174,000 People Want Nashville’s Airport Renamed for Dolly Parton. Changing BNA Is the Part Only the Airlines Can Do.

Tennessee’s governor has already endorsed it and the airport board takes it up on September 17. The three letters on your boarding pass are a separate fight, and Nashville does not get to settle that one.

Renaming an airport is a local decision. Changing its three-letter code is not.

The Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority board meets on September 17, 2026 to take up a proposal to rename Nashville International Airport for Dolly Parton, who died in Nashville on August 25 at age 80. Governor Bill Lee and the airport announced the plan together on August 28. A Change.org petition behind the campaign has passed 174,000 signatures.

If it passes, the signage changes. BNA almost certainly does not, because that code belongs to a process run by the airlines and the International Air Transport Association, not by Tennessee.

Why Tennessee moved in three days

The petition is not new. Lydia Popovich and Dan Dion launched it on January 22, 2025, arguing that Parton’s philanthropy, and specifically the Imagination Library that has given away more than 100 million books since 1995, had outgrown the music she was famous for.

It sat mostly idle for 19 months. It gained roughly 30,000 signatures in the first day after her death and has kept climbing since.

Three days later, on August 28, Lee and the airport authority announced they intended to act on it. “Dolly Parton’s extraordinary life is forever woven into the fabric of our state,” Lee said. “At a place where Tennessee welcomes the world, it is fitting that Nashville International Airport would bear the name of our state’s favorite daughter.”

Lee said Parton’s representatives were “touched by the idea and open to further discussions,” which matters more than it sounds. Estates have blocked this kind of tribute before.

The board still has to amend its own naming policy before it can vote on the name itself. That is the real agenda item on September 17, and it is the step that turns a popular idea into a procedural one.

The three letters nobody in Nashville can vote on

BNA is not an abbreviation of anything in the airport’s current name. It stands for Berry Field Nashville, after Colonel Harry S. Berry, the Works Progress Administration official who oversaw the field’s construction when it opened in 1937.

The airport already changed its name once. It became Nashville International Airport in 1988 and kept BNA anyway, which is the normal outcome and the reason so many airport codes no longer match the city on the sign.

IATA assigns those codes and treats them as close to permanent. Its stated position is that they “are almost never changed, and then only with strong justification, primarily concerning air safety.”

There is one very fresh exception. Palm Beach International became President Donald J. Trump International Airport on July 9, 2026, under a law signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in March, and its code did move from PBI to DJT.

That happened because Delta, United, American, JetBlue and Southwest jointly asked IATA for it. An IATA spokesperson framed it precisely that way: the association “acted on a request from airlines serving Palm Beach International Airport.”

So the question for BNA is not whether Tennessee wants it. It is whether the carriers serving Nashville decide the change is worth rewriting their systems for.

The airlines got there first, using flight numbers

Airlines cannot hand out airport codes, but they can pick flight numbers, and 925 has become the shorthand for “9 to 5.”

Allegiant got there first and did it while Parton was alive. On February 17, 2026 it announced Flight 925, a one-off themed service from Orlando Sanford to Knoxville on November 6, 2026, built with Dollywood and carrying gate parties, live entertainment and in-flight trivia.

It sold out fast enough that Allegiant added a second one. Flight 2925 was announced on March 4, 2026 and departs the same day at 4:16 p.m., behind the original’s 12:57 p.m. slot.

Both run on the Airbus A320, still the backbone of Allegiant’s fleet at roughly 78 aircraft in 2026, alongside about 34 A319s and a growing group of 12 Boeing 737 MAX 8-200s.

Southwest’s tribute was smaller and immediate. On August 26 it turned the cabin lighting pink on flights working through Nashville, with Parton playing over the boarding music on at least one of them.

The airline confirmed it afterward, saying it hoped the gesture “brought a smile to Southwest Customers in Nashville this week.”

American appears to have made the most permanent gesture, and the quietest. Parade first reported that a daily Dallas Fort Worth to Nashville service will change from flight 1396 to flight 925 from March 28, 2027, the start of the summer schedule. American has not announced it publicly, and the change has not appeared in any airline statement.

Crews have not waited for any of it. Pilots and flight attendants have spent the past week welcoming passengers to “Dolly Parton International Airport,” and at least one Southwest crew used the name on the radio to ground control.

There is an irony sitting under all of it. Parton was afraid to fly and never hid it, and she never owned a private jet.

She crossed more than 360,000 miles (580,000 km) of the country by tour bus instead. The industry now naming flights after her is the one she spent 60 years avoiding.

What actually happens on September 17

The board’s realistic outcome is a name, not a code. Nashville would join a long list of American airports that carry a person’s name over a code that remembers something else entirely, which is how most famous-name airports actually work.

It would also be the busiest airport Nashville has ever had to re-sign. BNA handled a record 26.7 million passengers in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026, up 7.7 percent, and reached 115 nonstop destinations that June.

That growth is the reason the timing is awkward. The airport is in the middle of New Horizon, a $3 billion expansion meant to carry it to 40 million annual passengers, with a 16-gate replacement for Concourse A due in July 2028.

Every sign, map and wayfinding panel in that program is being specified right now. A rename settled in September 2026 lands early enough to be built in rather than retrofitted, which is a mundane reason for a board to move quickly on a sentimental question.

The code is the part that will lag, if it moves at all. Palm Beach proved a change is possible in 2026, but only because five airlines asked for it together, and nobody has asked for Nashville yet.