. The first letter tells you the world region. K means contiguous United States. C is Canada. E covers Northern Europe. L is Southern Europe and North Africa. The second letter usually narrows to a specific country within that region. The last two letters identify the individual airport.
So EGLL? E is Northern Europe, G is the United Kingdom specifically, and LL is Heathrow. LFPG? L is Southern Europe, F is France, PG is Paris Charles de Gaulle. Once you learn the prefixes, you can look at any ICAO code and immediately know roughly where on the planet that airport sits. Probably should have led with this — it’s genuinely useful information that almost no casual traveler knows about.
The Regional Prefix Cheat Sheet
I keep a mental list of the big ones. K for the US is easy — KJFK, KLAX, KORD. Canada’s C prefix means Toronto Pearson is CYYZ. Mexico and Central America use M. In Europe, it splits: E for the northern countries (EHAM is Amsterdam, EDDF is Frankfurt), L for the south and Mediterranean (LEMD is Madrid, LIRF is Rome Fiumicino).
Asia is where I always have to pause. R covers Japan and both Koreas. Z is mainland China. V handles South and Southeast Asia. Australia and the Pacific use Y — which, confusingly, is also why Canadian IATA codes start with Y, because that convention leaked across systems decades ago. I mix these up sometimes, honestly. The Asian prefixes never stuck as firmly for me.
Why Pilots Actually Care About This
In the cockpit, everything runs on ICAO codes. Flight plans, weather reports — those METAR and TAF things you see on aviation weather sites — NOTAMs about airport hazards, all of it uses the four-letter version. When a pilot programs a destination into the flight management computer, they’re typing ICAO codes. Air traffic control clearances reference them too.
It’s not optional knowledge for pilots. You fly into an airport regularly, you memorize its ICAO code. Period. A friend of mine who flies regional jets says he knows maybe 200 codes by heart, and he considers that on the low end for someone with his seniority.
Switching Between the Two Systems
For US airports, converting is dead simple — just slap a K in front. LAX becomes KLAX. ORD becomes KORD. ATL becomes KATL. Done. Other countries aren’t as clean. You can’t just add a letter to LHR and get the ICAO code; you need to know it’s EGLL. Flight planning software handles the conversion automatically, but that’s what makes knowing both systems endearing to the people who bother learning — it’s a small club, and they take a weird pride in it.
