Why Is Nashville Airport Code BNA? The Story Behind the Letters

Why is Nashville airport code BNA? I get asked this more than you’d think. I’ve been obsessed with airport codes since I was about twelve years old, sitting in a plastic chair at O’Hare with my dad, staring at the departure board and wondering why Chicago wasn’t CHI. That question sent me down a rabbit hole I’ve never really climbed out of. BNA is one of my favorite answers in the whole world of IATA codes, because unlike a lot of them, the story behind it involves a real person, a real war, and a renaming decision that happened decades after the original name was already gone. The short version: BNA stands for Berry Field Nashville Airport. The long version is a lot more interesting.

BNA Stands for Berry Field Nashville Airport

The B in BNA is the key to everything. It refers to Colonel Harry S. Berry, a Tennessee state administrator who was appointed by Governor Gordon Browning in the late 1930s to oversee the Works Progress Administration in Tennessee. Berry was instrumental in making the airport happen — not just in a bureaucratic rubber-stamp way, but in a roll-up-your-sleeves, fight-for-the-funding way. The airport that opened in 1937 was named Berry Field in his honor.

So BNA breaks down like this:

• B — Berry (as in Colonel Harry S. Berry)
• N — Nashville
• A — Airport

Simple, right? Almost satisfyingly literal compared to codes like ORD (Orchard Field, the old name for O’Hare) or MSY (Moisant Stock Yards, the swampy land where New Orleans’ airport was built). BNA just tells you exactly what it was called. Berry Field Nashville Airport. Three words, three letters.

Probably should have opened with this section, honestly. If you just wanted the quick answer and you found this article at 11 p.m. while waiting to book a Southwest flight, there it is. But if you want to understand why it’s still BNA today — when the airport hasn’t officially been called Berry Field since 1988 — that requires a little more digging.

The Berry Field Story

Pulled into the archives by a layover and a cheap paperback that turned out to be terrible, I once spent two hours in the Nashville airport reading everything I could find about the building around me. That’s where I first learned that BNA has a military history that most casual travelers walk right past without knowing.

Berry Field didn’t start as a commercial hub. It started as a New Deal project. Governor Browning wanted Tennessee to have a modern airport, federal money was available through the WPA, and Colonel Berry was the man who made sure Tennessee got its share. Ground was broken in 1936, and the airport officially opened in 1937. At that point, it was modest — a few runways, a small terminal, nothing like what you’d walk through today with its 30 gates and the Corsair bar that sells a $16 IPA I always tell myself I won’t buy and always buy.

Then World War II arrived and changed everything.

The Army Air Forces took over Berry Field during the war and turned it into a major military installation. At its peak, tens of thousands of military personnel moved through the facility. The base housed training operations, logistics, and transport functions critical to the war effort. This wasn’t a minor temporary arrangement — the federal government had significant infrastructure investment in the site by the time the war ended. That military heritage is part of why the airport’s footprint became large enough to eventually support the commercial growth that followed.

After the war, operations shifted back toward civilian use, though the military presence didn’t vanish immediately. The Tennessee Air National Guard maintained operations at Berry Field for decades. If you’ve flown in or out of BNA and noticed the military aircraft parked on the east side of the airfield, that’s the 118th Wing of the Tennessee Air National Guard — they’re still there, still operating out of the same general area where wartime operations once ran at full capacity.

Through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, commercial aviation at Berry Field grew steadily alongside the city of Nashville itself. New terminals were built. Jet service arrived. The country music industry brought in more passengers. By the 1980s, the airport was handling millions of travelers a year and had outgrown its original identity in almost every physical sense.

Colonel Berry’s Legacy in the Concrete

Harry Berry died in 1948, not long after the war he’d watched transform the airport bearing his name. He didn’t live to see the jet age come to his airport, or the Nashville skyline fill in, or what his WPA project eventually became. There’s something a little melancholy about that. The man got a runway built with Depression-era federal money, helped win a war’s worth of logistical battles, and then was gone before any of the real glory arrived. His name stayed on the building for another forty years after that.

Why the Code Stuck When the Name Changed

In 1988, the airport was officially renamed Nashville International Airport. Clean, modern, ambitious — exactly the kind of rebrand a growing city does when it wants to signal that it’s arrived on the national stage. Out with Berry Field. In with Nashville International.

Except the code didn’t change. It’s still BNA. Every ticket, every boarding pass, every flight tracking app on every phone. BNA.

This is where understanding how IATA codes actually work becomes essential. The International Air Transport Association assigns three-letter codes to airports worldwide. Once a code is assigned and embedded in global aviation infrastructure — reservation systems, routing databases, air traffic control communications, airline scheduling software — changing it is genuinely complicated. We’re not talking about updating a website header. Airlines run on systems that have BNA hardcoded into millions of records. Travel agencies, corporate booking platforms, global distribution systems like Amadeus and Sabre — they all know BNA. Changing that code would require a coordinated update across an enormous number of interconnected systems simultaneously.

The practical cost of changing an airport code almost never justifies the benefit. The passengers don’t care what the letters mean. The pilots and controllers communicate fine. The luggage tags print correctly. Nobody’s flight is delayed because the code commemorates a name the airport stopped using before some of the current passengers were born.

I made the mistake early in my airport code obsession of assuming that codes always matched current names. They almost never do, actually. ORD is still ORD even though nobody has called it Orchard Field since 1949. EWR is still EWR even though Newark Liberty International Airport has added “Liberty” and dropped all reference to the old East Newark Railway routing that originally inspired the E. Airport codes are historical artifacts that happen to still be functional. BNA is one of the cleaner examples of this — the code is a direct fossil of a name that lasted roughly fifty years and then retired.

How Codes Get Assigned in the First Place

Early aviation codes in the United States were often borrowed from the two-letter weather station identifiers that the National Weather Service already had in operation. When airlines needed to expand to three letters, they typically added a letter — which is why so many American airport codes look like a two-letter city abbreviation with a third letter tacked on. Nashville was NA. Berry Field Nashville Airport became BNA by putting Berry’s initial in front.

Outside the US, IATA codes follow different patterns. Canadian airports often start with Y (YYZ for Toronto, YVR for Vancouver) as a legacy of early radio beacon identifiers. International airports frequently use logical country or city abbreviations. But American codes are often historical accidents, frozen snapshots of what something was called the day someone assigned the letters.

BNA is Nashville’s frozen snapshot. It’s 1937 in three letters. A New Deal administrator, a governor’s political will, WPA funding, and a construction crew that broke ground on what would eventually become one of the busiest airports in the American Southeast — all compressed into B, N, and A.

Next time you’re at Nashville International, check your boarding pass. That little code in the upper right corner is older than the terminal you’re standing in, older than the jet age, older than almost anyone flying that day. It’s a letter from Colonel Harry S. Berry, sent forward in time by accident, arriving at your gate right on schedule.