mischka

lewis, the idea is good on first thought, but the problem is rather that ppl can't be bothered to install a tool - in case they haven't already flown for another va that requires acars.

Why you don't want to use bidding? As far as I know, I can file a pilot report manually even for a route I'd normally not be allowed to fly. You have to be very vigilant approving pireps without the bidding system, if you want to restrict certain trips

I'm confused! At any rate, you can set a "minimum rank" to every single airplane in your fleet, it's not by type. So if you have route 1, 2 and 3 by an ATR callsign RB1, and route 4, 5 and 6 by ATR callsign RB2, you can restrict RB2 to a minimum rank 1st officer. Then you can do all the "difficult" routes with RB2 while newbies can still use the ATR on routes 1, 2 and 3

Depends on your abilities, really.. if you're a s/w developer by trade you'll spend 1/4 of the time from those who haven't got these skills. Also any technical issues you run into are easier to solve, so you can concentrate on other things - like automating some things in the va, which saves more time. Personally, If I'd have to do it all over again, I'd ask myself this question: what does my airline offer that no other airline offers, what makes mine different that people might want to join my VA?

That's all very well, and pretty well done and well executed, however... the first 12 minutes are about setting up a hosting account and a free domain name, which some people might have or might want to do with another provider (unless your aim is to promote these providers you use). So if somebody uses another provider the first 12 minutes won't apply to them. I guess that those too dumb to sign up for a hosting account and upload files via ftp, should spend their time doing something else than starting a VA, if you know what I mean What would be really great is to explain in a video how the different tpl files relate to eachother, what is the difference between a skin and a layout, and how to install modules. That's the kind of stuff I was struggling with in the beginning because it's not all that clear from the documentation. Also, it might be handy to give a bit of a primer on the admin module, and maybe how to change settings in the local.config files? just giving you some ideas.. keep up the good work!

You could put an exam-center up where people can do exams/quizzes and pay for them with the money eg type ratings The pilot shop is pretty useless I think, unless you put things in there that pilots need for certain flights. Personally, I think it'd be better to swap the pilot pay for something like "experience points", and let ranking depend on the amount of points. like parkho said, it all depends on your expectations and/or the goal of your airline

Hello I was just wondering the other day if there are any VA's that don't require their pilots to use an ACARS system? Most VA's require their pilots to submit some 'proof' that they did the flight by using ACARS and submitting the log, or submitting a tracker log from vatsim and the like. But honestly, why would a pilot lie/cheat about doing a flight? Reason I'm asking is that even though I wrote a pretty fool-proof guide on how to configure kACARS and xACARS for use with my VA, some pilots still struggle with it or the software causes other problems, so I'm considering to make this non-mandatory. Would I be the only VA doing that, or are there others out there who fully trust their pilots?

OK, grand... good to know this is just an issue of fueling before hitting start. Maybe it should be included in the manuals ... I didn't read anything about it.

Hello I've had already a few times that the fuel consumption posted by kacars was incorrect. I think I've got it narrowed down to that you have to set your fuel *before* hitting start flight, but not sure. Today one of my pilots logged this, however: [16:22] Aircraft Title - Boeing 737-400 [16:22] Aircraft Model - B734 [16:22] Flight Number EUR2040 [16:22] Departure LFML [16:22] Destination EDDM [16:22] Boarding [16:25] Pushing Back [16:25] Taxiing to Runway [16:30] Taking Off [16:30] Taking Off [16:30] 177kts [16:30] pitch angle 5 degrees [16:30] 5700 (lbs) of fuel onboard [16:31] Climbing [16:49] TOC Reached [16:49] Cruise 31000 [17:05] Stall [17:05] Simulator Paused [17:05] Simulator Un-Paused [17:05] TOD Reached [17:05] Descending [17:06] Stall Recovered [17:08] Stall [17:08] Stall Recovered [17:16] Stall [17:17] Stall Recovered [17:36] On Approach [17:54] Simulator Paused [17:54] Simulator Un-Paused [17:58] Landing Rate -491fpm [17:58] 29126 (lbs) of fuel onboard [17:58] pitch angle 5 degrees [17:58] Taxiing to Gate [18:02] Arrived [18:03] Max Sim Rate: 1x [18:03] kACARS_Free Version 1.0.1.1 and the result was -22521lb of fuel.. Yes, minus! Maybe he met a KC130 on the way and had a top-up? He stalled around 30 minutes into the flight, so I guess he topped up and restarted the engines. Funny is as well that 29126-5700=23426 so the numbers dont match. Any explanation for this? is kacars known to mix up fuel consumption when refueling after the "start flight" button is hit?

This seems to have helped a great deal! I've had this error just once since I made an exclusion on the program directory. AV was mcafee virusscan

Just don't have the time for flying for other airlines... I suppose you know well enough how time-consuming it is to run a VA.

I agree with stuartpb that it's a waste of resources. After all, the IFE which the passengers have in the seat in front of them is not installed in the cockpit, so why have it in FS? If you let george fly the aircraft just go outside and get a bite of fresh air, shag the "stewardess" (if you have one) or do something else that's useful

I was only able to watch the site now due to firewall restrictions at work, but it looks great! If I wasnt a VA manager myself I'd probably join up

other than going in the backend and change the values, I dont know but who cares, anyway? If you want to play a game of airline financials, I suggest checking on facebook for a game called "airline manager": it simulates exactly these kind of things

that'd be silly IMHO You should leave it up to your pilots what version of an airplane they use... maybe they don't have resources to run the high-quality, but also resource-intensive payware... not to mention that kids might not have the money for it.

Yeah, like I said: I don't think its possible to make a pirep without an existing flight number, thats the way phpvms is programmed and i think it's good that way

I don't think phpvms will let you file a pirep on a schedule that doesnt exist. But you can let pilots fly "random flights" outside your schedule with "charter schedules". These are schedules that are not bound to a certain time but just for an airplane. So, for each type of airplane you'd have one scheduled flight which can be flown any time. You may open a separate "airline" for this (I have one thats simply called charters) to differentiate unscheduled flights from scheduled. To make it easy, you can name the flights the same as the corresponding airplane, eg 9747 for a 737 or 9830 for a dhc8-300 works well for me

aarbee, I think I don't fully understand your problem... why create a separate index.html? That would cause a lot of work when you want to change anything like style, layout etc later on And why set a different frontpage controller? In the frontpage_main.tpl you can enter any html or php you want, so it wouldn't be any different than just displaying a page from the vms system. the pro of using the frontpage_main is that you are very flexible: you can add any coding you want and display a lot of information. If you decide to display a static page like pages/about then you are more flexible on what you can display from day to day, but you also limit your options very much. One idea ive been toying with lately is to use a cookie to track returning visitors, and present those who have no cookie with a kind of intro-page, maybe featuring a video, that will warm them to the idea of joining your VA. Any returning visitor (most likely pilots) will go straight to the frontpage. They dont want to see a static page about your va: they will want to see whats new on the va, who was flying, that kind of stuff.

hi thats why in your layout.tpl you should have this: echo $page_content; That will put your pages that you create in the admin center. If you go to news & content in the admin center, you see a link called "pages" and there you can create & edit pages. There is also a link to every page, so if you click on it you'll see the actual page as it will look like on the site.

I hope you won't write on your homepage/news something like "this is a test event fcukers" and leave it there for 2 days LOL!

Look at frontpage_main.tpl as a part of your front page. In frontpage_main you can put any html or php and that will only show up on the front page Basicly, your layout.tpl is a kind of placeholder (in het nederlands zou je het een sjabloon noemen) that directs where certain elements in the page are. Typically, you'd have a kind of banner on the top, then a navigation bar (core_navigation.tpl) and then the "meat" of the page ie whatever index.php is told to show. (echo $page_content) and then a footer. Also there should be all the javascript stuff you need and anything like pagecounters, copyright notice etc. So on the front page, the echo page_content will show the frontpage_main.tpl If you create a page in the admin section, you can link to that and it will show instead of the frontpage_main. A link to the pilot center, will show that instead of frontpage_main. Suppose that should clear things up a bit. Succes met je airline!

Mind you, if you set autocalc to false you have to do every promotion manually. If you have a handful of ranks and more than a handful of pilots, that might give you a lot of work! its either calculate automatically and not be able to change it manually, or the other way around.

+1!! I definitely had an eyesore after looking at this one LOL The clock is good in that it blends in with the ehm... colorful website. For anyone else, I'd recommend luiz montero's highly customisable flash clocks: http://www.luizmonteiro.com/WebmasterTools_FlashClock.aspx

Maybe the file got locked or something? Maybe it didnt close it properly, or another process locked it.. I may consider giving an antivirus exclusion a try

Not that I know of... at least not actively tracking. It might be that I accidentally started two instances, but I only ever use one of them to track the flight.