Certification of Aeronautical Data

Recently there has been some discussion in the forums about the usefulness of the OFM VFR charts, since every chart carries a disclaimer. The disclaimer must be published since the data in the database has not been certified for navigation purposes. The comments are along the lines of “What use is a chart that cannot be used for navigation?” The answer is that the disclaimer says that the chart should not be used as the primary source of navigation. The basic concept of VFR is that the pilot must be able to see where he is going. So in this sense the OFM chart is useful as a backup. A helpful analogy is to make the comparison with a car: in VFR the pilot is like a driver following the road signs, but who might have a GPS device to assist him. It was suggested that a certified VFR chart was useful for avoiding legal problems, for instance in the case that a pilot inadvertently flies into a restricted zone. But it is not advisable to adopt this attitude, because to continue with the previous analogy, an inaccurate GPS device will not be taken as an acceptable excuse for a driver that does not stop at a red traffic light. In this regard it is relevant to point out that almost all of the VFR charts commercially available include the same disclaimer, albeit in very small letters.

The next question is to review the possibilities of achieving the certification of the OFM database. This will be quite slow, or even completely impossible. This is because today the certification process of almost everything, including aeronautical data, requires that the people involved in the process must all be certified as being competent in their roles. This requirement is not compatible with the concept of crowdsourcing, where the data is provided by a large number of contributors, unless there is a supervisory stage in which every component of the data is checked by a certified expert. This could be possible to achieve, but to adopt this methodology, merely to achieve certification, would contradict the essence of the advantages of crowdsourcing, which is that the quality is the direct result of the participation of a large number of contributors on the team. A fundamental part of the crowdsourcing concept of the OFM project is the speed at which a change can be implemented in the database: a matter of hours in the case of the OFM, compared with several months in the case of some commercially available charts. With new AIRAC cycles being published every 28 days, the time delay associated with passing all inputs through the bottleneck of a certified expert probably increases the possibilities of errors being published. Addressing this aspect would lead us into a discussion as to whether certification is necessarily an indication of high quality: in other industries there are many examples of certified products being of bad quality. But this is not the correct forum for such as discussion; for the aeronautical world we must all accept that certification is here to stay, and just learn to combine certified and uncertified tools and equipment.

The principle behind the OFM project is that the best means of providing quality in the data, is to involve as many people as possible. Linus Torwald is quoted as saying “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. It must be remembered that we are talking about the quality of data, which is dynamic in nature, so the more people are involved, the more likely it is that an error or an omission will be detected. It is probably going to take a long time before the authorities will understand that there is more risk associated with using the work of one certified expert, rather than complementing this work with one hundred intelligent amateurs. In this sense it is relevant to point out that the OFM charts are already being used in a number of commercial applications, precisely because of the speed of the updates in the database.

Robert Nisbet