Quoth Martin Smoot on Mon, Feb 12, 2001:
This is not like the commercial airports around the world where the 3 letter designation has to be unique so your luggage does not get lost (or maybe that is why it does get lost!).
Airports, BTW, have not only unique abbreviations, but also generalized geographical abbreviations which allow you to get a ticket to, say, Paris without specifying an airport. When I went from LON to TYO, I actually went from LHR to NRT. HTH. With timezones it's different. You try to go to IST (Israel), you arrive to IST (India), and your baggage waits for you in IST (Ireland). And I don't see a way to change it without getting out of sync with governments. While I don't think Israel has official English TZ abbreviations, governments in English speaking countries will not change TZ names. Vadik. -- XVII: Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics, i.e., it always increases. -- Norman Augustine