Over the weekend, we had 2 different VAs to take it upon themselves to try and get in the Top 5 list on the home page. While being on this list is good for you VA, the way in which they tried is not acceptable. Each VA had a member vote their respective VA with a 5 rating and then turned around and rated the remaining Top 5 VAs with a 1 rating. This serves no purpose other than to try and benefit themselves. Each VA was notified and a few members rating privileges were taken away.

The rating system is supposed to be a simple way for other to see how people view your VA. The problem is that when people take it upon themselves to trash other VAs for no reason its takes away from the other VAs. Should we remove the VAs who are doing this from the site or just ban their members? Should we give them warnings? Should we just ignore it as turnabout is fair play? The current stance is that if you are caught, your rating rights will be removed. We have close ...

Our Paint Shop has done pretty well so far out of the gate. Jeff Stewart has delivered our first repaint, a KingAir 300, to Alaska Adventures. We have several aircraft in the queue and we are working hard to get them delivered for our customers.

One of the cool features that has already been used is the Template Gallery. In the gallery, you will find different paint schemes that are there for your choosing. If a VA likes the scheme, it can become yours just by asking. This helps VAs find things they like and dont like and might even help them with a a custom scheme.

We look forward to helping the VA community in their fleet painting needs. Thanks to all who have signed up, now its off to work with my can of spray paint!

Anytime you have a website it can be seen by anyone in the world. I decided to take a look at the geography of the visitors to see where people are coming from to visit. Here is a top 10 list of countries that are visiting vahangar.com.

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Germany
6. Ireland
7. Netherlands
8. Turkey
9. Thailand
10. South Africa

As you can see, we people from all over the world visiting our site. I found this pretty interesting and wanted to share it with everyone to show just how diversified we are in the FS community. Here are some countries that are outside the top 10: New Caledonia, Senegal, China, Egypt, and Brazil.

Thanks to all have co ...

After a lot of planning, the Paint Shop is finally open. With the help of Pete McCay of VAWorld and Jeff Stewart from Dogceek Airlines, we are staffed and ready to paint some aircraft. 

Opening the Paint shop required a lot of planning and give and take by all involved. We all agreed not to paint real world schemes. This is not because we do not like them but from the ramifications that could come with painting them. Real world airlines do not take kindly to using their likeness without permission plus there are other sites that a re loaded with real world schemes. We also had to take into consideration new VAs. New VAs do not always have the resources to get them off the ground. We have put in place the ability to help VAs before they are even open. This should be good for new VAs. We can also help well established VAs in modifying their fleet or creating a paint scheme for a special occasion.

It’s been almost two month since we opened our doors and what a fun two months it’s been. Our listing database now has just under 100 listings. We are still contacting new VA's each week to try and build our database. It’s slow going but we will eventually have most of the VA's listed. While our listings have slowed in recent weeks, we have stayed busy.

We recently launched the Featured Airline section and it has been a big hit. The comments have all been positive with pilots telling us they like the idea as ...

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 ...