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As we begin to close out 2024 with holiday celebrations, family and friend get-togethers, and preparations to ring in a new year, I wanted to take a moment to look back at what we have been able to accomplish this year while also dropping a few hints about what we are planning for the future. Our Staff Team I wanted to quickly recognize our amazing volunteer staff team members who have been wonderful with helping us to continue to grow and excel. Their hard work and dedication has allowed for us to grow to over 540 pilots with an average of 7-8 new members joining us per week. There have been many new additions to the team this year, so I wanted to take a quick moment to highlight those individuals! Hire Month – PositionName – Email May 2024 – A320 Chief PilotNathanael S. – [email protected] 2024 – B787 Chief PilotAlgernon L. – [email protected] August 2024 – B777 Chief PilotJoe D. – [email protected] October 2024 – B757 Chief PilotJadan J. – [email protected] 2024 – DC9 (MD80) Chief PilotMatt M. – [email protected] As always our full team is available to be viewed on the main website by navigating to Headquarters > Our Team (or by clicking this link), and on Discord by visiting Tech Ops > Email Tree. We do currently have some of our Chief Pilots covering various other programs to begin helping out with cutting down on response times for new type rating programs, and those can be viewed in the Discord Email Tree! If you are interested in helping to continue the growth of our VA, I encourage you to get involved on Discord, on our Forums, and to also consider applying to one of the remaining open Chief Pilot positions which can be found by following this link. 2024 Summary As many of you know, 2024 was a tremendous year for us in terms of growth as we were finally able to update our systems to a more stable platform and CMS. The new system allowed us to not only take advantage of better security and general stability, it also brought us into 2024 in terms of web features allowing us to take full advantage of our hosting capabilities to deliver more content to you at a much faster speed. This also allowed us to expand the fleet to include real world tail numbers of the active American Airlines and American Eagle fleets, as well as begin to add in some of the retired fleet tail numbers from American Airlines, American Eagle, AirCal, Reno Air, TWA, and US Airways. With the current December schedules loaded into the system along side of our expansive historic section, we now have over 25,000 available flights for you to operate with over 2,500 total tail numbers which all have their own maintenance logging functions and can be monitored on the website. Lets take a look at the numbers for this year compared to last year, while also keeping in mind that we still have a full month of operations to go! Stat2023 Result2024 Result (Through November)Total Flights2,8514,438Hours Flown7,292 hours11,427 hoursMiles Flown2,612,052 nm4,142,014 nm We were able to accomplish some pretty big things as well with completing all of the requirements to become a VATSIM partner VA, completing all requirements to officially become a registered 501(c)(3), and of course, performing our largest data migration and website improvement since our start in 2019. We could not have done any of this without every single one of you, and I wanted to extend my personal “Thank You!” to you for deciding to join our community and continue to help propel the legacy of vAAirlines into the new year, and the 5th year of operations. Moving into 2025 As we get ready to move into 2025, I wanted to take a few moments to highlight some things that we will continue to expand on to help increase activity, create an even stronger community, and propel us into celebrating our 5th year of operations! Events/Activities – Our VP of Strategic Growth, EJ D., and Director of Marketing, Jose P., have been putting together some amazing events, challenges, and activities that have begun to go live in our Discord server. These challenges include monthly screenshot competitions, pilot of the month challenges, and average landing rate challenges. We will be introducing the challenging airports competition in January which will be a quarterly challenge which will be aimed at opening up our route network to some of the most difficult approaches/airports! Jose has also put a lot of work into beginning to create a Charter announcement section that will feature some of the live charter operations that American Airlines actually flies including things like sports team movements and other special flights that are not scheduled for normal passengers. If you have not gotten involved on our Discord server yet, now would be an excellent time to do so! To join simply log into the main website and click the “Discord” link on the navigation bar to be directed to the server invite. If you do not have a Discord account yet, they are free to create and you can edit settings as you need on a server by server basis (or even channel by channel) to make sure the notifications are set just how you like them. Once you follow the initial instructions for changing your nickname you will be granted access to be able to see the complete server and begin to customize your experience. To get involved in the various events simply visit the “#get-roles” channel to begin customizing your notifications. As always, if you have any problems at all please do not hesitate to reach out to a Staff Member by either email or by utilizing the “Contact Us” feature on the main website. Thank you again for taking the time to read this update, participate in our community, and continue to grow our VA! We would not be here without you, and we do hope that your holiday season is filled with nothing but good food, great family and friend get togethers, and even more amazing memories. From all of us here at vAAirlines, and on behalf of the entire team, Happy Holidays to you and yours! One More Thing… As a gift to you, and in an effort to allow everyone to enjoy the full range of our fleet, we have unlocked the ranking restrictions on the website allowing us to go “CAT FREE” from now until January 5, 2025 @ 2359 CST. Please keep in mind that this does not remove the restriction for fleet substitutions and only removes the restriction for you to only be able to see/fly aircraft that you do not have a type rating for. Remember, CAT FREE allows you to fly any aircraft in the system regardless of your rank and/or type ratings held, but please keep in mind that all other parts of the SOPPHB (https://sop.aalva.org) do remain in effect. Also please keep in mind that red icon “Training Only” flights (also indicated with a “TRN” flight number) may not be flown unless doing so on an actual assigned checkride. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to a Staff Member! View the full article