Do you see what I see?

Most commonly, I see car license plates that remind me of VORs and airports. Many states have license plates that include trios of letters and numbers, so when I see one that looks even vaguely familiar, such as DJB 341, I think of the Dryer VOR on the 341 radial. Or maybe 34.1 DME to or from the Dryer VOR. Sometimes my desire to practice aviation math will kick in, and I might see that the reciprocal radial will be the 161. I’m not the only one with this affliction. I’ve spoken to other pilots who also suffer, and we all deal with it differently.

For example, if I see the three-letter block pop up somewhere and I can’t place a VOR, I will start trying to see if an airport will work. ORD becomes Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Sometimes, I will see something that begins with K, and that summons a churn of airport codes. KEW in my mind becomes KEWR: New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport, which most know as EWR. I passed a sign on a road not too long ago that dealt with something Municipal, which was abbreviated MUN, which when you add another M becomes MMUN—the International Civil Aviation Organizaton code for Cancun, Mexico.

IFR pilots know that every aerial fix that isn’t derived from a ground-based navaid is given a five-letter name, be it an intersection on an airway or a fix on an approach. The FAA occasionally has some fun with this. Memphis, Tennessee, has ELVIS; Kansas City has SPICY; and a lot of airports have departure procedures (DPs) or standard terminal arrivals (STARS) that have common themes. Washington, D.C., honors former members of the city’s NFL franchise, known today as the Commanders; Chicago does the same with the Bears. The need to get down to five letters creates some interesting spellings. Riggins becomes RIGNZ, Pats for the New England Patriots becomes PATSS.

Things can get really confusing when the same identifier can be found for multiple places. American Airlines Flight 965, a Boeing 757, crashed in 1995 due to common identifier issues in the flight management system. And yes, I just looked and didn’t see an airport with the code FMS. I used to fly near Georgetown, Delaware, in my younger days, and I could never figure out why the code was KGED. It turns out that KGEO is in Georgetown, Ohio, which is only a few miles from my current home field. If that isn’t bad enough, Georgetown, Kentucky, is a short flight away, but the proliferation of Georgetowns explains why the Kentucky identifier is 27K.

Tail and serial numbers can also play with my mind. I was recently in Minneapolis and saw a Cessna 172 with the tail number N5088Q. I could have sworn that I had flown that airplane way back when, so when I got home, I looked through my logbooks, and sure enough, 88Q was at one time assigned to a Cessna 152 that I used to fly a lot. My airplane has the letters PG in it, which is Papa Golf in airplane speak. It’s amazing how many Papa Golf call signs suddenly started coming through my headset. It has almost become a game between my wife and me to see who hears them first. The reverse of this might be seeing a customized tail number (or hearing one on the radio) and trying to figure out who it belongs to. JT has been used by John Travolta, JB by Jimmy Buffett. A former aviation writer with the first name Nigel built an airplane, and made the call sign N16EL. Written in block letters, it spelled his name.

Highways can do the same thing. I can’t see A1A without thinking of Victor 1 or vice versa. Both are major East Coast north/south routes.

Abbreviations are fun as well. SBY is either Standby or Salisbury-Ocean City Wicomico Regional Airport in Maryland, and 739 is a Boeing 737-900. MIL is military spec or a reminder of Millville Municipal Airport in New Jersey, which is actually MIV, but MVL is Morrisville-Stowe State Airport in Vermont. FOB is fuel on board, but FOD is both fuel over destination and foreign object debris, unless of course it is KFOD, which is Fort Dodge Regional Airport in Iowa. BNA is the code for Nashville International Airport in Tennessee, but when I was an RJ pilot, we called it “Bananaville” for obvious reasons, so now I often equate Nashville with bananas in the grocery store (or country music with bananas). In fact, I abbreviate bananas as BNA on my list when I go to the store.

Just like people on the West Coast have the habit of referring to interstates as “the,” such as “the 405,” locals sometimes speak a unique vernacular as well. In Orlando, MCO is often referred to as OIA, for Orlando International Airport, and Denver residents will say DIA, when they really mean DEN. OIA and DIA are not official tags in the United States, although OIA is a nondirectional radio beacon in South America, and DIA is a VOR in Doha, Qatar.

Phone numbers are also an easy source of entertainment. A buddy of mine has a phone number with a prefix of 737, which is convenient since that’s what he flies for a living. When I was living on Guam, several of us had 727 and 747 prefixes, and it became a running joke to ask which airplane we “owned.” The 811 number to call before digging near utilities will always remind me of N96811, a 172 that I spent hundreds of hours in, but has since been lost in a crash.

Speaking about airports, I was recently parking in Denver, the non-KDIA DIA. Our flight was pulling into gate B-52 and our next flight was leaving from B-29. We were going backward from the Vietnam War to World War II. Then we briefly got changed to gate B-17. You can’t make this stuff up.

Aviation is anywhere and everywhere you want to look. But, be warned, once you start, you can’t stop.