At FlightAware, our software needs to gracefully handle all sorts of weird and wonderful situations. While we as engineers might hope for aviation data to be clean and well-standardized, the real world is messy.There are a lot of assumptions one could make when designing data types and schemas for aviation data that turn out to be inaccurate. In the spirit of Patrick McKenzie’s classic piece on names, here are some false assumptions one might make about aviation. While many of these are simply c...