Airport Trivia
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95 free Airport trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
43 free Airport trivia questions with answers. Airports are where most travel stories begin, and this quiz covers the ones worth talking about. There are the records: Atlanta's decades as the busiest, Dubai for international traffic, Denver's enormous acreage, Changi's 40-metre indoor waterfall, Tibet's 5,500-metre runway and the 1.7-mile hop between two Orkney islands. Then the codes and their odd origins (Orchard Field, McCoy Air Force Base, the X added to LA, the YYZ that became a Rush song), the name changes at Idlewild and London Airport, and the dangerous ones: Kai Tak's apartment-block approach, Lukla's 11.7 percent slope, Barra's tidal beach, Gibraltar's road across the runway, St. Maarten's beach flyovers and Bhutan's handful of certified pilots. Plus airport history: College Park and Wilbur Wright, Croydon's first control tower, the Berlin Airlift, Shannon's first duty-free shop, the jet bridge inventor, and the refugee who lived 18 years in Charles de Gaulle. Easy questions suit anyone with a boarding pass; harder ones will test frequent flyers and avgeeks. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the airports, and the source line appears under each question after you answer.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which airport was the world's busiest by passengers every year from 1998 through 2019?
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson is named after two former Atlanta mayors, William Hartsfield and Maynard Jackson; only 2020's travel restrictions broke its run.
Q 02Which airport was the world's busiest by passengers on non-domestic routes in 2024?
Dubai (DXB)
Dubai International (DXB) handled a record 92.3 million passengers in 2024, all on international routes, making it the world's busiest airport for non-domestic traffic.
Q 03Chicago O'Hare's code ORD comes from the airport's earlier name; what was it?
Orchard Field
ORD comes from Orchard Field, the airport's original name; it was renamed in 1949 for Medal of Honor recipient Edward 'Butch' O'Hare, but the code never changed.
Q 04Orlando's code MCO comes from what?
McCoy Air Force Base
MCO stands for McCoy Air Force Base, the Strategic Air Command base that shared the site until it closed in 1975; the civilian airport kept the code.
Q 05Which Canadian rock band recorded an instrumental named after Toronto Pearson's code, YYZ?
Rush
Rush, the Toronto trio of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, released the instrumental 'YYZ' on 1981's Moving Pictures; its opening rhythm spells Y-Y-Z in Morse code.
Q 06What was JFK Airport commonly called until December 24, 1963?
Idlewild
Idlewild, after the golf course on the site, was the everyday name; officially New York International Airport, Anderson Field, from 1948, it became John F. Kennedy International on December 24, 1963.
Q 07Which architect designed JFK's winged TWA Flight Center, opened in 1962?
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect also behind the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, designed the TWA Flight Center; the landmark reopened as the TWA Hotel in 2019.
Q 08Heathrow opened in 1946 under what earlier name?
London Airport
It opened in 1946 as London Airport, built over the former Great West Aerodrome and the hamlet of Heath Row; the name Heathrow became official in 1966.
Q 09Denver International owns how much land, the most of any commercial airport in North America?
33,531 acres
Denver International covers 33,531 acres, about 53 square miles and nearly twice the land of Dallas/Fort Worth; the airport opened on February 28, 1995.
Q 10What material is Denver airport's famous peaked terminal roof made of?
White fabric
The peaks are white fabric, a Teflon-coated fiberglass membrane evoking the snow-capped Rockies; heavy snow tore a hole in it during the March 2003 blizzard, closing the airport for two days.
Q 11Denver airport's notorious 32-foot 'Blucifer' sculpture is what animal?
A blue horse
It is a blue horse: Luis Jiménez's 32-foot fiberglass Blue Mustang, commissioned in 1993 and installed in 2008, two years after a section of it fell on and killed the artist.
Q 12What 40-metre world-record feature opened at the heart of Singapore's Jewel Changi in 2019?
Indoor waterfall
Indoor waterfall is the record: the Rain Vortex cascades 40 metres down seven storeys inside Jewel Changi.
Q 13Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport, famed for its hair-raising approach, closed in which year?
1998
Kai Tak closed on 6 July 1998, the same day Chek Lap Kok opened; its checkerboard approach had pilots banking low over Kowloon City rooftops on final.
Q 21College Park Airport in Maryland was founded in 1909 so that whom could teach army officers to fly?
Wilbur Wright
Wilbur Wright trained Lieutenants Frank Lahm and Frederic Humphreys there in October 1909 on the Army Signal Corps' first airplane; College Park is the world's oldest continuously operated airport.
Q 22Which airport near the British capital, opened in 1920, introduced the world's first air traffic control?
Croydon
It also had the first airport terminal and the first airport hotel.
Q 23Tempelhof was the centre of which Cold War operation?
The 1948-49 Airlift
The 1948-49 Airlift flew over two million tons of supplies into blockaded West Berlin, most of it landing at Tempelhof; the airport closed in 2008 and became the Tempelhofer Feld park.
Q 14Which main road crosses the runway at Gibraltar's airport?
Winston Churchill Ave
Winston Churchill Avenue, the road to the Spanish frontier, crosses the runway at grade; barriers close it for each aircraft movement, which is why the Kingsway tunnel was built to bypass it in 2023.
Q 15Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides is believed to be the only one where scheduled flights land on what?
A tidal beach
Flights land on a tidal beach: the cockle-shell sands of Tràigh Mhòr, where Loganair's Glasgow service uses three runways marked by poles and the timetable follows the tides.
Q 16Lukla's Tenzing-Hillary Airport in Nepal has a runway with what gradient?
11.7 percent
The runway slopes at 11.7 percent, climbing about 60 metres over its 527-metre length; a 2010 History Channel programme rated Tenzing-Hillary the world's most dangerous airport.
Q 17Princess Juliana Airport's famously low landings pass right over which stretch of sand?
Maho Beach
Maho Beach lies just beyond the threshold of Runway 10 on the Dutch side of Sint Maarten, so arriving jets pass barely 30 metres overhead; the jet blast famously knocks spectators over.
Q 18Japan's Kansai International Airport is built where?
On an artificial island in Osaka Bay
It stands on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, built from 1987 and opened in September 1994, linked to shore by a 3.75-kilometre bridge; the reclaimed island has sunk several metres since.
Q 19Loganair's Westray to Papa Westray flight, the world's shortest scheduled service, covers what distance?
1.7 miles
The hop is 1.7 miles (2.7 km), scheduled at a minute and a half and once flown in 53 seconds; it is about the length of Edinburgh Airport's runway.
Q 20Qamdo Bamda Airport in Tibet once had the world's longest runway, at what length?
5.5 km
The runway is 5.5 km (5,500 metres) long, needed because thin air at the airport's 4,334-metre elevation lengthens take-off runs; it was the world's highest airport until Daocheng Yading opened in 2013.
Q 24The world's first duty-free shop opened in 1947 at which airport?
Shannon, Ireland
Shannon, Ireland, then a refuelling stop for transatlantic flights, opened the first duty-free shop in 1947, the brainchild of catering comptroller Brendan O'Regan.
Q 25Who is credited with inventing the jet bridge?
Frank Der Yuen
Frank Der Yuen, a Chinese-American aviation engineer, is credited with inventing the jet bridge; 'Jetway' is a manufacturer's trademark that became the generic name.
Q 26How many letters are in an IATA airport code?
Three
IATA codes have three letters, like LAX or JFK; the separate ICAO codes used by pilots and controllers have four, such as KLAX. IATA is headquartered in Montreal.
Q 27Mehran Karimi Nasseri lived in Terminal 1 of which airport from 1988 to 2006?
Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle's Terminal 1 became his home after his refugee papers went missing; the 2004 film The Terminal drew on his story, and he died at the airport in November 2022.
Q 28Beijing Daxing airport is nicknamed after which sea creature because of its terminal's shape?
Starfish
The terminal's five radiating piers earned it the nickname 'the starfish'; designed by Zaha Hadid Architects with ADP Ingénierie, it opened in September 2019.
Q 29Which European hub, opened in October 2018, is run privately under a 25-year concession?
Istanbul
Istanbul Airport opened on 29 October 2018 and took all scheduled flights from Atatürk in April 2019; the İGA consortium built it and operates it under a 25-year concession.
Q 30How many runways does London Heathrow have?
Two
In the 1950s it had six runways arranged in a hexagram; only the two parallel east-west ones remain.