If you’ve ever looked out a plane window at a US airport, you’ve probably seen them. Big white numbers painted directly on the runway. They might look like a decoration, but they are not. Every number is a short compass reading that tells a pilot which way the runway points, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aeronautical Information Manual. When you know the trick, you can read a runway like a pilot, and a plain strip of pavement suddenly starts to make sense.
How a runway gets its number
