One of the questions I have been asked several times is Why can't I find (Insert VA Here) listed in your directory?

Since listing is voluntary, not all VA's have taken part in listing with VAhangar.com. If you do a search on Google for Virtual Airlines, the first 15 pages of VA's have all been contacted about listing. The responses from these VA's have varied widely. We have been told positive things like Great Job and The VA community needs a site like this. From the negative camp we have received I don't need your site to get new pilots and your site will be gone in 2 months.

Getting VA's to list is not always easy. We are trying to build a comprehensive list that gives VA's a place to promote their VA and also gives pilots a place to search for a VA. Since our listing is voluntary, we cannot make VA's list nor do we want to list VA's that do not want to be here. Since ...

There seems to be several qustions and concerns about the rating system so I thought I would address this in the VLOG.

The rating system is available for people to rate a particular VA and give it an overall rating between 1 and 5. We have set the rating system so each user can rate a VA but only once every 30 days. By using this, monitoring people rating, and relying on the honor system this should be enough to keep things in check. The problem is people are not always honest nor do they have honest intensions.

Recently, a VA CEO rated 17 airlines giving them all a rating of 1. This was detected and all rating by this CEO were removed. The CEO's rating privileges were removed and an email was sent explaining why he had been removed from the rating group. The CEo replied back that his brother did the rating and that I didn't know my own policy and that I was wrong. The CEO then quite and said vahanga ...

I have often wondered how Virtual Airlines and the flightsim community got so big. I can remember the days of running FS on my Commodore 64 and thinking it doesn't get much better than this. Today, I can feel as though I am actually in the cockpit and real strangers tell me where to fly if I would like. The flightsim industry has grown from a small tight knit group of guys who just want to fly to fully supportive industry. I remember the first time I flew online was using FS 98. I called a friend in another state and told him he had to get it. He was a student pilot and jumped on FS 98 faster than I thought he would. We both connected up and flew the Cessna around Chicago all the while racking up some serious Internet charges. Those were the days!

Today, Virtual Airlines are the places people go to fly with others. While most people use an online network, its the VA's that make the online flying fun. The fun with VA's lies not ...

The question has been asked a few time about how are we going to keep the VA Directory clean. This is not only a good question but a valid one. The Virtual Airline community is not so much different than the real commercial Airline industry. There are so many pilots available and each pilot wants the best benefits and they also want to feel comfortable and secure in the airline they choose. A good guess would put the average VA life span around 6 months. Why they only last 6 month is another discussion entirely but a short version boils down to time, money, and resources.

So, how do we keep the directory clean?  As new VA's are listed, they are not only added to the directory but to monitoring software that allows us to monitor each VA's website for changes. We look at each VA's VAhangar.com page to make sure it has been changed from the default page when they were listed. At the first of each month, we will scan all listed VA's to ...

Our first week has been a success. We have had over 60 members join and currently have 40 VA's listed in the VA Directory. This is well above expectations. We are glad people are signing up and listing their VA's. Our hopes are that this site will become a one stop shop for all things VA related. We are still the new guy on the block but I thank all of you for joining and hope our ads bring you some new pilots.

Our site has been met with some skepticism though. We have had a lot "Why are you doing this?" and "What’s in it for us?" type questions. Let’s see if we can clarify some of these questions. The whole point of this site is to give VA's a place of their own on the Internet. VA's tend to have spaces on other sites but nothing dedicated to them. Don't get me wrong, the spaces available on other sites are great and highly appreciated, but I just think a place that conce ...