mischka

looking good! do you have permission from turkish airlines to use their name/logo? THY shalt not infringe copyrights!

I did read the post, and actually thought about it. waste of time, obviously... My idea was that it shouldn't matter which airline it is, but the destination you fly to... you want to see the weather charts for your arrival destination, regardless of the airline you fly for.

I'd make it depending on the arrival icao... you can use the first letter to determine the icao region, eg K is US, L and E are Europe, M is middle america etc

I also found this template last summer when I was looking for templates for my new VA. I don't think it was a paid one, it was a free downloadable skin. quite nicely done, although as a VA owner the first thing would be to change the picture of the airplane at the top

you can also just apply with some of the existing airlines that have staff vacancies I don't understand how people can do anything half-arsed.. if they do a VA half-arsed, I wonder, what other, more important, aspects of their lives are done half-arsed?

It's a bit like signing up for a VA and then not flying for it

what I mean is that you're gonna actually have to write php code to achieve this. First, check the amount of bids for the logged-on pilot, and if it is more than 0, then set some variable to true. Or just load the amount of bids in a variable. Then go to the code where it normally would display the "add to bid" link and put that code in an if-block, the criteria being the aforementioned variable being true or greater than 0

I'd start with checking if bid>0 on the schedule results page, and if that criteria is true to not show the "add to bid" link

funktionieren denn die andere acars programme wie kacars. xacars etc?

I had a similar issue when I tried to run phpvms on freehosting. In my case, the host added some tracker-code for statistic purposes on the end of each page, and kacars can't handle that. However, because the site of the threadstarter seems to be unavailable, this cannot be confirmed to be the case here.

Normally an aircraft would take just the necessary fuel to make the trip plus reserves. No way a 747 would, for example, load the full tanks to the brim because the kerosene is a few pence cheaper than on the destination,.. doesn't make economic sense Besides, by doing this you may exceed the max landing weight.

No, but there are so many VA's out there... to make a new one is one thing but to make a new VA that already exists is a waste of time IMHO

Have you got written approval from the real british airways to run a virtual version? Afaik there is already one approved BA, so probably not...

I understand that.. if you're not interested in taking part just don't post.. Rather than putting an idea down. This is not a discussion to philosophise why people start a VA

You didn't quite get the point, I think By flying for another VA, you get the CEO from that VA to fly for yours. And in the end, whatever motives people have for starting their VA, I think most have one wish in common: that many people join the VA and fly for it. The effort of forming a "pilot pool", as described above, may help to get the critical mass together so other pilots who visit the webpage see a variety of pilots flying and join the club.

The other day I was browsing some of the new and not so new VA's and noticed that at a lot of new "startup" VA's the CEO is doing a lot of flying. So far, nothing out of the ordinary - you'd expect the founder of a CEO to put time in. It is a common phenomena, that if you want to get a VA (or any club, society etc) off the ground, you need a "hard core"... a kind of "critical mass" to get the snowball rolling. Some VA's have the benefit of having a few people that sign up right from the start, or are a result of a merger. Others are not. Now, to get to my idea: why not form a pool of "Flying CEO's": VA-owners who fly for other startup VA's instead of their own? So, if you own VA1 you sign up for VA2 and VA3 and fly for them, and their CEO's fly for your VA. An eye for an eye, a pirep for a pirep? Anyone interested to join in this, just post here in the thread

its mainly a tool for separation - some people run phpvms not as a single airline but groups of airlines, others use different divisions, like cargo, passengers or charter the hub is only really relevant if you use the default pilot roster, which groups pilots by hub.

Dear CEO's Last year I made a 5-page report, based on the pireps, for the VA I used to "work for". This information helped us (the management at the time) a great deal in making decisions to take the airline forwards. Today I have decided to make this information available to you, for a small fee. What you will get is a pdf document full of stats and graphs about your airline, which will give you a statistic, objective insight in your operations. You will have numbers, black on white, that tell you the state of your virtual enterprise. The graphs will be based on your pilots reports (PIREP) data, which contain tons of information. (you do know the difference between data and information, right? ) So, here are a few examples of what is possible: This graph shows pireps logged by (UTC) clock-hour: It enables you to see at what times most of your pilots like to fly, and change the schedules accordingly. This graph can be modified to include another line, showing at what time all these flights actually started. The next graph shows the pilot reports by region, over time. Regions, in this case, were Caribbean, Canada (CA), North America (NA) and EMEA: Europe, Middle east and Africa. The graphs I offer here will more likely be based on the first letter of the ICAO code of the destination airport. So, K for united states, T for caribbean, L and E for europe etc. Breakdown per country is also possible, but might be messy if you have too many countries. Here is a more simplified, overall, breakdown of regions. Next to it is a breakdown by division/airline if you operate multiple airlines: This is a breakdown by aircraft type: Note that for this I would also need additional data, see below This is an example of a graph that compares two years: green is the past year, red is the year before, the purple line could be growth, or something else you'd like to see. It can compare your year to the year before. I'm quite flexible and open to new ideas and proposals Other statistics/graphs that I did before, and would be included: - most popular airport (both for departure, arrival and combined: you'll be surprised at the differences!) - least popular airport (again, departure and arrival may vary a great deal. Now you know which airports you can scrap from your list of destinations) - amount/percentage of rejected pireps (as far as they are kept on file) - financial reports on routes and aircraft. Which of your routes/aircraft are most profitable, and where do you need an increase in ticket price - average cost/fuel burn per mile for each aircraft So, you may wonder how I will get the data about your airline? Do I need admin access? No way, I wouldn't want to have an account at all your airlines All YOU need to do, is go to phpadmin and dump the phpvms_pireps table in a csv file. If you want a breakdown per aircraft types, I'll need the aircraft table as well. In case of custom pirep fields -> contact me per PM. You then send these files to my email address (will be provided by PM) and send me 10 euro on paypal. Within a matter of days (depending on workload) you'll have a comprehensive report in pdf format. If you include your VA logo I will put that in the letter-head as well If 10 bucks seems much for a report, then think again: it (probably) takes you more time to make this yourself than to earn those 10 bucks filling shelves in the supermarket. Time you can spend flying, hang out with friends or improving your VA on the basis of objective, quality information in this report. And again: if you have any ideas/suggestions/requirements for certain graphs -> respond to this thread. Thanks for your attention - I'm looking forward to your reactions

Hmmm... that makes you like... 14? ish? Hows that different from a 14-year old? Not much, from the perspective of a 30+.. all <20 = kids if they log their flight online, that can't be tampered with either.. not the time and route anyway, which is the important bit Vatsim won't keep the flight track if you crashed... you have to "arrive" and stay online until the status propagates to vataware. There's no point in lying about fuel consumption - if you know your fleet, you know the approximate fuel flow per hour. In my previous VA, which was flightgear based, we had no acars at all and it was never a problem.

You're right on many accounts stealthbird, and my initial thinking was the same: how can someone who is too stupid to install a simple program actually fly an aircraft, simulated or otherwise? Then I thought back to the time when I first came across an acars system, just after signing up for austrian virtual airlines. I had about 1700 hours of flight behind me for a VA that doesn't use acars and i was, let's say, quite irritated about the mandatory aspect of using an acars system, and having to install aditional software. I updated my FAQ to such extent that users either need to provide a link to vataware.com tracker link with a manually filed pirep, or use an acars system.

So, Jacob, what do you plan to offer what Mark's thomson virtual doesn't have? And what countless other VA's don't have already? Just another thing: I don't mean to attack you or anything: I wish you best of luck with your VA attempt, and I really liked the flyaero skin you posted. But if I personally were to start another VA, I'd do something that has never been done before, instead of making a VA that already exists.

Well, they do sometimes, don't they?

Why dont you guys put your creative/technical heads together and make one big thomson virtual? I mean, why does the world need two separate thomson virtual airlines?

Yeah. I had one guy sign up and then half hour later file a flight from gatwick to st. petersburg That was the only exception though. There's some good ideas and input here, thanks guys

this is a really great plugin, well done! It would be great to be able to provide a custom "where clause" to the query that returns the pilots list. In this way, you could make an advanced filter like displaying only those pilots who didnt file a pilot report for X amount of days, pilots that are member of certain groups, or pilots that have a certain rank posibilities would only be limited by knowledge of sql, really