The hidden beauty of airport runways, and how to decipher them

Flying Fonts

Airports use a specialized font to number their runways. It’s highly geometric, which eliminates confusing curves and can be reduced to simple schematics, making it easy for groundskeepers lacking typographic training to recreate. The font apparently has no name, but the numbers are called “runway designators” in pilot parlance.

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Turns out, MAD is considered a textbook example of good runway design, known for maximizing the flow of air traffic in a compressed amount of space.

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CNN