My favorite is when a customer was raising hell because London International Airport (YXU) wasn't appearing under the city listing for London, UK and demanding it be added immediately. I had to tell them you don't fly there... it's located in Canada.
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/03/31/dutch-teen-ends-...
We also have airports with "CZ" (eg. CZBB).
I am not sure what the difference (if any) between CZ vs. CY codes is. Probably just sticking with convention (begin with Y or Z because everyone else does).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_O...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_by_IATA_code:...
But Y is heavily Canadian. We should all just start our own airport. Sounds like a good way to learn about naming. I imagine we will want an airport code staring with YC, so it'll have to be in Canada :P
The worst part is that after you land at YXU you're in London, Ontario.
(I lived near YXU for three years).
My neighbor at the time was a commercial pilot, and I asked him about the difference. He says that anything else that the airline or anybody else tells you ahead of time is only tentative. The final call on the route is made by the pilot on departure. He's considering things like wind speed and direction along the way, weather along the route, and weather at potential intermediate airports should an emergency arise.
Bonus fact. He told me that he dislikes flying the newer Boeings because of the location of the cupholder. On other planes it's closer to the plane's major axis, but these planes put them farther away. This has the effect of magnifying the plane's motion, and leads to coffee spills.
About halfway through the flight, the gamer remarks that the pilot is wrong, and not taking the best route for the flight. The flight sim path and real plane are going in slightly different directions. They try to tell a flight attendant who assures them know "the pilot knows what they're doing." The remaining half of the flight they complained to either the author or other attendants, acting like they knew more than the staff.
They never got to finish their flight-sim though, because the real plane landed 20 minutes ahead of schedule. I guess the pilot did take a different path after all!