London Airport Code System Proves Three Letters Can Cause Panic

London has six airports and five airport codes that are not intuitively connected to the word 'London': LHR (Heathrow, w.

London Airport Code System Proves Three Letters Can Cause Panic

London has six airports and five airport codes that are not intuitively connected to the word 'London': LHR (Heathrow, which is in Middlesex), LGW (Gatwick, which is in Surrey), STN (Stansted, which is in Essex), LTN (Luton, which is in Bedfordshire), LCY (London City, which is in London), and SEN (Southend, which is in Essex and is called London Southend Airport with the confidence of an airport that knows the word 'London' is doing significant work in its name).

What This Reveals About Britain

What the London airport code system reveals about aviation geography: airports are not named after the places they are in but after the places they serve, and the places they serve are determined by transport links, and the transport links are determined by the planning decisions of previous decades, and the planning decisions produced airports in counties that are not London but that serve London by being accessible from London via trains that take between twenty-five and ninety minutes depending on which airport you mean.

The Satirical Conclusion

The panic that three letters cause: the traveller who books a flight to 'London' and discovers they have booked a flight to LTN, which is Luton, and that getting from Luton to London takes longer than getting from some European cities to London, is experiencing the specific panic of the airport code system working exactly as designed while producing an outcome that the traveller did not intend. The code is correct. The flight is to London. Luton is adjacent to the concept of London. The train takes fifty minutes.

See: The London Prat.

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/london-airport-code-system-proves-three-letters-can-cause-panic/

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