BIAR - BGKK
Another big mass of water to cross, this time from Iceland to the east coast of Greenland.
Because of the flightsim bug affecting Keflavik (the game crashes if you spawn there), I set BIAR (Akureyri Airport) as my departure airport.
Kulusuk (BGKK) is my entry point into Greenland, and my first flight leg outside of Europe. Ok, Greenland belongs to Denmark and that kind of still makes it Europe. But to me this is the mid point in crossing the Atlantic and I’m now closer to North America than I am to continental Europe.
I’m also super curious to see how the landscape of Greenland looks like in the Sim.
If you haven’t noticed already, I start all my blog posts with my departure-arrival airport codes. These, however, are not the codes known to most passengers. You might be more familiar with the 3-letter airport codes, such as JFK (for New York John F. Kennedey), or LHR (for London Heathrow) and so on. These 3-letter codes are the IATA (International Air Transport Association) airport unique identifiers. While these codes are commonplace for passengers, pilots utilise the 4-letter ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) codes. For example, JFK is KJFK, LHR is EGLL.
Why are there 2 codes? IATA is a trade organisation, and they presumably created these easier 3-letter codes to make passenger’s life simpler. For example, the IATA code for Frankfurt is “FRA”, whereas the equivalent ICAO code for the same airport is “EDDF”. In terms of ticketing, itinerary descriptions and so on, FRA is certainly more intuitive for the passenger than EDDF.
For aeronautical purposes though, ICAO codes are the name of the game and that’s why I will exclusively use these codes in my blog.