ICAO codes grinding a good story to a halt.

[stratobee]

I want to preface this by saying that I've myself been guilty of this many times, so I'm just as much telling myself:

Whenever there's a trip report, story, airplane sighting, hangar find, aircraft spotting in any thread we always reference ICAO codes for the airport/s involved. Why? Does anyone know what the h**l you're talking about unless you're based at that very same airport? It just grinds everything to a halt and makes me lose the will to live when I read that. Now, I have to go find whatever that airport is out of the 40.000 other ones in the continental US, then figure out where and in what state it is and if this has any relevance to me or if it's of any interest. How hard is it to write out the name of the airport? 5 more letters?

There isn't an abbreviation yet discovered that hasn't been adopted by a pilot. This madness must stop. Don't ruin a nice cross country story (see what I did there? I didn't use XC, although it was tempting) by starting with "It was a beautiful day so I decided to go for a flight from home airport KOCK, then via KUGH for lunch with my buddy and then to KILL"….:mad2:

 

[Jim Logajan]

Agree with the sentiment and I try to provide state and city to give better geographic context that doesn't require extra work of the reader. The harder I make a reader have to work to understand what I'm writing, the less likely they will care to continue reading. Defeats the whole point of writing posts.

Also, some acronyms are nearly impossible to figure out because they match some common word or name; such as IRAN. Good luck figuring that one out using keyword searches.

(My understanding is it means Inspect, Repair As Needed (or Necessary.))