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 for international passengers in 2024?
Dubai (DXB)
Dubai (DXB) has no domestic routes, so every one of its record 92.3 million passengers in 2024 counted as international; it had led that ranking for a decade.
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 and became Heathrow only in 1966, once the capital had other airports at Gatwick and Stansted to confuse it with.
Q 09Denver International owns the most land of any US airport, nearly twice as much as which runner-up?
Dallas/Fort Worth
Dallas/Fort Worth owns about 17,200 acres to Denver's 33,500; Denver built far out on the plains because its old airport was hemmed in, with runways too close together to add flights.
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 shaped to recall the snow-capped Rockies and the tipis that once stood on the plains.
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 was installed in 2008, two years after a section of it fell on the artist in his studio and killed him.
Q 12What 40-metre world-record feature opened at the heart of Singapore's Jewel Changi in 2019?
Indoor waterfall
Indoor waterfall: the Rain Vortex drops 40 metres through seven storeys from a hole in Jewel's glass roof, and in a thunderstorm the rain itself pours through to be collected and reused.
Q 13Which closed Hong Kong airport made pilots bank sharply over Kowloon's rooftops?
Kai Tak
Q 21At College Park, Maryland, the world's oldest operating airport, Wilbur Wright trained which service's first pilots in 1909?
The Army
The Army had just bought its first airplane from the Wright brothers, and Wilbur taught two lieutenants to fly it at College Park; one of them made the first solo by a military pilot.
Q 22Which airport near the British capital, opened in 1920, introduced the world's first air traffic control?
Croydon
Croydon's radio officer Frederick Mockford also devised the distress call 'Mayday' in the 1920s, from the French m'aider, 'help me', because so many of its flights ran to Paris; the airport closed in 1959.
Q 23Which Berlin airport, the centre of the 1948-49 Airlift, closed in 2008 and became a public park?
Tempelhof
Kai Tak's approach had pilots aim at an orange-and-white checkerboard painted on a hill, then swing hard right at low level; it closed in July 1998 as its replacement opened.
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: Loganair's planes from Glasgow use three runways marked by wooden poles on the sand, and because high tide covers them the timetable changes with the sea.
Q 16Which Nepalese airport, where most Everest treks begin, has a short runway that slopes steeply uphill into a mountainside?
Lukla
Lukla's airstrip, 527 metres long with a gradient of about 12 percent, was built in 1964 under Edmund Hillary, 11 years after he and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest; it now carries both their names.
Q 17Princess Juliana Airport's famously low landings pass right over which stretch of sand?
Maho Beach
Maho Beach lies at the very end of the runway on the Dutch side of Sint Maarten, so landing jets pass just overhead; the blast from departing ones can knock people off their feet.
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 1.7-mile hop from Westray to Papa Westray, the world's shortest scheduled flight, links islands in which group?
Orkney
Orkney's hop takes about two minutes including taxiing and covers roughly the length of Edinburgh Airport's runway; the islands' council pays for it as a lifeline service to Papa Westray.
Q 20Why did Qamdo Bamda Airport in Tibet need a 5.5-kilometre runway?
Thin air at high altitude
Thin air at high altitude gives wings less lift and engines less power, so at 4,334 metres aircraft need far more runway; the strip was once the longest at any civil airport.
Tempelhof's runways reopened as a park in 2010, and in a 2014 referendum Berliners voted to ban any building on the field, so the old airfield remains open space.
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 25Oklahoma City's main airport is named for which humorist, who died in a 1935 plane crash in Alaska?
Will Rogers
Will Rogers died with the pilot Wiley Post, whose name is on Oklahoma City's other airport, so the city's two airports honour the two men killed in the same crash.
Q 26Why do some US airport codes, such as PDX and PHX, end in an X?
Padded two-letter code
A padded two-letter code is all it is: Portland and Phoenix kept their old weather-station codes and simply tacked on an X when aviation moved to three letters.
Q 27Mehran Karimi Nasseri, whose story inspired the film The Terminal, lived for 18 years in which airport?
Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle's Terminal 1 became his home in 1988 after his refugee papers went missing; he left in 2006, but moved back in weeks before he died there in November 2022.
Q 28Beijing Daxing airport is nicknamed after which sea creature because of its terminal's shape?
Starfish
Starfish: curved piers spread from one central hub; Beijing built the airport because its Capital airport had run out of room, and 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 the Turkish Republic's 95th anniversary; in April 2019 trucks moved some 10,000 pieces of equipment over from Atatürk Airport in under two days.
Q 30Heathrow's 1950s runways formed which shape?
Six-pointed star
A six-pointed star, a Star of David in outline, gave Heathrow six runways; four were later given up, leaving the parallel east-west pair.