Maddening mess? Come on, this is silly nitpicking. Airport codes are as clean an logical as it gets with century-old international standards. In fact, most of "maddening mess" in the video can be essentially ignored, which author basically admits by stating closer to the end that these are used by different organizations for different purposes. It is just that story is being told backwards and in a snarky voice for dramatic effect, otherwise it would become clear that IATA codes are pretty much the most natural and logical thing in the world, which would rob author of a passable video topic. There is no real pressure to use ICAO codes instead of IATA codes, and the switch would be quite complicated because of all the legacy in GDS systems, not to mention organizational effort.
From the top of my head, I can come up with only one reasonably annoying thing about IATA airport codes, which is much less than most other legacy standards. While EWR can be used both as a city code and as an airport code, according to every airline in the world airport EWR belonged to the city NYC until this October (because it's "New York metropolitan area", despite being in a different state). This is no longer true, but there still are a couple of other peculiar cases like that in other countries. This is important, because airlines have different rules for fares, exchange rules and stuff for airports in the same city and different cities (like there will be different fares for round-trips and non-round-trips, and the definition of round-trip obviously depends on different airports being in the same city or not).
Runway numbering in one HN comment: it's the magnetic heading of the runway, minus the last digit. If more than one with the same heading, add L or R (for left/right) accordingly.
If more than one even with L/R markings, add 1 to the heading (or maybe take 1, not sure).
>It is just that story is being told backwards and in a snarky voice for dramatic effect, otherwise it would become clear that IATA codes are pretty much the most natural and logical thing in the world, which would rob author of a passable video topic.
I think most travelers, including myself until I started working on this project, have never heard of IATA and only know the ICAO codes -- which do seem like a real mess. It's weird to find out then when you look into them that a much better system exists, but it's not the one branded on the outside of all the airports!
First off, you are obviously confusing IATA and ICAO airport codes: ICAO are the 4-letter ones. Second, I do not know why anybody would consider IATA codes a mess. These are just some arbitrary IDs that appeared one by one since some pre-historic times, are insanely informationally dense (just 3 letters, and I cannot remember from the top of my head the exact number, but there are definitely more than 3000 of IATA airport codes) and are very hard to re-assign or organize because of how global and distributed the system is. If anything you should be happy and astonished they resemble city-names in any way at all. Personally, I always found this pretty incredible, that hundreds of small cities with long (and often similar) names manage to have pronounceable and kinda "intuitive" 3-letter codes assigned. They could've been just numbers for that matter (it's not like you have to know them if you don't work in travel — any ticket has city names printed on it nowadays).
From the top of my head, I can come up with only one reasonably annoying thing about IATA airport codes, which is much less than most other legacy standards. While EWR can be used both as a city code and as an airport code, according to every airline in the world airport EWR belonged to the city NYC until this October (because it's "New York metropolitan area", despite being in a different state). This is no longer true, but there still are a couple of other peculiar cases like that in other countries. This is important, because airlines have different rules for fares, exchange rules and stuff for airports in the same city and different cities (like there will be different fares for round-trips and non-round-trips, and the definition of round-trip obviously depends on different airports being in the same city or not).