A comprehensive reference of IATA two-letter airline designator codes mapped to airline names and countries of registration. Whether you are building a flight search interface, populating booking engine dropdowns, or processing airline ticket data, this dataset gives you the standard codes the aviation industry relies on.
Pro tip: IATA codes are not always intuitive — "AA" is American Airlines but "BA" is British Airways. Download the full list to build reliable code-to-name lookup tables instead of guessing.
Select which columns to include in your download.
About the IATA Airline Codes Dataset
The International Air Transport Association assigns unique two-letter designator codes to airlines worldwide. These codes appear on boarding passes, baggage tags, flight schedules, and reservation systems. This dataset contains active airline designators along with the full airline name and the country where each carrier is registered. The codes are maintained by IATA Resolution 762 and updated as airlines launch, merge, or cease operations.
Common Use Cases
IATA airline codes are foundational data in the travel technology ecosystem. Practical applications include:
- Flight search and booking: Map airline codes returned by GDS systems (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) to human-readable airline names for display in search results and itineraries.
- Baggage and cargo tracking: Parse airline prefix codes from air waybill numbers to identify the operating carrier in logistics and freight management systems.
- Travel expense reporting: Extract airline codes from PNR data to categorize corporate travel spend by carrier for procurement analysis and preferred-airline compliance.
- Aviation analytics: Join airline code data with route and schedule datasets to build market share reports, route coverage maps, and competitive analysis dashboards.
Column Reference
- iata_code — The two-letter IATA designator assigned to the airline (e.g. "AA" for American Airlines, "LH" for Lufthansa).
- airline — The official name of the airline as registered with IATA.
- country — The country where the airline is headquartered or registered.
IATA vs. ICAO Codes
Airlines have two different code systems. IATA codes are two letters and used commercially — they appear on tickets, airport departure boards, and booking websites. ICAO codes are three letters and used by air traffic control and flight operations. For example, American Airlines is "AA" (IATA) but "AAL" (ICAO). This dataset focuses on IATA codes because they are what most developers and business applications need. If your use case involves ATC or flight tracking, you may need ICAO codes as well.
How to Import Into a Database
Download the CSV and import it into MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite as a lookup table. Create the table with a CHAR(2) primary key on the IATA code column for fast lookups. In most applications, you will JOIN this table against booking or flight data using the two-letter code to resolve the airline name for display purposes. Subscribers can download pre-formatted SQL INSERT statements that are ready to paste directly into any SQL client.