For the longest while I’ve been puzzling over why the Caribou and the various Twin Otters appear at the bottom of my Selection List. After all, it’s organised alphabetically and they’re de Havillands: they should appear between Cessnas and Embraers. Or at the very least, ignoring the ‘de’, between Grummans and Junkers.
This morning I had a rare collision between a couple of my few remaining brain cells and the answer hit me: they’re not organised alphabetically at all.
They’re organised according to ASCII codes, and there all the lower cases follow all the upper cases, so poor de Havilland gets relegated to the bottom of the list.
The good news is that the Beaver escapes this trap, since it’s now assigned to a manufacturer other than de Havilland. The bad news is that the manufacturer is Viking, so it really doesn’t help much.