The Letters on Your Bag Tag Have Outlived One Name Already. Now There’s a Date for the Next One.
The three letters printed on every bag tag leaving Nashville — BNA — do not stand for Nashville. They stand for Berry Field Nashville, and they have outlived the name they came from by nearly forty years.
That is worth holding onto this week, because Nashville's airport is being asked to change its name again, and the change now has a date attached to it.
What was announced, and what wasn't
On Friday, August 28, Governor Bill Lee and the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority announced their shared intent to name Nashville International Airport in honor of Dolly Parton, who died in Nashville on Tuesday, August 25, at 80. She was laid to rest days later in a private burial beside her late husband.
The precise wording matters, because the announcement is a beginning rather than a conclusion. The airport authority's board meets Thursday, September 17, and it is there that both the authority's existing naming policy and the governor's proposal will be taken up. Doug Kreulen, the authority's president and chief executive, is at the center of that process. Further details were promised in the weeks between.
The other half of the equation is the family's. Parton's team, approached before the announcement, said it appreciated the outpouring of support and was touched by the idea — and that it remained open to continuing the conversation. That is warmth, and it is genuine, but it is not yet a signature. Nobody involved has claimed otherwise.
The airport has done this before
Berry Field opened in 1937, named for Colonel Harry S. Berry, a West Point graduate who ran Tennessee's Works Progress Administration and oversaw the airfield's construction. For half a century that was simply what the airport was called.
The current terminal went up in 1987. An international wing was added to Concourse A, and in 1988 the field became Nashville International Airport — a change of identity that matched a city beginning to think of itself as a destination rather than a stop.
But the code never moved. BNA stayed BNA, which is why a name officially retired in 1988 still rides on the side of every checked suitcase in the terminal. Airport codes are stubborn things; they tend to outlast the decisions that produced them. Whatever the board decides in September, BNA will almost certainly still be BNA the morning after.
Why the push had momentum before the announcement
This did not begin in a governor's office. A public petition to rename the airport for Parton had been circulating since early 2025 — well over a year before her death — and it climbed past 125,000 verified signatures in the days immediately following it. We covered that surge, and the petition's own history, here.
What changed on August 28 is that the idea stopped being a request from outside the building and became a proposal inside it, with a board date and an institutional process behind it.
What to watch on September 17
The interesting question at the board meeting is not really whether the authority admires Dolly Parton. It is whether the authority's own naming policy, as written, permits what is being asked — which is why the policy and the proposal appear on the agenda together rather than separately. Policies of that kind commonly set conditions on who may be honored and how, and revisiting one is a procedural step, not a formality.
For a city that spent decades explaining that its airport code referred to a WPA administrator most travelers had never heard of, the prospect of a name the whole world already knows is a considerable shift. It is also, as of this morning, still a proposal.
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