I had hoped that others may wish to contribute to this discussion in the hope that it would bring forward some kind of resolution. I do believe that there are problems with the consistency of data entered into the database by uploaders. Please understand however that my intentions should not be misconstrued; problems can be regarded as opportunities as they say.
The two areas that I feel may need some reconsideration are airfields and manufacturers.
It is a fact that manufacturers have allied companies, they may change name but there does appear to be a wide number of interpretations as to what is the manufacturer’s name.
Take Schleicher, for example, who primarily produce sail planes – sorry, gliders. There are at least 16 different entries. Now it could be argued that this may not matter as entering the single word name in the search field will collect all entries but unfortunately in two cases the name is incorrectly spelt. Aerospatiale is another example.
When entering a new registration into the database, the alternatives are shown, but how does one choose?
Why have these alternatives been ignored by those who have created a new manufacturer’s entry?
The ideal solution would be to limit entries to this field by a rejection of all but those shown but I am unsure as to the difficulties associated with this from a programming aspect.
Regarding airfields, the respective field is again ‘open’ that is to say that uploaders are free to enter anything they wish up to, I think, 10 characters. The intention is enter either an ICAO or IATA code. But clearly there are numerous unlicensed airfields and farm strips which have no allocated codes. The obvious solution would be to create another pick list containing these, progressively added to as and when, but how would this be controlled? Once again it would be preferable to have this as a limited field, only accepting the listed alternatives, prior approval being required for additions.
Personally I think it is beneficial to include the airfield location in the remarks, particularly if it is unlisted, at least until a resolution can be found.
Malcolm.