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One Typo, Wrong Continent

CGP Grey2 HN recommenders · 2022–2025
11.6M views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2022-12-02

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

HN people point to it as a fun summary of how messy airport codes are, especially in threads on aviation falsehoods and code collisions.

Aviation & aerospace engineeringLanguage & linguistics

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3 comments from Hacker News

@simplyinfinity2022 · in “Airport Runway Names Shift with Magnetic Field”

CGP Grey did a couple of episodes on runways[0] and airport codes[1] that are just fascinating and worth the watch [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

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@shagie2024 · in “Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code”

CGP Grey The Maddening Mess of Airport Codes! [VIDEO] I'd rather deal with designing tables to properly represent names.

CitesView on HN
@Titan21892025 · in “Falsehoods programmers believe about aviation”

Great Summary of how messed up Airport Codes are by CGP Grey [VIDEO] including (attempts at) a few in-depth reasons for why these quirks exists

RecommendsView on HN