Chris from Angle of Attack

Hey all, I'm glad the majority of you are finding the training useful. Producing a course of that size at the time was very difficult to do. Both our 737 and 777 courses are quite in depth and offer a one-stop-shop for most of the knowledge you'll need flying the aircraft. Of course, you can go out and try and get what you want from Youtube. There is some pretty good stuff out there- even I admit it. That said, it's not all-in-one place, and not all of it is professionally produced. In other words, to be able to find everything is one spot, and not have to keep searching around, is one of the highest values of these packages. Also, you're learning from actual pilots when you're consuming our content- not flight simmers who got their knowledge from someone else. Too often I've found that Youtubers are good at some things, but leave me baffled at others. BTW, Jason Sokoloff of AOA has been continually producing content for the 737 for a few years now. 737 LineWork has over 55 episodes now, packed full over very, very advanced techniques. We're talking hundreds of hours of additional content here. If you haven't checked it out, it's worth doing so! He regularly releases updates to that course. If you guys have an additional questions, feel free to reach out to me directly at [email protected] and I'd like to answer any questions you may have. We know that with some effort and focus, using our courses can transform the way you fly simulated airliners. Throttle On!

Thanks a million, man! I really appreciate that. Big thanks! Really hope you get to enjoy that beautiful bird. Don't forget, you can make it less daunting for yourself by getting our Aviator90 series.

Michael, you can contact support. You'll be taken care of. Doesn't help to say it here when we're really the people that can help you. We do appreciate your business, and we always recognize your name when it comes up. We don't do had products. It's a logistical nightmare, and just doesn't work out that great. Our company is a bit too small to be doing that. The demand for it just isn't as high as you'd think, so we put our effort into things online. Yes. It's honestly a lot of getting riled up for nothing, if you ask me. Yeah, whatever. You're making this into a much bigger deal than it is. Had you read what I wrote earlier about our policies and why, you'd see that we're not pulling moves like AT&T to increase our margins. This is something we HAVE to do to survive. It's fun to come and rail on FS Companies, as for some reason we seem big and bad. I can tell you that most FS Companies aren't big, or bad, and the small things matter. This isn't something we've wanted to do. It's something we HAVE to do. Yeah, we're not EA... You get it! Thanks!

No, actually, it's free. Completely free. I have thousands of people watching these videos that don't pay a dime. And I love it! Because of a reason you suggested "My blog is not a lesson in doing things right. It is the frustration of a newbie trying to figure out the basics. When I look back at it now, it is actually rather embarrassing. There simply was a lot of stuff I did not know, and more experienced flight simmers never thought were important enough to mention. Of course, these are the things which are critical to understand (like the 250 speed limit below 10,000 feet). One of the biggest problems with people who have been doing this for a while is they overcomplicate things. Very few of them know how to get to the point, how to strip out the extraneous garbage and just tell you what you need to know to get started. At the same time, there is a tendency to leave out important details, because, for them, those details are so routine as to seem unimportant. Many of these people thrive on complexity and making things as difficult as possible. The end result is they end up confusing people." Doing an ILS to begin with is really, really overcomplicating things. An ILS is an advanced maneuver taught to people that are already competent in landing the aircraft visually. And ILS does NOT take you all the way to the ground, so how are you going to land in those last few hundred feet? Listen, I really appreciate you trying to help this guy out, but you're being super confusing and contradicting. I want other people to jump in here and back me up, because this is borderline ridiculous to say you can't land without an ILS. I can tell you aren't a real pilot, but I can tell you've learned a thing or two. If it were me, I would want to be starting out with the basics. ILS is NOT part of the basics. I would also want to be learning from actual pilots. It's up for other people to decide, but it's clear where the real experience is here. And I think that's who most people want to learn from, bypassing years of confusion.

This is totally inaccurate. We have a free course called Aviator90 that is absolutely perfect for you, and goes through all the basics of flying in a video course. 45 videos, all taught by real pilots (mostly me). Come on over, you have nothing to lose. www.Aviator90.com Checkout Aviator90. You'll love it. I would wait on this stuff. You've got to learn to land and take off first, do maneuvers, and so on. ILS is actually quite advanced, and you need a good grasp of the machine to do simple things like descend on glideslope.

Yup! It's available. Both download links should work.

I would go ahead and look again. www.777Training.com is vague, but you aren't actually entering card information there. The checkout pages themselves are incredibly clear as to what you get, how it's delivered, and so on, don't to how many minutes of video you get. So I invite you to look at the bullet points again. It's very, very clear. Certainly not as realistic, though. But it's great.

I don't have any plans on changing the way this works. It works quite well. If people aren't serious about the product at all, then it's probably not going to work out anyway. This isn't a SaaS where you get a certain amount for free, forever. Like Dropbox and 2GB. It's a full product that gives you a glimpse into the training. I've had to enter my card details plenty of times before hand, knowing that if I didn't like the trial, then I needed to manually back out. This is the case for many of the services we pay for to run the business. Understood. We'll be enabling this in the future. It's worked out well for 777. But in order to do so, we'll need to code things up a bit different and that'll take a bit of time.

For anything that isn't 'buy now', so basically all the trials, PayPal is not currently available. We will be turning on this functionality for a 'buy now' options with the NGX here in the near future. But if you jump in the trial, then contact support, we can basically eliminate the trial and get you started. Can I give you a hug?... THANK YOU! We believe it's a MUCH easier way for everyone. Intense, huh? To be 100% honest, we realized that we had a reputation to repair. We really got our act together with the 737 eventually, but it was too late for the community to see that. Our team is truly impressive. And yes, 100% of the training is done and complete in GroundWork, and the rest of FlightWork is already being worked on. Really appreciate your business, Gavin. Thanks for all your support.

Thank you! We've put a lot of money, time and effort into this website. We've been working on it since may. It's SO much easier for customers to use, and to take care of themselves and their account. And it's so much easier to get into the training. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. At all. Almost any website you use as a service will take a credit card up front for you to get in the trial. You aren't charged, you can cancel any time, and there's really no risk. We don't see the issue here at all. There's honestly no risk in your corner, yet there is STILL cost in our corner if you decide to bug out. We're confident that you'll really enjoy the training once you're in, which is why we offer the trial.

You get several hours of training by enrolling in the trial. There is a preview video at www.777Training.com, although it's not live for all viewers, just half of them. (we are changing that) Your card isn't actually charged when you do a trial. You can cancel any time, and you are not charged at all. So honestly, theres's really zero risk. This is how our system work, and it works quite well. Much different than it had worked in the past. Glad to see the people are recognizing we worked our butts off to release this training in full. Nick still has some work to do in FlightWork, but that's a done deal. GroundWork 100% done on day 1 is what we've been shooting for all along this past year. And although we weren't able to hit day 1 (we didn't get a copy of the 777 early enough, darn!) we did get AWFULLY close. Really proud of our team for all they've done to make that happen. Thanks, Robert! It's worth noting at this point that our new streaming system actually detects your steam, and delivers the top quality video available. It also makes sure that your video goes un-interrupted. How are we a rogue developer? I have a feeling you're just making noise right now. We haven't screwed our previous customers. They got full access to their downloads (those stragglers are being taken care of by support) and no one is going without. Additionally, those members still have full access to streaming versions in the infinite future. So I find it hard to see how we're screwing our customers when A. we've given them (are giving them) what we promised and B. we're trying to stay in business. I don't know how hard understand how massive of a library this much video is, but it is a tremendous amount of data, and it's sucking us dry. There's nothing else to be said (although I'm sure I'll have to). This is not something I WANT to do, but something we HAVE to do. I'd rather just keep it simple and not have to be writing this, believe me. AND We made our 777 Training a lower cost so those that DID want to get the downloads could add them on, and not be any poorer for it compared to other products. And those that don't need downloads don't get charged for it. It goes both ways. It's still not cheaper. You're talking about DVD production houses that require a thousand copies minimum, at a premium. On top of that, we'd then be in the distribution business, which takes a completely different business model. We've done DVDs in the past. That's how we started out. Those were the good old days. However, it's not the way to go anymore. Everything is going digital, and we cannot shoulder THAT burden either. We decided to go all digital for our customers- Instant Access, No Broken Shipments, etc. Good thought, though.

First off, I want to start off by saying that I haven't read through all the comments. I'm sure that many of the questions and comments are things I have directly answered for our customers that have reached out to us over the last week. We've gone through a lot of support tickets, a lot of comments on the blog, and a number of other sources as well. Before any of you jump to any further conclusions about the downloads, I offer you our official support article on this subject: http://support.flyaoamedia.com/customer/portal/articles/1291842-unlock-downloads-and-paying-for-downloads Now that you've read that, and potentially put some of the rumors to rest, let me tell you with my own words what is going on here. We have a MASSIVE offering with our training packages. Our 737 Training is just under 35 hours (34 hours and 58 minutes, to be exact... not including LineWork). You can imagine that HD video of that size is quite a large, large set of data. Generally speaking, HD video runs about 1GB per hour. Now knowing that our product(s) are some of the largest, if not the largest, in flight simulation in relation to file size, you can see that AOA has a very unique challenge that not a lot of other companies have. We are not a large publishing house like FTX, are are not Flight 1 or Aerosoft or even a Flight Sim Store. We're a fairly small company, a niche of a niche, and costs are super, super important for us to watch. Recently I enabled a new analytics tool that showed me some shocking data- customers are coming back year after year, and taking their training again. At first my reaction was, 'This is really great! We'd love to have them back!'. But then I realized that our downloads were open, forever and for always, to our customers. My foresight at the time of offering these downloads didn't allow me to see that I'd be constantly devaluing our company, and continually running up the cost-per-unit. Already the costs for downloads were high, but we wanted to offer an experience that anyone could enjoy. So we did- without giving a second thought to the data costs. However, as time has gone on, and we've learned more about how our business runs, and how to stay profitable and survive, we have had to make some tough choices, and get real about this downloads situation. Our plan with the new website was to offer these downloads for customers that have purchased within the previous 6 months. Customers that were outside the 6 months we assumed had already downloaded their files, and wouldn't need to be downloading again anyway. Quickly we learned that wasn't the case, and customers that bought the 737 Training when it first came out still needed to finish downloading their training. Very soon after that, we contacted all past package owners, and let them in to get the downloads for free. If Angle of Attack is to stay alive and vibrant, we simply cannot run up the costs, and continually devalue our company because trainees want to take part in the training every year. Our streaming versions remain 100% open and free for always. Streaming costs, unlike downloads, are a completely different thing. We've heard people say, "these are the same videos. Why is streaming any different than downloads?" From a data delivery stand point, streaming is completely different than downloads. We pay for our streaming services on a per-view/storage size basis. We pay for downloads on a byte-for-byte basis. Streaming one of our videos is simply one less time we can serve that video, with the allotted views we have. Serving a download is byte-for-byte cost. It would be nice if we could offer downloads straight from our servers. However, this would be unrealistic because of the international nature of this hobby, and the world-wide customers we have. Not only would our servers get slammed and make the website unusable, but it would mean that people that are far away from that server location would experience painfully slow downloads. Therefore, we have to serve our downloads on a content delivery network, or CDN. A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that act as delivery points for our content. That means that when you request to download a video, you're getting it from down the street, and not from a server across the world. The speeds are much faster, and you can get to your training faster. CDN services, however, are not free. You can imagine that a company running such a large network of servers has to charge something reasonable for this service. And although the prices per GB are worth it, it's still a lot of money when added up over the course of a training package, and multiplied by the number of users taking part in that training. As far as our obligations to past customers, we have given them what they asked for. They have their downloads. Apart from a few minor issues we are chasing down with our current website (I saw some of you were complaining about them) we have given access to all of those videos. If you read the article above, you will have seen several key points. 1, the videos are available always on streaming. 2, follow files, diagrams, transcripts and other supporting documents will forever be free. 3, past customers and new customers that were promised the downloads have been offered or are getting the downloads. For those that have contacted our support, they have seen swift support regardless of the influx of tickets we've had. They have also seen a lot of the issues with some of the files to be fixed. We have a large content library to manage, and so the help from the community letting us know where things are amiss has been incredibly helpful. If you have an issue with the new website, or with the downloads, or with anything else, you're welcome to write our support. We're quite helpful, reasonable, and fast to get to you. However, by complaining about it here, it does nothing. We are busy supporting people that want to be helped, and are reaching out. Our team doesn't have the time to scour the forums and make sure that everyone is getting what they need. We recognize that there have been issues getting started with the new website, and we apologize for that. We completely changed out website because it was not user friendly before, and simply caused way too many issues. Moving to a new system means users having to learn a new system too, so we thank you for your patience. At the end of the day, you're going to find your training easier than ever before to learn and take part in. This transition is a little difficult, but for those who have been able to get their issues fixed, it's the best experience they've had so far at Angle of Attack. We're excited for the up and coming 777 Training release. In the meantime, we look forward to ironing out the final wrinkles in the system so you all can get your downloads. Again, if you have anything you need, or trouble accessing the website, please come get a hold of us and we will help you. Thank you to all of you for your business, but most of all your morale support. It's awfully challenging in this market, but we feel our new way forward will be better and more rewarding for you as a customer. We can't wait for you to see that, and experience that. Until then, Throttle On!

I believe you're facing an anti-piracy issue here. Not accusing you of anything, but you need to take this directly to PMDG support if you have a legit copy.

Read your whole post, but only wanted to quote this particular part. Thanks so much! You're right- the single pilot environment is extremely difficult. I've mentioned several times that I have to do that, film, keep the production value up, teach, and FLY. It's actually too much, and not very safe. But it's what we have to do. I'm really glad that you enjoy our live training style. I think it's what we're going to be doing in the future, albeit, highly improved from what we're doing now. And honestly, I think we have great quality now. I just want to always be doing better. Thanks again for your wonderful words and support! I'm glad everyone is enjoying Flight #5. The first 4 flights were meant to be quite basic yet thorough. You're out of the basics now. It's time to put the big boy pants on!

He does a fantastic job, huh?! Thanks for the compliment here. I really do want to change AOA for the better, and I see myself as a humble person that is willing to change and improve continually. I'm attaching an example of GroundWork, so you can see it in action yourself. Jump forward to about 3:20 to see some of the more advanced animations and graphics we provide. I purposely chose what can often be a BORING section, to show you how interesting it can be with our tools and production quality.