VAhangar.com Blog

Whats Happening

webmaster@vahangar.com — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:00:40 GMT

Once again its been awhile since I posted anything. I will try and do better but we have been so busy.

Paint Shop: The Paint Shop continues to thrive. We are not turning out aircraft as fast as we would like but this is mostly due to more demand than resources. Besides the Paint Shop, most of the painters have their own VAs and they juggle time between them. Recently, we all got hit with either the flu bug or massive work loads at our real jobs, or like me, both. We should start cranking out the jets again soon. From the looks of the queue, we are doing pretty good. We have several repeat customers lined up. When people return thats always a good sign.

Directory: I am still working on revamping the directory. I am trying to get it so we the VAs can have more options to be found by. When I am not painting or listing people, I am working on the directory. Its a slow process but one I am slowly making progress on.

Listings: We are almost to 140 VAs. While that does not sound like a lot, we have had over 200 list. Each week this number fluctuates as we add new VAs and remove VAs that have closed or vanished. Patrick does a great job surveying the VAs and we remove the VAs that have fallen inactive so our directory stays clean and only contains known active VAs.

On the Horizon: We have plenty of ideas cooking. I hope we can announce the new ideas in the comming month. We hope the VA community like the ideas and that some VAs will actually benefit from them.

Til next time,

Jerel

VA Coordinator Hired

webmaster@vahangar.com — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:26:37 GMT

We have hired a Virtual Airline Coordinator. What does the VA Coordinator do you ask? The main role is to scan the Virtual Airline Directory and verify the VAs that are listed. Since VAs come and go fairly quickly, its important to keep the VA directory as accurate as possible. This give credibility to the directory and also give prospective pilots an accurate list of VAs from which to choose.

Patrick Hughes has been hired as our new VA Coordinator. Patrick is a military guy and should be a great fit for the position. He has already started scanning and helping out VAhangar.com.

Welcome aboard Patrick!

Jerel

Been awhile

webmaster@vahangar.com — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:04:49 GMT

So its been awhile since I posted anything here. Its can be tough to blog regularly.

Our Paint Shop is doing well and we have more requests than we have painters right now. We are cranking them out as fast as we can. We hope everyone is enjoying the service and so far the comments on our work has been great.

Our next big addition will be in the area of a Virtual Airline Coordinator. VAs come and go and in order to maintain an accurate VA Directory we must scan the VAs in the directory from time to time. We have automated tools that help us scan but these tools can not determine if the VA is active. All we can detect are page changes and if the site is still up. Just to give an idea, over the last 30 days we have removed 15 VAs from the directory just using our scanning tools.

The new coordinator will randomly check VAs to ensure that even though they are there, they are an active VA. This will help maintain an up to date directory for pilots looking for a VA. The new coordinator will also select the VAs for submission as the featured VA. All in all, this position will greatly enhance what VAhangar.com has to offer.

Thats it, I will try to write more and not go as long without posting like this last time.

Jerel

Why is it so hard...

webmaster@vahangar.com — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:49:42 GMT

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 to 500 registered users now and so far 3 have had their voting rights taken away. While that is a low percentage, its still disturbing that people feel they can rate others poorly just because they can. As I have mentioned before, if you do not know anything about a VA, how can you honestly rate it.

I have been given several suggestions as to how to make the rating system better but all of them require more time and overhead than I feel is needed. If people would just be honest and vote for VAs in an honest manner, we would not need to revamp the rating system. I would like to think everyone is honest and has honest intentions but our rating system shows that both VA members and VA CEOs will rate other VAs simply because they can and they use their own criteria to do so.

Paint Shop on its way!

webmaster@vahangar.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:52:03 GMT

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!

Where in the world are my visitors

webmaster@vahangar.com — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 16:35:28 GMT

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.

United States
United Kingdom
Canada
Australia
Germany
Ireland
Netherlands
Turkey
Thailand
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 come and visited and I hope you continue to enjoy our site!

Paint Shop Opens

webmaster@vahangar.com — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 19:54:09 GMT

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.

We hope the VA community will use and enjoy the Paint Shop. We look forward to helping your VA with their painting needs.

Jerel

O how time flies

webmaster@vahangar.com — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:57:48 GMT

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 they will see VA's they might have never found before. From the VA side, it gives the VA solid exposure for two weeks. We also have a paint shop in the works. In the very near future, we should be opening the Paint Shop to help member VA's with any painting requirements they need. We are working closely with vaworld.org to make this happen.

We are still planning on rolling out tutorials for startup VA's as well as pilots that are new to the VA world. We would like to thank everyone who has helped us get here and I look forward to our future expansion.

Why cant I find...

webmaster@vahangar.com — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:05:06 GMT

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 each VA has the ability to customize their page, this gives each VA a great chance to advertise and tell everyone about them.

If your VA is not listed here and you would like to see them listed, the best thing to do is to ask your VA to list with us. We have contacted over 200 VA's directly and will continue to contact VA's as we find new ones. Hopefully, we will build the most accurate and comprehensive list of Virtual Airlines on the Internet and maybe even get some of the Nah Sayers to join and list.

Rating System

webmaster@vahangar.com — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:51:36 GMT

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 vahangar.com was of no use to his VA and he unregistered himself from the website.

Its unfortunate the CEO reacted this was but if people rate 17 VA's with a 1 in the span of 5 minutes, actions must be taken. There is no perfect solution to rating. Eventually, enough ratings will be given to each VA dn a single vote of 1 will not drastically alter the rating of a VA. Some suggestions have been made and I will review them to see if we can improve the rating system or if we should give up and pull the rating system.

Hopefully it wont come to pulling the system and we can use the system to rate VA's as they should be rated and not rated due to spite.

Jerel