the future of air-child

Christopher Bennett

Christopher Bennett

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Beta Team
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Today 1:59 PM
Hello everyone,

I have been able to reach both Norbert and Peter and have spoken to them about the future plans for air-child.

Unfortunately, both of them have been struggling with the results of the world economic crisis for some time now and as a direct result of that have to invest more time into their respective businesses that in turn is leaving very little to no time at all for air-child.

Just before Christmas 2016 Norbert and Peter had discussed the future for themselves and decided that either they would place air-child in able and willing hands of others or would have to shut down air-child.

When I started as a Pilot here in 2009 it was because of the charity program which I found no other virtual airline had at the time and was completely blown away by the concept of combining my hobby and helping others.
I had already worked with Peter and Norbert then to help out where I could but became quite busy with work and life. Nonetheless, I have always maintained my membership even though it has become to mostly lurking around over the past few years.

Either way, I have quite a lot of spare time on my hands nowadays and got together with a few other members here and a few friends that have also run a virtual airline with me in the past and we all decided that it would a terrible shame to let such a great project die because the founders no longer have time to maintain it.

So I approached Norbert and Peter with our offer of stepping up and taking over for them. Please bear in mind that we in no way intend to relieve them but to help them keep their “baby” alive and kicking through these hard times they are experiencing. Although they are stepping away from air-child right now to focus on their personal lives and the lives of their employees they will always be the founders and I hope that once they have more time again they will return to air-child in a staff capacity, that is however up to them to decide.

Norbert and Peter have signaled their appreciation of our offer and will discuss over the next few days what they need in order to turn over the administration of air-child to us. I would like to outline our plan and what will change for you.

First, we plan to inform all members by personal email of what has been going on and what the future may bring.

Next, we will contact all the Charity Partners and inform them of the situation so they are informed as well.

We will then be offering staff positions to select members to fill critically needed Staff Positions - Watch the Forum for the Announcements.

Over the next few weeks, we will take some time to get into the code of the front and back end of the website and identify the hot spots that need to be worked on as soon as possible. We plan to modernize the Website front and back end as well as the forum software to get it up to today's standards and enhance your experience with air-child. However, this will be a long-term project.

We will also be adding new hubs and new routes as well as new fleet aircraft to make air-child as an airline more attractive to new users as well as the current membership. Please do let us know if there are destinations/hubs/aircraft you are missing in the current lineup.

I have already set up a TeamSpeak server today and will post the details on how to log-in to it in a separate Topic.

After all that is done we will also try to acquire new partners for the charity program in order to raise even more money for UNICEF.

I hope this has provided you with some much-needed clarification of the future and the background of why air-child has almost come to a complete still stand.

My request to you would be to give me and the new staff team a bit of time to get settled in so that we can get started and get you all the information you may need

That being said I wish you all a happy new year and am looking forward to hearing you on TS or in the Air.
 
Sounds good Christopher, let me know if I can support you. My offer to support the relaunch and also to set a staff member it's always on go.
 
Good news, thanks to all for this information and all the best for Norbert and Peter.

asking about planes: IXEG 737 :D

I will stay here and will do like in the past: only one membership and that's AirChild :oops:
 
It sounds like our VA has gotten the kiss of life then...

So first of all my appreciation for those who have taken this task upon them.

I have some questions for Christopher(maybe it's early days for some):
- will the policies stay the same? I mean the relaxed atmosphere, no obligations, no fees etc.?
- will the new site stay accessible and enjoyable for pilots without social media accounts(like me)?
- will we keep X-Plane compatibility? I've heard this will be quite some task because XAcars has given up coding for newer X-Plane versions. So we would have to build our own ACARS for it.
- will the new site be heavier to run(hardware wise)? Some of these modern social media filled sites kill my Firefox every time... Making a flight plan on a heavy site while running FSX would be impossible for some(like me).

I could offer some help, like with graphics or texts. But I think this will come when the plans for the new site have developed a bit more. It depends a bit if I fit in with the technologies it will use etc.
 
Martin Laengle said:
Good news, thanks to all for this information and all the best for Norbert and Peter.

asking about planes: IXEG 737 :D

I will stay here and will do like in the past: only one membership and that's AirChild :oops:
Click to expand...

IXEG 737 Repaints will be done yes, I don't know when they will be completed at the moment as we have to see who from the repaint team will want to stay
 
Barthe Hogenboom said:
It sounds like our VA has gotten the kiss of life then...

So first of all my appreciation for those who have taken this task upon them.

I have some questions for Christopher(maybe it's early days for some):
- will the policies stay the same? I mean the relaxed atmosphere, no obligations, no fees etc.?
- will the new site stay accessible and enjoyable for pilots without social media accounts(like me)?
- will we keep X-Plane compatibility? I've heard this will be quite some task because XAcars has given up coding for newer X-Plane versions. So we would have to build our own ACARS for it.
- will the new site be heavier to run(hardware wise)? Some of these modern social media filled sites kill my Firefox every time... Making a flight plan on a heavy site while running FSX would be impossible for some(like me).

I could offer some help, like with graphics or texts. But I think this will come when the plans for the new site have developed a bit more. It depends a bit if I fit in with the technologies it will use etc.
Click to expand...

Hello Barthe,
  • Policies will remain as they are now. I have no intention to change a running system ;)
  • Yes the new site will be accessible and enjoyable for those of you without social media accounts.
  • we will most definitely try to keep compatibility to X-Plane, I don't know how we will manage that at this moment though. (Perhaps someone here will provide us with a client that builds up on XAcars)
  • the new site should not be taxing your system any harder than the current site, hopefully even less.

Your offer to help is noted and we will be contacting you as soon as we are settled and know what we need.
 
Thank you for your quick and reassuring answers Christopher!

As for X-Plane, Jesco Freund offered to do something about it. But he went away some days ago because he thought our VA was dead....
Due to the story on ACARS availability for XP, other VAs supporting X-Plane have resorted to building their own ACARS scripts (as in X-Plane, you can easily put something together either in Python or Lua). In case XACARS does not work with XP11 (which I'm about to test), I could imagine writing an ACARS client in Python for ACH - but I would only tackle this if there's some need other than mine, and if I can get in touch with the ACH staff to align on the interface.
Click to expand...
Maybe you can contact him and ask if he'll come back?
 
About the IXEG:
I have a repaint for AirChild which Jesco painted, so If someone can upload it to our repaints .....
 
Hi to all,

the amount of offers to help during the last 48 hours is really impressive. Thanks so far and as well for the first hints.

The appearance of our homepage has to be polished for sure, but this has not the highest priority. It is more urgent to bring up to date the things that can be read. As soon as we have the administrative rights on that, we will bring the website content up to date - and hopefully keep it there.

Beside the special projects, which have to be evaluated, there are a few common points, where everyone can help:

1. Everyone who reads this should tell every other airchild-pilot he knows on every possible way, that a restart is taking place.

2. Start to live this forum. Give us your ideas and your comments to our ideas. Nobody will be blamed for a post not formed in English language on highest level.
For those, who are on facebook, follow us on the
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. The facebooksite has less likes than the airchild pilots :(

3. For those, who are flying online on any network: Please take part in the several online-events whenever possible. Bring the ACH... callsign back into the virtual skyes on a noticable amount.

That brings me to a point, where I need help from a special group of pilots. Gents, flying on IVAO, please post the upcoming events in your vicinity into the airchild-online chapter of the forum.

Thanks so far, stay tuned
 
I may get some more pilots by flying on pilotedge. Using air child and in flightplan it's a link to our va which maybe gives us more pilots too. Any chances of getting routes in theire coverage area? It's Los Angeles artcc. Half california. Would be cool.to have some small aircraft routes there :)
 
Hi Christopher,

Good to hear ACH is not as dead as I feared :)
Christopher Bennett said:
IXEG 737 Repaints will be done yes, I don't know when they will be completed at the moment as we have to see who from the repaint team will want to stay
Click to expand...

Already done, I couldn't resist once I got hold of the paint kit. In fact, I did a couple of repaints for X-Plane models (IXEG 737, Rotate MD-88, RW Design DHC-6), but I could not avail them in the hangar (found noone to push them there). So as a temporary solution, they're availed via Google Drive:
Rotate MD-88: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxxOX-8RP7qMa3d6NVQzR2hUa3M
IXEG 737-300: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxxOX-8RP7qMSTUzTjFveEd4SGs
RW Design DHC-6: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxxOX-8RP7qMTF9VZzg2Z3VQYzg

I initially planned to do a paint sprint for X-Plane, but as response was quite low and some of the liveries I intended to do where already available at X-Plane.at, I did not follow up on this activity.

On top of that, I have re-done the paint kit as vector graphics in order to facilitate the creation of high resolution liveries (and they might come in handy when doing a facelift for the website, as you also find the logo as SVG in the pack):

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BxxOX-8RP7qMNHBIWWh0YW9oSUk
Barthe Hogenboom said:
Thank you for your quick and reassuring answers Christopher!

As for X-Plane, Jesco Freund offered to do something about it. But he went away some days ago because he thought our VA was dead....
[...]
Maybe you can contact him and ask if he'll come back?
Click to expand...

I would love staying with ACH as there's now a future perspective - given X-Plane will stay on the list of supported simulators. Here's what I can offer to do or work on together with others (some of that is perhaps too big for one guy):
  • Repaints for X-Plane aircrafts
  • Backend coding for the website*
  • Development of a training centre**
  • Plugin stuff for X-Plane (e. g. ACARS client rewrite or similar)

However, please keep in mind I also have a full time job and a family to take care of, and from time to time I also simply want to fly ;) So the capacity I can pour into these tasks is limited; we'd need to set some priorities about what's really urgently needed.

Cheers
Jesco

* I can offer some experience with Django and Python including automated integration & deployment, but I do not have any PHP experience (at least not since the days of PHP 4.1, and that was evil stuff back then...)

** Certainly not a top notch priority, just something going around in my head for a while. But maybe it's better kept as a stand-alone project, not tightly integrated into the ACH website (e. g. on a subdomain). Too bad I have no clue about plugin development for FSX or P3D, so I can only cover the XP part here...
 
Jesko,

thx for the short reply. We are just looking around, who of the members who offered help in former times are still willing and able.

We are working on a roadmap and we will come back to you soon.
Thanks again
 
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