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Just curious considering Heathrow and all others are either registered or licensed aerodromes, why we call it an airport?
😂
Just a mad thought of the day……
Answers on the back of a postcard please (if you are old enough to remember that phrase)
Airport, noun: a complex of runways and buildings for the take-off, landing, and maintenance of civil aircraft, with facilities for passengers.
Aerodrome, noun: a small airport or airfield.
Try finding a road sign that gives directions to Heathrow Aerodrome, or indeed any other significant facility in the world offering passenger flights. Perhaps the question should be Why does the licence refer to an aerodrome?
For one, all of them trade as airports.
An aerodrome was historically considered to be relatively small but it is still the all encompassing word use in the international and UK licensing legislation. The aerodrome rooted word is still the principal word used in other languages such a modern Greek – αεροδρόμιο.
It’s not dissimilar to major companies that operate under some simple acronym but whose legal name is something older and more complicated.
Heathrow was still fairly small when originally opened and still operates on a tiny area compared to most major international airports.
In the UK Air Pilot documents issued by NATS, the term used is Aerodromes (AD). My understanding is that the infrastructure that is used to get aircraft from gate to the air and back again is an aerodrome irrespective of size. The terminals, shops, customs and immigration etc make the whole thing an airport. Apologies for the poor grammar, I’m typing on my phone without my specs on.
I’m typing on my phone without my specs on.
Hope you safely parked your aircraft clear of the runway first 🙂
I once once told the following:
Airfield – all aircraft like to take-off and land into wind, so the early “flying fields” were literally that: a big field where you could take-off and land in any direction. St Micheals near Blackpool is like that. The typical wartime three-runway pattern was said to have been influenced by the construction of three runways at Stornoway in the laste 1930s so as to give much of the “into wind” advantage of a “field”, but not disturb the golf course!
Airstrip – a single runway marked out out as a “strip” on some ground.
Airport – like a port for ships, so passengers and cargo.
Aerodrome – an all emcompasing word.
ps Langley, the Smithsonian Institution Secretary, designed an unsuccessful flying machine in the late 1890s – and called it an “Aerodrome”!
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