The reason Lublin's IATA code is so prominently exposed is because the word "luz" in Polish means - among others - the state of being relaxed, chilled out. Just a bit of marketing on the city's part.
Many airports around the world have a large signboard.
(And before you ask why not, try to think of some answers yourself first. I can come up with a few drawbacks, though I'm nowhere close to a subject expert.)
I guess it's just a "list of databases that was useful/fun to someone, at some point". Harder to "just get it from the internet" back in the 80s.
Its inclusion in 4.4BSD seems a mystery though. No other files on the 4.4BSD distribution seem to reference it. The atc(6) game involves airports, but it doesn't seem to actually open this file, both in 4.4BSD and in OpenBSD.
The previous release, 4.3BSD-Tahoe, did not have /usr/share
.. also: https://www.openbsd.org/events.html
It's just a bit of culture, don't worry about it so much.
Alternatives are to scrape some other website (who presumably paid IATA for the data) or Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_airports_by_IATA_and_...) which may or may not be more complete/accurate than OpenBSD's own crowdsourced list.
> Once again, the more astute reader will not have missed the fact that the rules do not stipulate any flying requirements. Neither did henning@, who not long after airport.7 was committed, added an entry for XFW, (the Airbus factory) which he had visited but not flown from.
Fair enough - he wrote the requirement, after all.
However, the Caveat in the man page seems to contradict this, and indicates that you do have to fly in:
> There are also railway stations with IATA codes. These may not be listed, except if someone landed there by plane and survived to update the file.
This says nothing about rail stations. For a rail station to be added, you must land on it. Presumably, taking off from there does not count.
This is an attempt at humor, because railway stations are not airports.
Such locations, which can also be bus stations and ferry ports, are known as "intermodal locations".
TL;DR its for ticketing purposes to enable flight and rail/bus/ferry legs to be issued on the same ticket.
Or at least that's the theory. To be honest its probably going be extinct in due course, given the complexities of integrating the airline world with the modern private railways etc. In most cases its just easier and more sensible to ticket seperateley. Plus some of the quaint old-fashioned things such as being able to check-through bags are becoming few and far between due to security and other aspects (e.g. disappearance of station porters and baggage cars).
Because you could (still can?) book a trip that way.
Just like if you try to fly from Boise to Tokyo, you'll get a ticket set from BOI → SFO → NRT.
You could book a trip from ORD → PHL → whatever the code is for Penn Station in New York.
I don't think it's done that much anymore, but it used to be pretty common.
There are ~2,000 entries vs ~11,000 assigned IATA airport codes
My city has two airports which are like 50 km apart. One of them is for military only.
It shows the regular passenger airport IATA code mapped to the military airport name.
I wonder if I can correct it. I'm not a BSD developer at all.
It sounds like a severe enough accusation that there should be some corroborating evidence.
