I have become so accustomed to the flood of pertinent information in response to questions on this forum that I did not think it possible to pose a question about the aviation world which would leave the membership without an answer, but I think I might have hit on such a question here.
When I posed this question, admittedly of no significance other than curiosity, I thought that many would instantly provide the answer. It’s a bit like why does the country name not appear on British postage stamps, and why dot com is not followed by dot us in American web addresses.
Thanks Serfty for the trouble you went to in hunting down the links to other forums where this issue of Canadian airports had been discussed. I followed them all and read all the submissions, but as you say, none of them really get to the meat of the question. They are more a grab-bag of nonsense and conjecture, nothing that you would call a concise, authoritative answer. Not that the forums were useless: I did learn that there were exceptions to the rules that (1) all Canadian airport codes commence with Y, and (2) that Canadian airports have an exclusive hold on Y as an initial letter.
So I decided to do a little research myself.
Exceptions Type 1. These are far more numerous than I had suspected. There are 547 airports in Canada, of which 444 (81%) have an initial Y, and 103 (19%) with some other letter. But in the vast majority of those 103 the initial letter is X or Z. Only a handful have a non-X, Y, Z initial. [As a personal aside I must admit that I should have known this only too well. I approved the construction plans of one of those exceptions, DVK (which sits way out in the middle of the tundra), and I flew in and out of it many times. But I had never realised until now what its designator was.] However, when I examined the list of those 103, I noticed that almost without exception they are landing strips in remote regions or in very small communities which most Canadians would never have heard of. One might quibble about inclusion on the ‘remote and small’ list of ZBF - Bathurst, New Brunswick, population 13000 – and CXH Coal Harbour BC, which is right beside downtown Vancouver!! Actually, it is the portion of Burrard Inlet reserved for sea plane movements.
Exceptions Type 2 . One of the correspondents to whom Serfty has pointed has informed us that Yakima Washington is YKM. In fact I have discovered that there are 39 other such non-Canadian airports with an initial Y (and three of them are here in Australia.) There are 484 airports in the world starting with Y, of which 444 are in Canada and the other 40 are scattered around the world. As far as I could tell, the 40 are all small remote places, with the exceptions of YKM Yakima (population 82,000) and YNG Youngstown Ohio (population 83,000). By the way, the Australian trio are YLG (Yalgoo in central WA), YNN (Yandi, in the Pilbara region of WA) and YUE (Yuendumu, in the middle of the Northern Territory).
In Conclusion, I think it is fair to say that despite all the exceptions, someone, somewhere, is making a concerted attempt to reserve as many of the 626 (26 squared, for the mathematically minded) possible Y combinations for the significant airports of Canada and to deny their use to significant airports elsewhere. Clearly this game has been played (or perhaps I should say this policy has been pursued) for a long time, and continues to be. But by whom, and why, and why Canada alone and why Y? As docjames has reminded us IATA is based in Montreal, so one suspects some leverage by Canadian authorities. But why?
