Note: This article pertaining to Yet Another Reason Airports Should Not Be Named After People was originally published on Saturday, December 23, 2017 at 12:45 in the afternoon and has been updated.
After having been known for 14 years as Bob Hope Airport, the name reverted back to Hollywood Burbank Airport — a name this airport in California has not been officially called since 1978 — and the name change was precipitated primarily by reports that people from east of the Rocky Mountains did not exactly know where Bob Hope Airport was located…
Yet Another Reason Airports Should Not Be Named After People
…but that is only one reason why airports should not be named after people.
I wrote this article on Monday, December 18, 2017 pertaining to Chick-fil-A opening on a Sunday in order to provide greater than 2,000 chicken sandwiches and bottled water to passengers who were stranded at the international airport which serves the greater Atlanta metropolitan area because of a fire which knocked out electrical power and closed the airport for approximately twelve hours.
Chick-fil-A has been closed on Sundays since it was founded in 1946 by the late Truett Cathy — I had the pleasure of meeting both him and his son Dan — to allow employees a day of rest and worship; so opening on a Sunday is quite unusual for the company…
…but extraordinary circumstances prompted Dan Cathy to implement an exemption to the policy, which was covered by this article written by John Eades for Inc. — who used the name “Hartsville-Jackson International Airport” to refer to the international airport which serves the greater Atlanta metropolitan area. Incredibly, that error still remains in the article in 2025.
Hartsville-Jackson International Airport? I am not sure that neither William Berry Hartsfield — who was mayor of Atlanta twice — nor his descendants would be too thrilled to read that.
Towns named Hartsville do exist in both Tennessee and South Carolina — but I do not believe that they are located close enough to the airport in Atlanta to justify the “name change.”
Final Boarding Call
Should John Eades have been taken to task for not being more careful in attempting to use the correct name for the airport in Atlanta — or is what he did understandable if you believe that Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport is simply a ridiculously long name?
One thing is for certain, at least in my opinion: that error would likely never have occurred if the name of the airport was shortened or simplified to Atlanta Airport instead of named after people…
Photograph ©2010 by Brian Cohen.
