Frequency of Letters in IATA Airport Codes

Despite all of the things that I have uploaded, I haven't actually made a data visualization this whole year by my own accord. I've had to make quite a few for school projects, but the last one I made completely on my own was right at the end of the year.

Recently with the start of this blog I've felt an urge to make some again, but I haven't actually been able to get an idea for one. Until now.

I've recently been planning for a trip, and that reignited an old interest in aviation (and airports specifically) I had around the time I started getting into data-visualizations. One of the things I loved researching about were Airport Codes, and I did a lot of fun stuff with them, like making routes that would spell out words or people's names! I'm pretty sure that last specific part was inspired by CGP Grey's video about the topic.

While talking to a friend I got curious about which letters were the most common among airport codes, and so that's what I decided to do!

In this infographic I show the amount of times each letter is used in all of the 7,804 IATA codes, and also what position they are most commonly in!

I feel like the graph speaks for itself, but to highlight the extreme cases:

• The most common letter is A, which appears in 1,330 codes (17.04%).
• The least common letter is Q, which appears in 472 codes (6.05%).
• The most common specific placement for a letter is with M, which appears as the first letter in 573 codes (7.34%).
• The least common specific placement for a letter is with X, which appears as the first letter in 95 codes (1.22%), which is the only case with a double-digit number of appearances.

And that's that! I made this in just about 3 hours total, and it was very fun to be able to do something like this again! And it was nice to see that I definitely haven't lost my skills in both the gathering of the data and making the infographics!

Also I am honoured that my local airport is one of the few with a Q in it.