For my use, aircraft types are very important; I’ve noticed several cases where data in push alerts (FXML2) and airport boards (FXML3) (or even on your own public-facing arrival/departure boards) are giving bad types when your system ought to know better.
For example, the airport board for PDX currently has several SWA flights where the type is listed as B733, even though the tails are all in your inventory as B737 or B738. It also seems to be a relatively frequent issue for flights with 777 variants too (B772 / B77L / B77W seem to switch randomly).
I’ve started a couple of other threads that seem to be related to this…
- FLightXML3 - AirportBoards - DAL 739's as 735's
- FlightXML 3 - Airport Boards - Aircraft Type Changing
In short, if you know the tail for a flight, could you please trust the data from your database for the aircraft type over whatever’s provided in the datastream(s) you’re parsing? If, for whatever reason, it’s important to preserve the incorrect data for certain use-cases, could you add an additional field with your best guess for the type based on the tail?