airline codes are boring. Or so it seems at first. BA is British Airways, AA is American Airlines and so on. Others are random. IATA will assign available codes to airlines as needed and it is not necessarily a creative process. JetBlue getting B6 is one example. But sometimes there’s a lot more to them. Some airlines request particular codes because they want something more significant or more memorable. Others inherit codes from predecessor airlines. The result is a handful of airlines whose airline codes are fairly fascinating. Some have even spawned wild origin theories and urban legends.

Every airline carries a handful of unique identifiers alongside its customer-facing name. Each has both an IATA code (the two-digit codes we’re talking about) and an ICAO code (which has three digits). That’s in addition to the call signs used by air traffic control, which can get pretty interesting as we recently discussed here. But in the list below we’ll focus just on that two-digit IATA code, and some of its most intriguing examples.