OAG Travel News

I wondered how many commercial service airports in the world had codes that went in order of the Latin alphabet (similar to the K-L-M in KLM Royal Dutch Airlines).

As it turns out there are seven airports around the world that fit my criteria, and the air service at these airports is examined in detail this week.

ABC – Albacete (Los Llanos), Spain
Albacete is situated in southeastern Spain and is served by Albacete Airport (Los Llanos Air Base).  ABC is linked with only one city – Barcelona – with nearly once-daily flights (24 times in February).  Spanish national carrier Iberia provides the service using Dash 8 aircraft.

BCD – Bacolod, Philippines
Bacolod, known as the “City of Smiles”, is served by the Bacolod-Silay City International Airport.  Two airlines provide service to two destinations nonstop.  Interestingly, the airlines provide the same number of flights to each city.  Both Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific provide twice-daily service to Cebu, and both airlines provide four-times daily service to the capital city of Manila.

DEF – Dezful, Iran
Dezful, in southwestern Iran, is served by just one airline with only one flight per week.  The weekly service to Iran’s capital of Tehran is operated with Tupelov TU-154 aircraft by Iran Air Tours, a subsidiary of Iran Air.

JKL – Kalymnos, Greece
Kalymnos Island is a part of the Dodecanese archipelago in the southeastern Aegean Sea.  Kalymnos Island National Airport is served by Olympic Airways with six-times per week service to Athens.

HIJ – Hiroshima, Japan
With nearly 50 daily flights, Hiroshima is the largest of the Alphabet Soup airports.  More than half of the flights from Hiroshima Airport are to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport – both All Nippon Airways (ANA) and Japan Airlines (JAL) provide this service; daily service is also offered on ANA to Narita, Tokyo’s second airport.  Nine other Asia/Pacific cities are served nonstop from Hiroshima – Bangkok, Thailand (Bangkok Airways), Dalian, China (Air China and China Southern), Guam (Continental), Okinawa, Japan (ANA), Sapporo, Japan (ANA and JAL), Sendai, Japan (ANA), Seoul, Korea (Asiana), Taipei, Taiwan (China Airlines) and Shanghai, China (China Eastern Airlines).

LMN – Limbang, Malaysia
Limbang is situated on the island of Borneo; Borneo includes portions of three countries – Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.  MASwings, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Malaysia Airlines, links Limbang Airport with Miri, another Malaysian city on the island of Borneo.

RST – Rochester, Minnesota
The only North American city to make the Alphabet Soup list, Rochester is situated in southeastern Minnesota.  Delta Air Lines provides more than half of the service at Rochester International Airport with flights to its hubs in nearby Minneapolis and Detroit.  American Airlines provides nonstop service to Chicago O’Hare, and Sun Country links Rochester with sunny Bullhead City, Arizona.

OAG contributor Laura Jackson was just two weeks old when she took her first flight on Piedmont Airlines.  In junior high school, she developed a business plan for her own airline.  Today she manages strategy and policy issues at one of the world's busiest airports and provides original content and aviation industry analysis for OAG.