AirportVector

GATE A–L Open location code · spec v2.1

Every place on Earth,
named from its nearest airport.

No word lists. No random letters. An AirportVector code tells you which airport, which direction and how far — before you even open a map.

Try the live map Read a code in 10 seconds
DEPARTURESLOCATION CODE--:--
5.5 km north-west of Tiruchirappalli International Airport
Near Trichy Central Bus Stand, India

01 Live map

Click anywhere — land, sea, even Antarctica. Or paste a code. Everything runs in your browser; nothing is sent to a server.

Click the map to get a code

02 Read a code in 10 seconds

A code is an airport, one letter, and two distances. That's all.

TRZ-D04200355
  1. TRZ The nearest airport — Tiruchirappalli, India.
  2. D Direction and distance band: North-West, under 100 km.
  3. 0420 420 cells West. At 10 m per cell: 4,200 m.
  4. 0355 355 cells North: 3,550 m.

Distance to the airport is √(4.2² + 3.55²) ≈ 5.5 km. Quick trick: the bigger number + half the smaller one.

The letter tells direction and distance

NESESWNW
Near < 100 kmABCD
Regional < 1,000 kmEFGH
Far < 10,000 kmIJKL

Every 4 letters = 10× further, and one more digit per axis.

Shorter code, bigger square

  • TRZ-D04031 km
  • TRZ-D042035100 m
  • TRZ-D0420035510 m
  • TRZ-D04203035541 m

Each half of a short code is the start of the longer one — trimming digits just zooms out.

03 No gaps. Anywhere.

4,133 commercial airports anchor the whole planet. The farthest any point gets from its nearest airport is about 5,150 km — deep in Antarctica.

World map coloured by distance band: green near airports, yellow regional, orange far (mostly ocean and Antarctica).
A–D near · 18% of the globe, 49% of land E–H regional · 54% / 51% I–L far · 29% / <0.1%

Human context

“NW of Trichy airport, 5 km” means something to a person. A string of random letters or three random words doesn't tell you where on Earth to start.

Exact distances

The grid is azimuthal-equidistant on the WGS84 ellipsoid, so √(X² + Y²) is the true ground distance to the airport.

Open & offline

A small anchor file and plain maths. No lookups, no accounts, no network — the demo above runs entirely in your browser.

04 Developers

Reference implementations in Python and JavaScript, tested against each other on 78,000+ cases.

Pythonairportvector.py
import airportvector as av

av.encode(10.7950461, 78.6793020)
# 'TRZ-D04200355'
av.describe("TRZ-D04200355")
# '5.5 km NW of TRZ (Tiruchirappalli International Airport)'
av.decode("TRZ-D04200355")
# (10.795052, 78.679291)
JavaScriptoavg.js
OAVG.loadRegistry(await (await fetch("/anchors.json")).json());

OAVG.encode(51.5074, -0.1278);      // "LCY-D12710024"
OAVG.describe("IPC-K104561248302"); // "2,694 km SSW of IPC (…)"
OAVG.move("TRZ-D04200355", 50, 0);  // 500 m East
GitHub repository ↗ Specification v2.1 (PDF) Download oavg.js Download anchors.json