Me and a friend of mine are thinking of Making First Choice Virtual for Vatsim as i know that First Choice was a popular airline. I was wondering would anyone join as a pilot or even our staff team? It doesn't have to be First Choice Virtual, We were also thinking about BMI or Thomas cook.

Hi Dale,I can give you a couple of bits of advice having done this myself a few years ago, then watched it fail... and a year or so later, re-built our virtual airline (Virtual Blue1) sorry, it's only in finnish.1) Make sure you choose an airline where there will be interest. Not to be harsh, but as posted by Clum, First Choice is covered by another very successful VA already and so trying to compete with them is not a great idea. The virtual pilots who really want to fly for that airline in the sim will already be with them - and you need a few of those committed people in your VA, otherwise it will all go wrong. If you are yourself committed to First Choice, join Thomson VA and offer to help with their administration.2) If you choose to make a VA of a real airline yourself, make contact with the airline and find out if they will allow you to run the VA with their name. Most of the time, if you are polite, and clearly have a good plan of what you wish to set up, they will give their permission. In some cases they will say no... and obviously that is very annoying but far less so than getting a few months down the line and then getting an email telling you to stop operations and/or threatening legal action for the use of the airline logos etc... this HAS really happened and some airlines have a policy of allowing NO virtual representation!3) Build a convincing website and make sure everything is working before going public - there is nothing less appealing to the prospective VA pilot than an unfinished or ininformative website! Also, once everything is working, make sure you have everything backed up etc so that if stuff goes wrong, you can recover. Our VA fell down because of a database problems followed by the person running the website giving up and then not handing over control to the next person on leaving (until 6 months later, by which time everyone had left). Also, make sure you have all the organisational aspects covered - there are lots of these and these are just what I can think of immediately:>> Timetables and how to get them to the pilots (we now have an MS Excel random roster generator working from real timetable data but that took me days of programming)>> Flight logging (FSACARS is good but you'll need to mess with the php code to make it work)>> Operating procedures, VA rules and perhaps training materials>> You probably need a forum or hosted board somewhere>> You'll want fleet repaints (but if it's a real airline, you might be able to link to the bigger file libraries, like Avsim for example!>> Web based application forms / comments messaging systems ... and this list could go on and on! 4) Make sure you understand how much work it will take to run a VA on your own. My gues is that once you understand this, your first job will be to recruit some help from the most keen of your early crop of new pilots! This is why I said you need some committed people onboard early on. A large majority of your intake will probably join, fly a few times, and then move on to other VAs... a bit like cattle grazing a field, sooner or later, there will be another patch of greener looking grass to investigate! Having said that, don't expand the management beyond the scope of the VA or it will all ge diffuse and nothing will get done. Also, don't be afraid to have a rule that says something like "You have to be active once per two months or you will be pruned from the pilot list unless you contact the admin beforehand." - and stick to these rules. A new pilot who sees a pilot list full of inactive pilots will not get a very good impression - we recently had a reqruiting and took on 14 pilots. Most of them have not started training flights and of that intake, experience tells me that only 4-5 will become active and stay.5) GOOD LUCK. I really hope you get your VA off the ground and it keeps running. You will find there are lulls in activity and people will join but not do anything, or decide to leave, but if you stick with it, it's quite rewarding.Oops - wrote a book! Hope it's useful!!Cheers,Geoff

You're killing me ...........

:( I see nothings changed much Dale. I wish you luck with this venture.Slightly off topic, my curiosity has got the better of me and I was wondering if you'd let us all know what your PC spec is now after asking numerous questions in the past.

UPDATE:Unfortanely i have had no reply from First Choice Airways so i will now be making up a virtual airline from beginning.