The decision to create a shared communications structure, taken in 1949 by 10 European airlines and one US airline with the formation of SITA, was made to eliminate 'excessive delays' and benefit the public through speedier handling of reservations. ICAO, IATA and SITA agreed on the need for industry standards for both message content and protocols. Discussions resulted in the introduction of a designator systems for the industry in the early 1950s. These codes, now managed by ICAO, IATA and the ATA, include:

• two-character airline designators (e.g. LH for Lufthansa)
• three-character airline codes (e.g. AMR for American Airlines)
• three-and four-letter location identifiers for airports (e.g. LHR for London-Heathrow and EDDC for Dresden)
• flight number identifiers (e.g. BA724)
• office function designators (e.g. OZ for Operations Management)
• usage of seven-character "teletype" addresses for messages (e.g. LHROZLH)

The role of DNS

Domain Name System (DNS), the technology behind .aero, is an important building block of the Internet. It is a distributed database, which maps structured names to "things". A wide variety of information can be distributed using various records defined in DNS. The records may contain host IP addresses or email server addresses as well as VoIP addresses, phone numbers, fax numbers, individual established industry coding structure-mail addresses, URIs which identify available services, or even public cryptography keys.

A community resource

With the introduction of the .aero domain however, a new world of communication becomes possible established industry coding structures can migrate to Internet - creating a predictable, easy-to-remember and rapid means of communicating or accessing information over Internet-enabled technologies, using desktop or laptop computers, PDAs, cell phones and other, yet to be invented, mobile devices.