#iata

6 articles tagged #iata.

The three-letter code LHR and the four-letter code EGLL side by side, both pointing to London Heathrow, on an Active Flights blog card.

Aviation27 Oct 20266 min read

IATA vs ICAO airport codes: why Heathrow is LHR and EGLL

IATA vs ICAO airport codes explained: why airports have a three-letter and a four-letter code, who assigns each, where they're used, and why LAX has an X.

A grid of aircraft seats with most of them lit up and 85.1% set large beside it, on an Active Flights blog card.

Aviation27 Oct 20266 min read

What Is Airline Load Factor? Why Planes Are So Full Now

Airline load factor is the share of seats an airline fills. How it's calculated, why it hit a record 83.6% in 2025, and what a full plane doesn't tell you.

A chart showing demand dipping while load factor holds at a record, with regional divergence bars, on an Active Flights blog card.

Industry & Markets3 Jul 20262 min read

Softer demand, fuller planes: reading IATA's mid-2026 numbers

In May 2026 global air travel demand actually fell year-on-year — yet load factors hit a record for the month. That apparent contradiction says a lot about how tight, and how regional, the 2026 network has become.

Aircraft type codes shown in both IATA three-character and ICAO four-character forms mapping to the same aircraft, on an Active Flights blog card.

SSIM & Schedules26 May 20262 min read

Reading aircraft type codes: IATA vs ICAO in the schedule

The 'equipment' field in a schedule is a short code for an aircraft type — and there are two competing code systems for it. Knowing which is which, and mapping between them, is a small skill that prevents big mistakes.

Schedule-change action-code chips — NEW, CNL, TIM, EQT — flowing from a schedule to downstream systems, on an Active Flights blog card.

SSIM & Schedules18 Dec 20253 min read

SSM and ASM: how schedule changes actually travel

A schedule is published once, then changed constantly. SSM and ASM are the IATA messages that carry those changes — bulk and ad-hoc — with action codes like NEW, CNL, TIM and EQT. Here's how they work.

A raw fixed-width SSIM record line decoding into labelled structured fields, on an Active Flights blog card.

SSIM & Schedules12 Nov 20254 min read

What is IATA SSIM? A plain-English guide to the format that runs airline schedules

SSIM is how the airline industry exchanges its schedules — a fixed-width, 200-byte text format that's deceptively simple and genuinely hard to get right. Here's what it is and why it matters.