resolve_airline

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Which airline does this designator, name or callsign refer to on a date? Accepts an IATA two-character designator, an ICAO three-letter designator, an airline name or a callsign. Returns the operator with both designators, country, operational status and, where an airline ceased, its successor. `as_of` matters more here than for any other tool. IATA two-character designators are heavily reused: SN was Sabena until 2001 and has been Brussels Airlines since 2007, so "SN" without a date is a question with two answers. Where a date falls between two holders the tool returns `unresolved` with both as alternates rather than guessing. ICAO three-letter designators are not recycled the same way and are the safer identifier to carry through a pipeline. `status` is reported as at the date asked about, not as at today: asked about 2005, Northwest Airlines is `active`, with a note that it merged into Delta in 2010. A status of `unknown` means no reliable source states it -- the bulk open data flags long-dead airlines as active, so it is not trusted. Unknown is not evidence of ceasing. Do NOT use this for fleet lists, routes, schedules, alliance membership or financial status. Reading `confidence`: 1.0 means an exact unique match on an unambiguous identifier for the as_of date. 0.7-0.99 means a unique match reached through normalisation, an alias or a historical record. 0.4-0.69 means the best of several plausible candidates and `alternates` is populated -- prefer asking the user over picking one. Below 0.4 is speculative: do not act on it. `status` is resolved, ambiguous or unresolved. An unresolved answer is a real result, not an error: it means this dataset cannot identify the thing, and inventing one would be worse. Every field in `best` has a citation in `provenance`. When the thing exists and this dataset could not identify it, report_unmet_need with gap_kind `unresolved` is how that gap gets prioritised -- report it, then tell the user you could not find it.