why does canadian airport codes begin with y?

"As to the origins of the Yxx codes, it's in part due to the heritage of Canada's railway station codes. All railway stations had an Xxx designation, and the basic Yxx pattern was based on this."

"Airport starting with a Y are associated with a NAVAID, that is why."

"You will find that almost all aerodromes with a tower or flight service station begin in Y of course there are some exceptions." "Any airport with a Y in front is a weather reporting station, at least thats what a pilot told me once."

"ICAO codes consist of a two-letter country prefix and a two-letter airport code. Some countries (those with lots of airports) have more than one prefix. The USA has 26 - KA to KZ. Canada has four, CU, CW, CY and CZ. The vast majority of Canadian airports use IATA codes starting in CY."

"The Y for Canada dates back to the first days of radio-telegraphy and some anal individual who thought that the ICAO designators and the IATA designators should have some co-relationship."

"As exAC notes, these designators go back to the early years of radio when transmission identifier codes were assigned. And because early airports also used radio transmissions to provide navigation signals, these "stations" had to receive a designator code consistend with normal radio transmitters. As airport convetion, the first letter was dropped. [Yes, Newfoundland had used V as its first letter designator for radio stations until it joined Canada in 1948.] As for why the "Y", since the Americans got into radio a bit earlier than we did with station licensing, all the logical city-related codes got snapped up down there and the precident was started. We had slim pickings for our airport transmitter licensees, so the modified city reference was concieved: VR for Vancouver; TO for Toronto, the original later superceded by YZ about which nobody knows; QR for Regina; WG for Winnipeg... Otherwise we could have aimed for things like VCR or WPG or EDM or CAL that were more descriptive of the actual city name. "

"Canada does not share the ICAO C letter with any other country, so why we were limited is unknown. We then could have had the ability to go with CTOR for Toronto. With the original restriction that the first letter must be a C and the second letter a Y there was not room for a lot of creativity when choozing airport codes."

"Taken from airliners.net....I'll try to do some more research on why the codes were assigned the way they were.

Airports use radio frequencies for communication. Radio frequencies are assigned call letters. The International Telecommunications Union assigned different call letters to each country. Much like each country has its own aircraft registration numbers.

Canada was assigned CB-, CF-, CH-, CI-, CJ-, CK-, CY-, CZ-, among others.

CB- was reserved for the CBC's (Cdn Broadcasting Corp) radio & TV frequencies.
CF-, CH-, CI-, CJ-, CK- were reserved for other broadcasters. (radio, T.V. etc)
CY-, CZ- were reserved for transportation frequencies. "

"That's what I remember reading long ago. Other theories exist though, so the actual derivation may be lost in the mists of history. "

You not the first one to wonder why Y. There was a discussion about this on Wikipedia about four years ago. Apparently, this was a decision made by the Diefenbaker government. Why they decided so, no one really knows. Here's the discussion on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:International_Air_Transport_Association_airport_code#Canadian_airports

It for Y do u wanna come here. Lol jk I honestly don't know