Hope you had a good weekend. Friday’s email had a broken link — I meant to share a gift link to the NY Times’ top 100 movies of the century but sent you to a story from my archives. Here’s the right story.

As for today’s, it comes via reader Jesse — thanks, Jesse! — Dan

I’m not a fan of air travel — it’s expensive, you need to show up way ahead of your departure time, and then you’re crammed into a metal tube for a few hours (and with my luck recently, often with a broken TV screen in front of you). Yes, it’s often the best and safest way to get from one place to another, particularly when the destination is more than a few hours drive away. But the experience, pardon the term, often sucks.

And in part of Iowa, they’re okay with that. If you spell it a bit differently, at least.

Sioux Gateway Airport is a small airport in Sioux City, Iowa, just east of the state’s border with Nebraska. (Here’s a map.) Only about 20,000 passengers fly in or out of the Sioux Gateway a year, which makes sense; the only regular service out of the airport are a pair of once-daily flights to Chicago and Denver. (Both flights are one hour and 44 minutes long, which is kind of a neat coincidence.) Chances are, you aren’t flying into our out of Sioux City very often, even if you live near there.

But the airport’s relative lack of use doesn’t concern the administrators of the facility — Sioux Gateway serves a key purpose for the local community, connecting it with two major cities that would otherwise be a full day’s drive, if not more, away. What did concern the airport’s leadership — at least, until relatively recently, was their airport code. Los Angeles has LAX, New York has JFK, and Sioux City? It has SUX — pronounced “ess you ecks,” at least officially.

For the first few decades of that designation, leadership of the airport and the city itself tried to get a new three-letter code. Most notably, as the Associated Press reported, “Sioux City officials petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to change the code in 1988 and 2002. At one point, the FAA offered the city five alternatives — GWU, GYO, GYT, SGV and GAY — but airport trustees turned them down.” (It’s unclear why they objected to these options.) In 2002, the mayor, Craig Berenstein, reportedly called the designation an “embarrassment.” Sioux City simply didn’t want to be known as the town that SUX.

At least, not before 2007. That year, on the urging of airport board member Dave Bernstein, the region decided to lean into the term. Per the Associated Press, he argued that “I think we have the opportunity to turn it into a positive” and stated “I’ve got buddies that I went to college with in different cities that can’t even remember their own birthdays, but they all know the Sioux City designator — SUX.” It was a branding opportunity like no other. According to the LA Times, he even created about a dozen “FLY SUX” t-shirts “to give to travel agents at an appreciation dinner. As word of his marketing ploy spread, he was deluged with requests for the shirts.”

So Bernstein went one further. He changed the URL of the airport’s website — without asking anyone for permission — to FlySUX.com, and if you click that link today, you’ll discover that the idea proved popular enough to stick. You’ll also find Fly SUX t-shirts, mugs, hats, postcards, and more for sale through the website. And if you work at the airport, or just don’t like your job, they have a baseball cap for you.

The rest of the town has followed suit in the year since. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023, “area businesses are increasingly embracing the branding and SUX is popping up all over the place. Poo SUX is a pooper scooper service for pets. RentSUX is a leasing company. Cleaning SUX is a commercial-cleaning firm. Radon SUX helps people mitigate radioactive gas from their homes. The Art SUX gallery is downtown. And the SUX Pride festival is held in June.” The owners of that pooper scooper business even used the airport code to win a fight with the state DMV, as the Journal notes, “When [owner Alex] Fuller applied for a custom ‘POOSUX’ license plate for a company vehicle, his initial application was rejected because state regulations prohibit sexual connotations, vulgarity, hostility, swear words or insults. His successful appeal noted his city’s airport uses SUX.”

Of course, not everyone in town is down with the three-letter code. I guess not everyone SUX.

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Today’s Bonus fact: While some people (hi!) aren’t fans of air travel, others can’t get enough of it. During the COVID-19 pandemic, though, most airlines weren’t taking on many passengers, and most travelers weren’t going anywhere because — beyond the safety concerns from being in a confined space with strangers during a pandemic — there wasn’t much to do once you arrived in your destination anyway. But Taiwanese airline EVA Air decided to find a way address the travel bug anyway — and add some potential romance into the equation. CNN explains: “Each of the dating experiences includes a three-hour flight that departs from Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport and circles the airspace above Taiwan, plus another two hours of a romantic date back on land. Participants are encouraged to have in-depth conversations with each other on board while sampling meals prepared by Michelin-starred chef Motoke Nakamura. They are also encouraged to keep masks on when they’re not eating or drinking.” These flights weren’t a regular occurrence; expecting low demand, EVA Air only offered the experience on Christmas Day 2020, New Year’s Eve 2020, and New Year’s Day 2021

From the Archives: The Never-Built Airport That Was Never Intended to be Used Anyway: This is a really great idea and I’m kind of sad that they never built it.

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And thanks! — Dan