the future of air-child

[Christopher Bennett]

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

Fabulous!
I think we could work something out concerning routes ... as soon as we have administrative rights

 

[Anders Kvamme Stemland]

Hope you get administration rights soon. I have maybe got a friend on PE to join our community too. So now I hope we will be up and running for full soon

 

[Christopher Bennett]

Hello again,

we have now settled on a date when air-child will be handed over to the new team.

It will be Friday the 20th of January 2017.

Concering the Charity Program, as far as I am informed it is still active but nothing has been done in a few months in regards to getting the donation amounts updated. More on that as soon as we have completed transition to the new team.

 

[Anders Kvamme Stemland]

Very good news

 

[Jesco Freund]

Indeed!

 

[Frank Kunath]

One step where be good. Air Child must be open for IVAO. I hope that will be possible

 

[Christopher Bennett]

Frank,

believe me it will be

 

[Frank Kunath]

Sounds great

 

[Tom Weber]

Dear pilots,
ok I understand Air Child gets new leaders. The last years I tried to help Norbert and Peter in administration. Problem was that I am not a programmer and believe me this VA needs a skilled programmer. Peter is one but he got no time to modernize ACH. And modern software is necessary for ACH. Problem will be that the programming as it is will not work in the way it should work if you switch to a modern software. So in my point of view - before new planes, routes, hubs, networks etc will be established - the new staff has to focus on the modernizing of the software for ACH, which will be a huge work, I guess.

Cheers Tom

 

[Jesco Freund]

Good morning,

It couldn't pass unnoticed that after your announcement, a lot of people are now expecting a lot of things (perhaps more than you can do in a short time, even with all the help you can get). To avoid disappointment, I suggest to transparently manage wishes and proposals made by users - i. e. simply create a kanban board (either use Trello, or install Wekan somewhere) and push all the ideas as cards into the backlog column. You can then give them an order based on priority, so people can transparently follow up what will happen soon, and what will happen later (and what will not happen at all).

If you like the idea, I can offer to set up a Wekan board on Heroku or create a Trello board and skim the forum for stuff to put in there, so you don't have to take care of that.

Cheers
Jesco

 

[Anders Kvamme Stemland]

Well. For my part it's not necessarily big changes that have to be made. Only that we get numbers on sponsors and how much donated regularly is good enough for me

 

[Jesco Freund]

Good evening,

In order to facilitate the collection, sorting and prioritization of ideas, I created a Wekan board:

https://ach-wekan.herokuapp.com/b/Ro7FoSv4wnvnzEoqD/air-child-relaunch-ideas

The board is publicly visible, but to edit content, you'll need to be added as a registered user to the board. If you send me a pm with your email address, I can send you an invitation link to join the board.

Cheers
Jesco

P. S. I skimmed the forums here and found 12 requests (fleet, routes, infrastructure, ...). I added those to the board and marked them with the pilot ID of the person who raised the topic.

 

[Barthe Hogenboom]

Well. For my part it's not necessarily big changes that have to be made. Only that we get numbers on sponsors and how much donated regularly is good enough for me

+1

As long as it's clear there's someone at the helm keeping an eye on business I'm happy.

We always had a policy to sparsely add new aircraft types. And not to add obsolete types, beautiful as they may be. I see pilots asking for 747-200 etc. These are old planes that real life airlines want to get rid of.

 

[Martin Laengle]

Hi Jesco,
thanks for the board.... I requested the 737-300 (IXEG) in the fleet, for X-Plane, not the 737-700.

Maybe you can modify this...

Thanks

 

[Jesco Freund]

Argh, shame on me! Of course it's the IXEG 733, not the 737-700 (fixed on the board).
Btw, there is a 733 in the charter fleet. Some couple of months ago, I worked with Tom on tweaking its technical data. Not PFPX quality, but the proposed fuel and ZFW are not that far now...

 

[Christopher Bennett]

dear pilots of air-child,

Chris an me had a very useful and helpful Skype-conference with Peter and Norbert.
Some technical details have to be performed during the next week, but in general, the operational handover has been done.

One of your biggest questions in the past concerned the charity-program, so I want to inform you about the state of donations.

We cannot give you the exact number of sponsors, because some of them prefer to remain anonymous. But it's between 15 and 50. The ones, who accepted to be named are listed on the homepage.
They all donate to UNICEF on an individual base some €-cent per reported flight with a individual upper limit.

So, what have you generated in the past quarters?

In 2016, we were stable or slightly above 500 € per quarter, which equals nearly 2100 € for 2016. - I think, we can really be proud of that.

As soon as we have news for you, we will post it.

Keep on flying for air-child and help to hold the donation on that amount.

 

[Christopher Bennett]

It sounds like our VA has gotten the kiss of life then...
- 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.

I have identified SmartCARS as a viable solution to this problem.

it was designed to be used with phpVMS or Jasper Bussemaker's Integrated Pirep System (IPS) but according to the developers can be modified to suit our needs. I will have to modify the database connection scripts of the Pilot Client but that should be the least of our problems since its simple PHP and MySQL.

You can have a look at the client screenshots and a list of features here

 

[Anders Kvamme Stemland]

Possible to add these aircrafts?

C172, 182, 185, 195, 208, 210 ?

 

[Jesco Freund]

The weak spot of smartCars is: it only works on Windows, not on Mac or Linux (both platforms are supported by X-Plane itself), and it is not integrated into XP (runs as a separate application connected via XPUIPC, similar to EFASS). For the time being, XACARS works just fine for XP10 and XP11, so this channel for filing PIREPs should kept open for the time being.

Once XP11 is final and Laminar publishes an updated SDK for XP11 (probably quite some time after the XP11 final release), it's maybe worth building a replacement for XACARS that runs inside XP as a plugin. As a first step, I started developing a new Python interface for X-Plane (Sandy Barbour has abandoned the one he created). This is a long-term project and will certainly not be done over night; but this could be the foundation for building an XP11 ACARS client that can be customized & skinned for ACH.

On the other hand, if we find a good (and not too pricy) off-the-shelve solution, that would spare us some work (I will work on the Python interface nevertheless as it's needed for a lot of other stuff as well).

 

[Deleted member 2137 - Ticket#2023051010000017]

Are there any news on the new website? on the new acars? It would take a nice update to Air-Child. What about new partners for Unicef?