Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s assertion that he is renaming Palm Beach International Airport’s code “RIGHT NOW” appears to be a bluff.
Mere hours after the airport was officially approved to be renamed the “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” Duffy said he was going straight to the FAA to change the airport’s three-letter code from PBI to something more MAGA-fied.
Duffy posted, “The FAA is working on changing PBI’s airport code RIGHT NOW… the name change to Donald J. Trump International Airport already official!”
But the body that would officially rename Palm Beach airport’s code—recognized by airlines worldwide—is the International Air Transport Association, not the FAA.
The IATA told the Daily Beast on Tuesday that it had “not yet received an official request for the code change” from the Trump administration.
The FAA did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment. The DOT also did not respond to request for comment.
The IATA, based in Montreal, Canada, has managed and recognized airport codes globally for nearly a century. These are the codes most passengers are familiar with, as they are the codes used for booking and printed on flight tickets and on baggage tags, according to flight school Pilot Institute.
While these codes often align with those recognized by the FAA, the FAA designations—like the one Duffy has requested for PBI—are used primarily by air traffic controllers and flight planners. They are operational in nature and rarely appear in passenger-facing materials.
The Florida state legislation, signed quietly into law on Monday by Gov. Ron DeSantis, that changed the airport’s name did not require the code to be updated from its current PBI.
Florida Congressman Brian Mast, a Republican who represents Trump in Congress, did introduce legislation at the federal level to change the airport’s code to DJT, but that has not yet been voted on. His bill would require the FAA administrator to work with the IATA to make the DJT code official.
When or if the Trump administration does go through the IATA to change the code, DJT, is not in use at any other airports worldwide.
Other airports named after presidents, aside from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, have not had their codes changed to match the new name.
Washington, D.C.’s Ronald Reagan National Airport is still known as DCA, Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan, kept its GRR code, and George Bush Intercontinental in Houston still has its IAH code.
And the Palm Beach airport will be the first to be named after a president who is still alive, as all eight U.S. airports bearing presidents’ names were designated as such posthumously.
