Pat, yes, I agree with the standard practice re distinct data items. In this case, it happens probably one in 30-40 flight events where the student is doing a cross country flight and there is no need to ever interrogate based on an airport. I would have put the starting and ending airports at the flight segment level but in most cases, there is only one airport - student goes up, does stuff, and comes back down.
So, more economical and practical to put at notes for flight header - just because something can be done does not always mean it should. It is more a historical record of where the student flew and the distance. And yes, I am sure someone could make a case for storing each field and rebuilding the string and attaching that to other notes at time of print, but it seems like a lot of work for no gain to me at this point. Good point though.
I am not trying to parse the data to replace something, I have a pop up form that gathers the data and then updates the field. I would just prefer to use arrows instead of “to” between the airport identifiers when I concatenate all the data together before updating the field. If this is problematic, I might do the quick and dirty solution of using the > or the slash character between the airport ids as CJ suggested. Will try the other points such as rich text though first.
Thanks guys