"Aэропорт "Домодедово" - why not genitve?

Question

When we form a noun phrase, we use either adjectives or genitive case. For example;

красная машина -> feminine adjective + feminine noun (red car)

цвет цветка -> nominative case + genitive case (color of flower)

I came across this phrase:

аэропорт Домодедово

The translation of this phrase is airport of Domodedovo. So we need to use genitive case. But Домодедово is not in genitive case. Why?

Answer 1

Домодедово is the proper name of the airport, which is technically called Москва (Домодедово). It's not an "airport serving Domodedovo" (although it does serve it among other cities of course), it's an airport called "Domodedovo".

If we were speaking about, say, "Domodedovo government" (администрация Домодедова) or "Domodedovo police" (полиция Домодедова), we would have used genitive indeed.

However, lately, Russian tends to drop declination of names in -ово, -ево, -ино, -ыно to avoid confusion with masculine names in oblique cases (в Пушкине could mean both "in Pushkin, St. Petersburg" and "in Pushkino, Moscow oblast"). So you can hear and read администрация Домодедово and полиция Домодедово just as often nowadays.

Answer 2

The rules about toponyms and such are a bit complicated and not too consistent in general. But, as a rule of thumb, Genitive case signifies that an object belongs or somehow dedicated to another one. E.g. улица Моцарта, площадь Революции etc.

But here we have an airport of Moscow named Domodedovo because of its location, while Аэропорт Домодедова, as you propose, would naturally be understood as an airport of town Domodedovo.