Lisbon Airport ICAO Code: LPPT

Important Information About The Lisbon Airport ICAO Code)

If you are taking a vacation to Portugal and you’re flying in or out of Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado Airport, you might have noticed a four letter code marked LPPT on flight tracking websites.

This four letter designation of LPPT is what’s known as an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code and this particular combination of letters is unique to Lisbon Airport.

ICAO is part of the United Nations and it represents member countries in developing standards and practices for how air traffic – both passenger and cargo – should be handled around the world, including investigating accidents, inspecting flights and more. ICAO plays a vital role in constantly reviewing and approving steps that help to make flights safer and more reliable.

This organization is a separate entity from the International Air Transport Association, which is a trade group on behalf of many major and smaller airlines located around the world. IATA also issues codes to designate specific airports but these are limited to just three letters.

The difference between three and four letters means that you can differentiate Lisbon’s three letter IATA code of LIS from the ICAO’s four letter designation of LPPT.

What is the use of the ICAO code for Lisbon Airport?

Although Lisbon’s IATA code of LIS can easily be found on your boarding pass or checked luggage tag, you might not see the ICAO code of LPPT at any point during your flight.

That’s because ICAO codes are primarily used by the pilots, air traffic control and others in planning navigation for a flight and other steps, so they don’t need to be seen by the public.

But if your aircraft has an onboard flight tracking system, or you check a website that track flights across the globe, you will likely see the ICAO code of LPPT used for trips to and from Lisbon, so if you know this code then you will be able to easily understand the flight map.

How the ICAO codes came into use for airports

ICAO started to produce codes for specific airports starting in the 1940s, although some locations were already using four letter codes and so ICAO simply adopted those.

ICAO codes are issued for aerodromes, which is a broad term referring to somewhere from where flights take off and land, so it’s not just limited to international airports because this term can also refer to airfields, strictly commercial flight facilities, military air bases and more.

When designating an ICAO code, the organization delegates the choice of the four letters to some extent to the affected country. To develop a code, the first letter and sometimes the second letter as well as used to identify the specific country of flight region, and the last two letters almost always are used to refer to a certain airport. It can quickly become a complicated process, but that’s how Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport ended up with the code of LPPT.