Airports

Every airport you've flown through

Frequent flyers keep lists, and airports are the natural one: three-letter codes, a clear definition of "been there," and a lifetime of connections to remember. This map covers the world's major commercial airports — 1,150 of them, every field classed as a large airport with scheduled service — by IATA code, grouped by continent. Layovers count. If you walked the concourse at DOH on the way to somewhere else, that's a tick.

The data is from OurAirports, a public-domain database maintained by volunteers, and the codes are the ones on your luggage tags. A few are famous for not matching their city — ORD for Chicago O'Hare (Orchard Field), MCO for Orlando (McCoy Air Force Base), YYZ for Toronto, and every Canadian airport's inexplicable leading Y. Most are obvious once you know the city.

Collecting codes

Hub airports pile up fast. A few years of domestic US travel will get you ATL, DFW, DEN, ORD, and the coastal gateways; a couple of long-haul trips add LHR, CDG, FRA, DXB, SIN, HND. The long tail is where the list gets interesting: regional airports in countries you've only visited once, the island strips of the Caribbean and Pacific, and the secondary cities you'd never have flown to on purpose. Looking at the map tends to reveal that you've flown through a lot of places you've never actually seen.

Zoom in to separate the clusters — the New York area has three large airports within 30 miles, London six. Click an airport badge or its pin to mark it, again for want-to-fly-to. The world capitals and countries maps are the obvious companions.

What counts as a major airport

The line here is OurAirports' "large airport" classification, which roughly means a long runway, commercial scheduled service, and significant traffic — the hubs and the bigger regional fields rather than every strip with a weekly flight. It leaves out some airports travelers use a lot (a few ski-town and island fields are classed medium), and includes a few big runways in unlikely places. It's a reasonable compromise for a checklist: broad enough to cover almost any flight you'll take, small enough to fit in a badge grid. If you fly through a field that isn't here, it probably belongs in the 2,000-odd medium-sized ones we've left out for now.