Fly UK Online Events Review

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Fly UK Online Events Review

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Dear Fly UK Pilots and Members,

As we enter a new year the Staff have reviewed our online events and the popularity with members. First the good news: we have seen an overall increase in event attendance – last year the attendance was up by over 80% from 2013. Our mainstay events each week (IVAO on Saturday at 0700 UK local time and VATSIM on Thursday at 1400) continue to be popular; with attendance averaging approx. 6.5 (Saturday) and 5 pilots (Thursday) per event. Any members who are new to online flying are always welcome to join these: in previous years we have had attendance in the high 20’s for some events and it would be great to see this again. The flights are normally chosen to last approx. 1 ½ hours and part of the fun is the time in the cruise when we can chat to each other on Teamspeak; and the ability for all members to fly any aircraft in the Fleet, regardless of rank.

As an experiment this the year we introduced 2 new repeats of each week’s event: first VATSIM on a Tuesday at 1930 and more recently IVAO on a Sunday, initially at 1400 and then moved to 1830 UK local. Unfortunately these have not proved so popular, with average attendance of approx. 3 members for each VATSIM Tuesday repeat and only 1.5 for the IVAO Sunday. We do not see these results as disappointing, as other areas of Fly UK continue to go from strength (e.g the Flying Club, new tours and the recent codeshare agreement).

Our aim is always to use the efforts of the Staff to best meet the wishes of members, within the overall principles of this VA. As each of these extra events requires staff effort to create event webpages, forum posts and PR images, we have decided to suspend the Sunday repeats from Feb 2015 onwards while we consider the best way forward. The VATSIM Tuesday events are proving more popular this month so we will continue as long as the attendance makes it worthwhile.

We would like to gauge members’ interest in a second IVAO event each week. The team are busy with various other activities at the moment, but we will aim to carry out a poll in the forum in the near future to seek members’ views on whether there is support for an IVAO repeat and also any input on what events would be popular.

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Any questions please contact:
 

Richard Jones – richard.jones[at]flyuk.aero

Head of Online Events