Airports frequently have a ceremonial name, a code that resembles nothing about it, and a name locals actually use. The disagreement is a record of how each was assigned.
The formal name is a political act
Naming an airport for a person is typically decided by the body that owns or governs it, which may be a city, a state or an airport authority.
Because the decision is public and permanent in feeling, it tends to honor figures with strong local association, and the process resembles naming a bridge or a library.
Renaming happens, and it is usually contested, because the existing name has accumulated its own attachment among people who use the airport daily.
The code was assigned for a different system
Three-letter codes used in booking come from an international scheme that has to keep every identifier unique across the world.
Uniqueness means many codes could not follow the city name, since another airport claimed the obvious letters first, sometimes decades earlier.
Codes also persist through renamings and even relocations, which is why some appear to reference a place, a former name or nothing recognizable at all.
Aviation uses a second code as well
A separate four-letter system is used operationally, built regionally so that the leading letters indicate an area rather than a city.
Pilots, controllers and flight plans use that system, while passengers see the three-letter one, so the same airport carries two unrelated identifiers.
The two coexist because they were designed for different users and neither can be abandoned without breaking a great deal of infrastructure.
The local name usually wins
In everyday speech, airports tend to be called by their neighborhood, their district or their historical field name, regardless of the honorific on the terminal.
Taxi drivers, transit signage and residents often standardize on that shorter form, and it can persist for generations after an official change.
Visitors who use only the formal name occasionally find themselves less understood than they expect.
Names carry history unevenly
Many airports were military fields before they were civil ones, and some retain names from that period even after every original building has gone.
Others carry the name of an early aviator, a local benefactor or a political figure, so the naming layer records what a city valued at the moment it built the field.
Reading the three names together tells you more about the airport's history than the terminal itself usually does.