Deleting Pilots & VA Central

[Bluemax]

This past weekend, I had a very rude awakening over deleting pilots and VA Central. I'm aware, when you delete a member his stats are lost and if he rejoins he has to start from scratch. What I wasn't aware of is his contribution to the VA is deleted from the data base. If I had kept all the inactive members we would have 123 man roster. We have found out the system doesn't delete anyone, Ours is preset from the beginning at 90 days but it has never dropped a single inactive member so we have to do this manually. This past Friday we were less than 100 hours to role over 10,000 hours and our second award. Sunday evening I went through the roster and removed 15 inactive members only to find out at VA Central we lost over 1000 hours, a host of flights and pireps.........this freaked me out. This tells me that if you want to maintain your rating at VA Central, Don't delete inactive members????? This tells me that VA Central isn't an honest reflection of a VA's progression as members who use phpvms who are aware of this, keep their dead wood to keep their rating.

www.usavamc.com/phpvms

[Guest lorathon]

I disagree. You have to remember that even if those pilots are not flying now they did fly before. Those flights did happen. Just because a RW pilot retires or quits does not negate his/her contribution in the past. Keeping a pilot that does not fly on the roster only ensures that your actual stats are correct. If you do delete a pilot, that is no longer active, then you are actually skewing your own stats.

I do think that the Pilot count on VA Central should be active pilots and not total.

[joeri]

i agree with Jeff

iff you flights made in the past still count for the future sam as a RW pilot would quit his job at airline 1 and goes to the second they ask what his experiance is would he also need to say 0 no he can credit his former hour.

also i belive now the total pilots don't count that mush in the calculation but that up to Nabeel to confirm

[Kyle]

Keeping a pilot that does not fly on the roster only ensures that your actual stats are correct. If you do delete a pilot, that is no longer active, then you are actually skewing your own stats.

I do think that the Pilot count on VA Central should be active pilots and not total.

I agree with you Jeff.

Since I want to keep records of pilots in the database. Even with my phpVMS, if I reject a pilot, it does not delete them, it changes the status to rejected and they will never be able to log in or anything.

That just creates all of rejected and inactive pilots in total, think active should be only counted.

[Bluemax]

I disagree. You have to remember that even if those pilots are not flying now they did fly before. Those flights did happen. Just because a RW pilot retires or quits does not negate his/her contribution in the past. Keeping a pilot that does not fly on the roster only ensures that your actual stats are correct. If you do delete a pilot, that is no longer active, then you are actually skewing your own stats.

I do think that the Pilot count on VA Central should be active pilots and not total.

Disagree with what? The bottom line is we lost close to 1000 hours....period, including a host of flights and pirep's. I keep records of the stats because the weekly reports don't include the hours. Friday evening we were as I indicated just short of 10,000 hours. After the delete we dropped to 8900 in change. So you can spin this however....it is what it is. I don't make this stuff up.

[Cor]

I always deleted a pilot when he is not active for awile. There is no point of keeping him to the database. his pilotnumber can be used again.

Regards,

Cor

[Guest lorathon]

This tells me that if you want to maintain your rating at VA Central, Don't delete inactive members????? This tells me that VA Central isn't an honest reflection of a VA's progression as members who use phpvms who are aware of this, keep their dead wood to keep their rating.

Just stating my opinion on the above portion of your statement.

I believe that VA Central is an honest reflection of your VA's stats for the reasons that I stated. Deleting a pilots previous flights is like cooking the books. That pilot did fly those flights. So if you delete the pilot the system deletes all traces of that pilot. If it did not delete the pireps associated with the pilot then if you did use that pilot number again the system would have those pireps tagged to the new pilot.

No offense intended.

[Nabeel]

The *number* of pilots have no bearing on your score. The flights flown and the *active* pilots do (just by default).

I don't recommend deleting pilots at all, just leaving them set as inactive. Real-world airlines don't delete their pilots records/count them out of their records, they're just set to inactive. Deleting a pilot should only be if they *have* to be - an incorrect user or something. There's an inactive status for that reason. If you delete a pilot who has flown in the last three months, you lose the stats on the phpVMS side, and also the stats on the vaCentral side (since vaCentral is rolling to the last 90 days)A. If you're not counting those flights/hours, I'm not either. I have no way to correlate those flights if the user doesn't exist. Those flights don't exist, there's no pilot tied to them, vaCentral doesn't see them. The only reason I've stored pilots is so that (sometimes in the future) those pilots can view all of their records, across VAs and get stats in that manner

But, there's no errors there, that's how the system is designed. If there are no records to count, I can't count them

[Cor]

I always keep my own stats every month in a serate database, so the amount of hours never gets lost.

I don't see the point of keeping pilots who don´t fly anymore. Because they keep their number and at some point

I will run out of numbers We have a 3 digit pilotnumber, and if I see how much pilots just do 1 or a few flights.

I would be nice if the pilots who are retired automaticly are assigned with a new number or for example when VBV010 resining

he will get automaticly will get number VBV010(032011)as refering to resinged in March 2011. Those records will be stored

in a serpate table like phpvms-pilots_retired.

Just an idea, it will keep all the records and you can use the original VBV010 again.

Regards,

Cor

[Bluemax]

The *number* of pilots have no bearing on your score. The flights flown and the *active* pilots do (just by default).

I don't recommend deleting pilots at all, just leaving them set as inactive. Real-world airlines don't delete their pilots records/count them out of their records, they're just set to inactive. Deleting a pilot should only be if they *have* to be - an incorrect user or something. There's an inactive status for that reason. If you delete a pilot who has flown in the last three months, you lose the stats on the phpVMS side, and also the stats on the vaCentral side (since vaCentral is rolling to the last 90 days)A. If you're not counting those flights/hours, I'm not either. I have no way to correlate those flights if the user doesn't exist. Those flights don't exist, there's no pilot tied to them, vaCentral doesn't see them. The only reason I've stored pilots is so that (sometimes in the future) those pilots can view all of their records, across VAs and get stats in that manner

But, there's no errors there, that's how the system is designed. If there are no records to count, I can't count them

Nabeel, thank you. I knew I wasn't going crazy. We are ranked 24 at VA Central and we are not going to progress much higher as we don't have the kind of pilot base (Active) that most of the larger players above us have. We were just shooting for the second award. Anyway, this information should have been integrated into the admin panel. We are already paying the price for re-using deleted pilot ID's, Very bad move, but at the time we didn't know the consequences of re-using them (Posted in another forum topic). I'm reading the above comments about the practice of doing this knowing that if you have 200 pilots & pilot 150 is deleted and you reuse that ID it makes no difference as the next new registry will be pilot ID 201. I'm reading the comments about deleting pilots doesn't delete his contribution to the VA, it does. One of the issues that has cropped up with us, is we assigned 7 transfer pilots from our old static site last July, ID's that were used for testing. There is no issue with their transfer hours or any pireps they have accumulated since but the transfer flight count after x-number of pireps they file will revert to the original transfer hours. These are re-used ID's only, do not have any issues with anyone else in the program. I appreciate you clearing this up for me and I'm sure others who read this.

David Zaleski

www.usavamc.com/phpvms

[Nabeel]

There is no issue with their transfer hours or any pireps they have accumulated since but the transfer flight count after x-number of pireps they file will revert to the original transfer hours.

I need a reliable way to duplicate this - with numbers, etc, without that, I can't really tell what's going on

[Bluemax]

I need a reliable way to duplicate this - with numbers, etc, without that, I can't really tell what's going on

We are working on getting solid stats as the number of filed pireps per member having this issue varies. Whatever is going on as indicated will revert to their transfer flight count they started with back in July 2010.

[Nabeel]

We are working on getting solid stats as the number of filed pireps per member having this issue varies. Whatever is going on as indicated will revert to their transfer flight count they started with back in July 2010.

But does this occur at a certain number? Certain time? I can't duplicate this.

Does anyone else get this issue?

[Bluemax]

But does this occur at a certain number? Certain time? I can't duplicate this.

Does anyone else get this issue?

Here is an update. Apparently I have and IT specialist who thrives (Runs his own server, he also provided us with a secondary TS3 with 100 slots beside the ten slot TS3 we had, and a multiplay server) on php who is going to help us isolate this issue, it turns out from a conversation I had with the staff, this is happening when these guys are in flight and VA Central does its migration and update. My man noticed a 60 second delay in the code for that migration of data. He is dissecting a copy of phpvms on his server and we will get you constructive information ASAP. He is going to develop pages we can use for our program. We are a military (Air Force VA) and this (Phpvms) is developed for a standard VA. Our awards and medals are geting out of hand, far mare than you have in a standard VA. So he is working to expand the code to allows us features not found in a commercial airline VA.