A bug can be both funny and annoying

Imagine yourself building a plane kit.  This is a huge endeavor in terms of the time, money and energy you devote to it.

At a certain point, the plane is ready to be tested, and you are ready to be your own plane’s test pilot.  Living in the US, you must register the plane with the FAA, which is not a trivial procedure.  After the registration process, you receive a tail number from the FAA, and anyone can type this tail number in the FAA registry and get information about the plane’s builder, namely you.

So far so good.  Now you register to CloudAhoy because you want to debrief your flights.  You enter your tail number, and CloudAhoy adds this tail number to the list of your planes, except, ooops, it lists someone else as the builder!  You have spent thousands of hours on building this plane, you registered it, and someone else is listed as the builder!  What is going on?

This happened yesterday to a CloudAhoy user.  The reason?  A bug in CloudAhoy. CloudAhoy incorrectly assumed that a given plane type is always manufactured by the same manufacturer.  For example, plane type 182R is always manufactured by Cessna, and S-76D is always manufactured by Sikorsky.   Obviously this is not the case with plane kits.  Turned out that a CloudAhoy user, call him A, entered his Lancair kit’s tail number, and CloudAhoy learned from the FAA’s registry that A is the manufacturer of that specific model of Lancair.  Then another user, B, entered his plane’s tail number, and the builder’s name was A.

Awfully sorry, B.  It will be fixed.  I can only imagine how annoying this could be to you.