I’ve been in South Africa the last week and I have been thinking how good, dare I say cool the Durban airport name is: “King Shaka International Airport” (pronounced Sharka) IMO it beats names like Sydney’s “Kingston Smith”, or Paris “Charles de Gaulle” no offence meant to the 2nd two gentlemen
It got me thinking that I don’t fly anywhere near as much and as far flung places as other AFFers, what is the best airport name others have come across?
LOL so bad we can't even get the name right... "Kingsford Smith", as in Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.
Doesn't matter - I don't even know if it is an official name, but nearly no one calls SYD that, especially in Australia.
Might change once Badgery's Creek opens up...
Tangential to this topic.
What are the names of Brisbane and Adelaide airports other then the city name? (BNE is not Eagle Farm).
They don't have one.
Australia... we just don't do airport names. The only examples that spring to mind are Ayres Rock Airport sometimes being called Connollan Airport, Gold Coast Airport sometimes being called Coolloongatta Airport, Sunshine Coast / Maroochydore and Ballina / Byron Bay.
This is in contrast to some countries, e.g. Philippines, where many airports are named after people and they are not afraid at all to name them fully as such in common speech. In fact, MNL or Ninoy Aquino International Airport is so commonplace that if you hopped into a taxi, you probably would be more conversant if you said, "I need to go to NAIA (pronounced 'nah-ee-ah')" rather than "Manila airport". Same goes in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi) and Argentina (Buenos Aires).
Then again, MUC is named after Franz Josef Strauss, but it is very, very rarely addressed as such. But across the same country, you have the infamous, beleaguered Berlin "Willy Brandt" Brandenburg Airport.
Many airport "names" are really just required to differentiate them from other airports serving the same city or area, and are typically taken from the area name they are situated in, e.g. Tokyo Narita vs Tokyo Haneda, or Seoul Incheon vs Seoul Gimpo. Two big exceptions that come to mind are New York (Newark, La Guardia and John F Kennedy) and Bangkok (Don Meuang and Suvarnabhumi).
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