You know there's a software engineer somewhere that saw this as a potential problem, brought up a solution, and had that solution rejected because handling it would add 40 hours of work to a project.
Look, when you're barking orders at the guys in the trenches who, understandably in fear for their jobs, do the stupid "business-smart" thing, then it is entirely the fault of management.
I can't tell you how many times just in the last year I've been blamed-by-proxy for doing something that was decreed upon me by some moron in a corner office. Everything is an emergency, everything needs to be done yesterday, everything is changing all the time because King Shit and his merry band of boot-licking middle managers decide it should be.
Software engineers, especially ones with significant experience, are almost surely more right than middle managers. "Shouldn't we consider this case?" is almost always met with some parable about "overengineering" and followed up by a healthy dose of "that's not AGILE". I have grown so tired of this and thanks to the massive crater in job mobility most of us just do as we are told.
It's the power imbalance. In this light, all blame should fall on the manager unless it can be explicitly shown to be developer problems. The addage "those who can, do, and those who can't, teach" applies equally to management.
When it's my f@#$U neck on the line and the only option to keep my job is do the stupid thing you can bet I'll do the stupid thing. Thank god there's no malpractice law in software.
Poor you - only one of our jobs is getting shipped overseas.
> Thank god there's no malpractice law in software.
This is aerospace, there are such things, but there's also blameless postmortems. And it happened overseas!
They are understood not to be. They are generally known to be regionally unique.
The "DVL" code is unique with-in FAA/Transport Canada control, and the "DVL" is unique with-in EASA space.
There are pre-defined three-letter codes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IATA_airport_code
And pre-defined four-letter codes:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAO_airport_code
There are also five-letter names for major route points:
* https://data.icao.int/icads/Product/View/98
* https://ruk.ca/content/icao-icard-and-5lnc-how-those-5-lette...
If there are duplicates there is a resolution process:
* https://www.icao.int/WACAF/Documents/Meetings/2014/ICARD/ICA...
Then why aren’t they namespaced? Attach to each code its issuing authority, so it is obvious to the code that DVL@FAA and DVL@EASA are two different things?
Maybe for backward compatibility/ human factors reasons, the code needs to be displayed without the namespace to pilots and air traffic controllers, but it should be a field in the data formats.
AIUI, most VORs (and in the past, NDBs) are located at airports. And there is an airport at Deauville (DOL/LFRG):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deauville–Normandie_Airport
But the beacon is elsewhere, apparently in some random(?) field:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/49°18'38.0%22N+0°18'45.0%2...
Best I can see (using Rust) is a hashmap on UTF-8 string keys and every code in existence gets inserted into the hash map with an enum struct based on the code type. So you are forced to switch over each enum case and handle each case no matter what region code type.
It becomes apparent that the problem must be handled with app logic earlier in the system; to query a database of codes, you must also know which code and "what type" of code it is. Users are going to want to give the code only, so there's some interesting mis-direction introduced; the system has to somehow fuzzy match the best code for the itinerary. Correct me if i'm wrong, but the above seems like a mandatory step in solving the problem which would have caught the exception.
I echo other comments that say that there's probably 60% more work involved than your manager realizes.
I assumed IATA messed up, not I'm wondering how that even happens. It's not even easy to discover the local codes of remote aviation authorities.
This isn’t IATA. IATA manages codes used for passenger and cargo bookings, which are distinct from the codes used by pilots and air traffic control we are talking about here-ultimately overseen by ICAO. These codes include a lot of stuff which is irrelevant to passengers/freight, such as navigation waypoints, military airbases (which normally would never accept a civilian flight, but still could be used for an emergency landing-plus civilian and military ATC coordinate with each other to avoid conflicts)
I'd rather deal with designing tables to properly represent names.
I guess we now need a "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Aviation Data" site :)