Returning flight controller to pre-solution state to solve the search functionality challenge on my own.
Query strings are showing up in server log, but still not correctly querying the db to get a result using params. Date needs correction.
Read Rails guide on active record querying and where conditionals. Corrected .where condition in flight controller. Date still needs correction.
Looked up how to do a date active record search and found solution on stack overflow. Needed to declare the datatype in SQL using DATE(). But this seems to be inconsistently working.