Every big airport has a fingerprint: the pattern of its runways. Here are ten of them, drawn to scale from real coordinates with north at the top. Can you tell which airport each one belongs to?
How to read a runway layout
Runways are named after their compass heading, rounded to the nearest ten degrees with the last digit dropped. A runway pointing east is close to 09, and the same strip used in the other direction is 27. When parallel runways share a number, the letters L, C and R tell pilots which is left, centre and right.
Airports build runways to suit the wind and the land around them. Parallel runways let an airport handle more traffic at once, while runways at different angles give pilots a way to land into the wind. That is why a layout says so much about a place.
Want to run one yourself? Try Tower, our own air traffic control game, or the airport knowledge quiz.
The airports in this quiz (contains answers)
Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, Denver International, New York JFK, San Francisco SFO, Chicago O’Hare, Dallas Fort Worth, Frankfurt, Amsterdam Schiphol, Tokyo Haneda and Madrid Barajas.
Runway positions come from the public domain OurAirports data set. The data may not show the very latest construction work, so treat the diagrams as a guide and not as navigation charts.
