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goodpaster

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About goodpaster

  • Birthday 03/30/1970

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    USA
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    King Air Instructor Pilot

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    http://www.flyelite.net/

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  1. I have been involved in VAs for several years, I got started on CompuServe when tracking was done on Lotus 123 spreadsheets and have been a member of staff for a few large VAs, and currently own my own medium-sized VA. Adding features to a VA is complex. You have to understand that many of us are not software engineers. So people like me, I am a real-world pilot and CFI, depend on the software created by others to run a VA. As such my ideas of how things should run are hampered by the developer of the management software. Things like a PIREP is a weather report made by pilots, not a post-flight report are baked into the software. SMS is unknown in the VA software, but would be a powerful tool for providing feedback to members. Even MSFS fails at modern advanced such as ADS-B, ADS-C, FANS-1A, PBN, etc. You can have two different members of a VA fly the same type of airplane, such as the A320, and have two vastly different experiences. One could fly a highly detailed third-party aircraft and the other a very simple default airplane. One person can take off and land at highly accurate airports and fly with online ATC whereas the other is using default scenery and built-in ATC. With a VA I find it is less about how detailed you can make the experience and more about how to accommodate a multitude of members each with a different definition of FUN. It is a hobby after all and not a job. Having spent many hours in real life sitting at FL300 and on autopilot, I can confirm that even real-world aviation can be quite boring. I do have financing and maintenance procedures baked in thanks to some third-party software that helps run the VA. But, for the most part, members hardly notice that until their favorite airplane is not available due to maintenance or I cannot afford to buy the latest airplane just released by a third-party developer. The other thing is a VA is a slice of a real-world operation. I have a few hundred members flying for my VA, but the type of flying we simulate the real-world counterpart has many thousands of pilots hired. Whereas my VA might fly three or four dozen flights during a weekday the real-world counterpart is fling over a thousand. Our operations department is one deep compared to the 50+ dispatchers at a real-world counterpart. Because I depend on volunteer staff I have to try and automate as much as possible. Automation reduces realism. I learned many years ago that surveys are a great tool, but the real trick is getting the right people to answer the right questions. Public volunteer surveys are unfortunately the least accurate way to achieve usable feedback. Having looked at your survey I assure you will get an answer, but do those answers represent the majority of active members at a VA is highly questionable. Realism is not a single point but a spectrum of possibilities depending on who you ask. There are a number of satirical posts by real-world pilots on realistic flying for an airline.
  2. Elite Air Taxi is proud to announce the relaunch of our website. We are now located at: https://www.crewcenter.flyelite.net This relaunch makes us compliant with SSL and PHP version 7. This should do away with warnings about an untrusted site from your browser. Elite offers U.S. FAR Part 135 Executive Air Transportation style Virtual Airline where pilots fly Business Jets in support of On-Demand operations. Elite also maintains a number of smaller piston-powered aircraft in its traditional budget Air Taxi operations. New members start as probationary pilots and must complete a one-hour flight in one of our piston-powered aircraft. After completing this initial hire certification flight members join Elite's free-flight environment where they can fly any aircraft in our fleet from the King Air C90 to the Boeing Business Jet. For those wishing for a more realistic environment, you can join the Elite Professional Division where you earn type ratings in a limited fleet of aircraft and select from a smaller list of flights. Members may transfer between our mainline Air Taxi operations and Elite Professional. Operating since October 2015 Elite is celebrating six years of operations and as always Elite is free and always will be.
  3. Happy New Year, Elite Air Taxi is celebrating its five-year anniversary in 2021 and we have a special around the world tour. But this is no ordinary around the world as east to west and west to east have been done by almost every VA out there. In our own unique way, Elite is doing a different around the world flight going Pole-to-Pole. This unique tour is for our members, if you enjoy flying Turboprops and Business jets then Elite Air Taxi may be what you are looking for. Head over to http://www.flyelite.net and give us a try. Elite Air Taxi is a fictional virtual airline simulating the operations of Business Jets and Turboprops in Part 135 operations and smaller piston-powered airplanes in managed aircraft operations (wet-lease.) Membership requires a single introductory flight in a piston power aircraft before our entire fleet is open to members in a free flight environment. Elite Air Taxi also has a professional division open after your introductory flight that closely resembles actual operations to include type ratings. Elite Air Taxi is open to users of FSX, P3D, Xplane, and MSFS (2020.) We provide an ACARS system (SmartCARS) so as long as your sim can output via FSUIPC or XPUIPC to SmartCARs you can enjoy our programs.
  4. Yes we are. http://www.flyelite.net We have started adding repaints for MSFS. The B350 is done and I have almost got the CJ4 buttoned up. We have changed our operations slightly, last year our membership voted for freeflight so there is no more entrance exam. Fly 1 hour in a piston power airplane and after that you have access to the entire fleet. For those who want a more structured experience we offer Elite Professional Division which will have you work on type ratings and only flying realistic routes. You can also come check us out on Discord. https://discord.gg/xRWssAM -Ken
  5. That is really interesting as the only way we were able to figure it out was to do it manually. With an automated system there was a problem of where was the touchdown zone. Because of the various platforms (FSX, XP, P3D) trying to find one overall solution was difficult. If you compared a member's touchdown with real-world data there may be an issue of scenery. An airport may have added a displaced threshold and older default scenery did not have the right runways or the scenery was misaligned with the actual location. The only solution we could come up with was to read the scenery installed on someone PC and build a database based on that. That way the threshold was based on what the member was actually seeing. The cost of building an ACARS program that could do all of that across all of the platforms we wanted was quoted in the thousands of Euros. That would be for a one-up development without any updates only bug fixes. Needless to say a few thousand Euros for a one-off ACARS that only added a few features that other systems did not already provide for a much lower cost was not cost-effective.
  6. Do you even know how most ACARS capture landing rates? Most of the ACARS use what is called the "on ground" flag to capture the landing rate, this is the flag set internally by the sim to state that the aircraft is on the ground. Then the capture is based on the fps on the user's computer at the likely landing rate. Thus if you are getting 30 fps on your machine it is the instant 1 / 30 of a second of the landing. The moment the flag is set on. Real airplanes don't land in 1 / 30 of a second. A landing consists of the flare, the touchdown, and the rollout. Real airplanes have gear that compresses on touchdown and tires that deform. All of these things work together in a real airplane to convert the pilot's flare and touchdown into a smooth feeling landing that occurs over many seconds as each individual tire contacts the pavement and energy is absorbed. I have witnessed perfectly good landings get reported as outrageously high landing rates by these ACARS monitoring programs. Some Add-on Flight Dynamics are just better than others when it comes to transitioning on and off the runway. Add-on weather can also play real havoc as winds suddenly change with a METAR update and the airplane basically encounters a low-level wind shear during the flare. Finally, the rate of landing is only part of the consideration in landing. The more important factor is putting the airplane down in the touchdown zone. I have seen Reddit video after video where neophytes brag about butter smooth landings yet chew up over half the runway attempting it. I see these videos and think "epic fail" as that landing would never be acceptable IAW the ATP ACS. Notice the standards say nothing about touchdown rate. As long as the landing does not exceed the limits in the applicable AFM it is an acceptable landing. However, we do prefer not to make every landing a firm landing. The problem is there is no easy flag to grab for the ACARS systems to determine if the landing occurred in the landing zone. So all VAs become slaved to this landing rate which really is a micro snapshot in time and does not capture the entire landing. At Elite Air Taxi I had a member who was concerned about getting nailed by SmartCARs for bouncing the landings. I told the member I was not too worried because during the landing sequence they probably barely touched one tire as they continued to flare and the ACARS caught that as a bounce as opposed to what we typically think of as a bounce. However, we did cover the appropriate approach speed for the weight of the airplane and discovered he was trying to landing at too high of an approach speed. (He pulled a set of reference speeds for the airplane, but the version being simulated had modifications that lowered VREF.) Once he started flying the correct speeds he got rid of the ACARS bounced landing and more importantly he started putting the airplane down where he was aiming. Now he is able to enjoy the sim and has even moved on to short field landings. To me, this learning process is much more important than any artificial landing rate recorded by an ACARS system which is not capturing the entire landing. If someone learns something, then I call that a good day and will continue to accept whatever number an ACARS system spits out for landing rate. At the end of the day, this software is a very low fidelity simulation of flight and does not come close to the capabilities of the Full Flight Simulators that I teach in. Too many people try to make this desktop software something that it is not and hold people to artificial standards that may not even be achievable on their machines.
  7. Here is a link to the site that sells the Random Job Generator. https://www.crazycreatives.com/downloads/random-job-creator/ Buy from Crazy Creatives at your own risk these days. The developer has not been heard from in well over six months so there is no support if you run into trouble.
  8. That would require a fairly customized version of the software that runs the websites. Most of the software works on the hub and spoke system in which pilots and aircraft are assigned to a single hub and they fly out and back routes. There is software from Crazycreatives Connecting Routes Searce for phpvms that will allow you to have up to 3 stops between two airports, but the schedule would have to support that. The other option is Random Jobs (which I have on my VA) that allows pilots to designate a departure airport and the system will slowly create a number of possible jobs departing that airport. The problem with Crazycreatives is their owner has not been heard from since December 2019 so until he comes back I would be very cautious of buying new modules. The other issue is phpvms 7 is close to release and right now none of the old modules will work with the new phpvms.
  9. They are all the same because in reality there is only a handful of serverside software that helps someone who is not a web programmer put together a VA. Unless you can spend thousands of dollars on a completely custom solution then you have to make compromises. No VAs are not and never will be realistic. No matter how hard the staff tries there are limitations.
  10. It's a VA, of course, it is a money pit. But, my time is worth something as well. There would have to be a huge benefit to learning a whole new system to change to AWS or a VPS as opposed to just shared hosting. Sure lower cost has some benefits with AWS, but that seems like a lot of work without hearing from someone who is successfully running phpvms on AWS. I don't want to be a guinea pig either.
  11. I am with a small hosting company now that specializes in hosting for VAs using phpvms. The problem is they are a small company and at least once a year they get blacklisted. Someone buys into the shared hosting and either does not setup security correctly or purposely causes trouble. Once a server ends up on a blacklist it takes months to clear everything up. That is why I am looking for an alternative host and considering a bigger company. I suspect that a server farm managed by GoDaddy will not stand for being blacklisted. I am on shared hosting now and that should be all that is needed for a VA. A VPS is five times more expensive and what will I gain from the VPS over a shared host? I think there are other things I can be spending my money on other than a VPS host. I was researching here: https://hostadvice.com/ for best customer reviews. But what you often don't see are the details such as Cpanel access, ability to select php version, and management of php. I ended up with the wrong server solution early in setting up the VA and I want to be careful making the jump to another hosting solution. Thank you for the advice.
  12. Thank you, but I am a pilot not an IT professional. AWS may be the best solution but it complicated setup and pricing plans make it too difficult. I am also not a fan of traffic based pricing model as I don't want blip of high traffic to create a large monthly bill. I am more insterested in hosts that provide free and easy transfer service.
  13. We have been with our current server for three years now, however, due to issues (blocked access, slowdowns, etc), we are considering transferring to a new host when our contract comes due again. Does anyone have experience with running phpvms 5.5.2 on A2 or Godaddy servers? I prefer to keep the server in North America. Thank you, -Ken
  14. Elite Air Taxi a free Virtual Airline that specializes in Part 135 Business Aircraft operations is celebrating the release of the PMDG 747NGXu by offering free flight in the BBJ for the rest of the month of November. Once a new member completes the joining requirements passing the technical and practical exams they can jump right into the left seat of the BBJ (737-800.) Elite Air Taxi is a Virtual Airline (VA) of like-minded aviation enthusiasts who enjoy simulating flight operations utilizing personal computer-based flight simulation such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) Flight Simulator X (FSX and FSX: STEAM), Prepar3D (P3D) and X-plane. Elite Virtual concentrates on U.S. Federal Aviation Regulation Part 135 on-demand executive passenger operations utilizing Business Aircraft (Biz Jets.) While Elite Virtual has a virtual headquarters at Centennial Airport (KAPA) located in Englewood, CO our operations extend globally; wherever in the world our virtual passengers wish to go. New members must complete new hire requirements to include a written technical exam and complete a 1 hour flight in the Beechcraft Baron or Mooney Acclaim. Once hired members must earn seniority by completing flights in order to fly larger equipment. Elite Air Taxi offers its members a Virtual Airline service completely for free.
  15. Looking for something a little different this summer? Elite Air Taxi might be what you are looking for. Elite simulates a Part 135 on-demand business jet and air taxi company flying everything from propeller-driven pistons to business jets. Our virtual clientele drives our operations to smaller out of the way airports exploring unique scenery with challenging approaches. We have a number of different ways of finding flights including real-world executive jet flights, constantly generated contracts, random jobs, tours, and if members still cannot find the route that they are looking for then they can create their own routes. Since our crews operate in the high-profile executive and limited oversight air taxi operations, we do have entrance requirements. New members must pass an open book written and complete an entrance flight demonstrating their abilities to operate twin-engine aircraft. Access to larger airplanes is through seniority which must be earned through flying with Elite. Our company is driven by an Operations Specification which is a document that the FAA provides to a real-world company telling the company what they can and cannot do. We have a Flight Standard Operating Procedures (FSOP) and abide by FAR Part 135. Although there are rules, we consider ourselves a moderate VA. Not quite a fly anything at anytime style but not too regimented. Flight tracking is through SmartCARs which is provided by Elite. This allows you to fly your simulator of choice (FSX, P3D, or Xplane.) We have forums and a Discord server. Give us a visit at http://www.flyelite.net -Ken General Manager Elite VA FAA certificated CFI, CFII, MEI AOPA Member 01255846
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