Have you ever wondered why Northwest Arkansas National Airport is known as XNA?

In the 1990s, when the airport was constructed in a rural area of Benton County, it was purposefully located and named for the Northwest Arkansas region — not any specific city. 

“The whole idea was to look for a site that would accommodate the size of airport that was centrally located to the whole region,” founding airport CEO Scott Van Laningham said. 

When assigning a new airport code, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) prefers to use the first three letters of the airport’s location (like LIT in Little Rock and TUL in Tulsa). If that’s unavailable, the IATA’s second choice is to assign a code that at least shares the first letter of the airport location.

“NWA” was the first choice of early airport leadership, but the U.S. Navy reserves all airport call signs that begin with “N,” Van Laningham said. “Then we actually thought about SAM, for Mr. Walton, but that was Salamo.”

They then requested a list of available three-letter codes and “XNA” stood out.

“X [was] sort of the crossroads, and then Northwest Arkansas,” Van Laningham said. 

In the years that followed, some people started to say it stood for eXtra Nice Airport.

“It was actually John Paul Hammerschmidt, the former congressman, that came up with the nickname,” Van Laningham said.

In 1999, the airport’s first full year of operations, 329,216 passenger trips started at XNA. Last year, the number was 1,147,947. Due to its growth, the airport was renamed Northwest Arkansas National Airport from Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in 2019.