Why do Canada airports start with Y?

As air travel became common, Canadian airports began to use 3 and now 4-letter codes, typically begin with the letter “C”. It is also thought that the reason the letter Y is used for all (or most) Canadian airports, is that the letter “Y” indicated there was a weather reporting station at the airport or close by.



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If the airport had a weather station, authorities added a Y to the front of the code, meaning Yes to indicate it had a weather station or some other letter to indicate it did not.

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(C) YYZ ? Toronto Pearson International Airport As for the 'YZ' part, that dates all the way back to the Morse Code railway stations along the Canadian National Railway, which had two-letter identifiers. The code for the station in Malton, Ontario, was YZ, which is where Pearson sits today?hence YYZ.

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Most large airports in Canada have codes that begin with the letter Y, although not all Y codes are Canadian (for example, YUM for Yuma, Arizona, and YNT for Yantai, China), and not all Canadian airports start with the letter Y (for example ZBF for Bathurst, New Brunswick).

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  • Yakutia Airlines ?(R3)
  • Yamal Airlines ?(YC)
  • Yan Air ?(YE)
  • Yangon Airways ?(YH)
  • Yemenia - Yemen Airways ?(IY)
  • Yeti Airlines ?(YT)
  • Yunnan Hong Tu Airlines ?(A6)


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Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport remains the busiest airport in the world with 5.2 million seats in September 2023. The composition of the Global Top 10 Busiest Airports is also the same as last month but there are a few changes to the rankings.

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When Canada started assigning three letter codes to airports, very few foreign airports began with “Y”, so Canada put a “Y” in front of each nearby train station code to create the airport code and to differentiate it from U.S. airports.

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