Normalizing Flight Statuses Across 7 Languages: What I Learned Building a Global Airport API

When you scrape flight data from airport websites across 85+ countries, you quickly discover that nobody agrees on anything. Not the data format, not the field names, not the status strings. "Departed" is SAL , FLY , CER , AIR , DEP , DEPARTED , Departed , Отправлен , Väljunud , DESPEGADO , gestartet , or partito , depending on which airport website you're looking at. Building MyAirports meant writing a status normalizer that handles all of these — and maps them to a single, predictable enum. Here's how it works and what surprised me along the way. The target schema Every flight the API returns has a status field from this set: scheduled | boarding | departed | arrived | delayed | cancelled | unknown Seven values. Simple, predictable, usable in any frontend without additional mapping. The hard part is getting there from the real world. Layer 1: Exact string matches The first layer is the most straightforward — a lookup table of known status strings to their canonical values: const EXAC