Evan Reiter

It actually is November 4-13.

Our next Getaway is Hawaii in December (4-13). After that, we traditionally head to Aspen. Norcal is on the list after that, probably during February or March 2012.

Re-posted from this month's Logan Informer. This article was written by Cpais (Claudio), one of BVA's Air Traffic Controllers. Recently, some of you may have noticed that more frequently than ever, early afternoon ATC has been available on the BVA Server. Expect to see a lot more of this ATC coverage going forward, as BVA is currently trying to utilize its European based controllers to expand peak hours into the earlier portion of the evening. To help support this goal, ATC Mentors are planning to host more training sessions during the early evening in order to get even more controllers in the session, so please be sure to come out and support our up and coming controllers whenever you can. BVA’s long-term vision is to have constant ATC online throughout the early afternoon and evening, including TRACONs actively controlled by our ATC staff starting at 1PM ET and onwards.

The ISP re-started our website/forum server briefly today to fix an issue with the mail service. This resulted in a 10 minute interruption of our website and forums. Both are now back online.

If you can find enough controllers willing to stay online until 12am ET (or beyond), I'd be happy to support that. Give me a list of controllers...and a date (and time).

Okay folks. Dan and Andrew have been up until...well, now...working on this last-minute update for the KPBI airport to change the runway numbering. Let's show them both our appreciation of their hard work by making sure we all get the update for KTPA and KPBI installed for the event tonight. Jon: next time, if you could let us know about issues with the airport in advance (say, 2 weeks instead of a few hours), the chances of getting the update out will be greatly improved.

Hmmm...excellent point about the runway numbers. I'll see if Dan can create a quick update for us tonight!

Well, there it is...our first bad weather event in more than 4 years. We had 37 pilots at the peak, and are looking at 58 flight plans 2/3 of the way through the event. I believe this dispels the myth of custom weather causing issues (I didn't see any more people than usual get disconnected). Since I had the ATC perspective only, I didn't get to experience any of the weather. What is the general consensus on the event? Is it worth doing again? Should we try harder weather or do we need to tone it down a bit? By the way, tonight's METAR: Wind 070 at 12. Visibility 3/4 in heavy rain, thunderstorms. Ceiling 300 overcast. Temperature 22; Dewpoint 18. Altimeter 2970. The weather was the same at both airports, with the tops in between the two around 9,500. Looking forward to your feedback...and a real-world weather Rc coming up on Tuesday!

As Hurricane Irene continues its advance toward the Northeast US within the next few days, be prepared for potential outages affecting our FSX and FlightDesk server depending on the severity of the hurricane. The ISP that hosts FSX and FlightDesk is located in New York State and is taking precautions in order to be "fully prepared for" the hurricane. Our ISP has advised us that the precautions it is taking include: Increased staff levels this weekend to ensure proper coverage in the event that an emergency response is necessary Completed readiness checks of emergency power systems including UPS and generators plants Notification of fuel vendors which may need to provide additional fuel for generators in the event of a long-term utility power disruption Our ISP has also stated that "throughout the event, all systems will continue to be monitored as usual. Additionally, the Facilities and Operations teams will be performing an increased number of inspections of building structure and all critical systems. We have also assembled an emergency management team to continually monitor and be responsive to the situation as it progresses." We hope that, as a result of these precautions, there will be no interruptions to our FSX server. One of the inherent advantages to being an internet-based community is that our administrators are located across the country (actually, across the continent). We do not expect any service disruptions to our website and forums (the ISP that hosts those is located on the other side of the country) and will post updates on our forums, Facebook, and Twitter in the event of any outages. I am also aware that some members may be unable to participate in our planned Sunday evening "Bad Weather Regional Circuit" event featuring KBOS & KJFK. Should that be the case, we'll be sure to host a similar event going forward.

Let's keep an eye on the storm for sure...but part of the idea behind the event is to test whether custom weather will work in the server without causing connectivity issues. This is important so we can understand whether this type of event works in the future, or if we are "stuck" with real-world conditions.

Chase makes a good point. We're never going to find a situation that pleases everyone and in this case, holiday travel means Chase will be away from home but it allows Sasha to be home. Sasha, this is your event and therefore your choice.

Nobody has attended Office Hours for the past several weeks. While that's fine and expected (gives me an opportunity to get some work done which I genuinely appreciate), that also means no action will take place on items like this. The next session is on Sunday.

That would be Tuesday, November 22, then?

From my end, I need 2 weeks' of lead time to set up a Regional Circuit. Dan: how long would you need for a scenery update? Ok, let's do a FWA/IND Regional Circuit. As I said, give me a date.

Sounds like a great idea! KIND and KFWA would make a good pair of airports for the Regional Circuit, although FWA will probably need a severe makeover from the scenery design team. Another option is to go a General Aviation Fly-in involving FWA, IND, LAF, and one more, maybe GUS, MIE, or AID...or both. What do you think would work best? Please give me a date (the Rc needs to be on a Tuesday, 8-11pm ET, the Fi should be on a weekend day, but evenings during weekdays will work as well) that works well for one or both events so we can schedule those now.

Our website and forums were offline for approximately 8 hours this afternoon and evening due to the failure of a crucial piece of network equipment at our ISP's datacenter. As you can now tell, the website and forums are back online. This outage was not a result of any scheduled or unplanned maintenance on the part of BVA and was enitrely out of our control. Nevertheless, I apologize for the inconvenience of not having the website and forums accessible today and am glad that it did not affect our 20+ pilot session this evening. Our ISP has described the problem to me as a a power failure that occurred despite multiple layers of redundancy (building wide battery UPS, and multiple redundant diesel generator backup systems). The problem has been diagnosed as a failed automated transfer switch (ATS), a key component in power redundancy and failure. Once power is restored, the ISP will be reviewing the failure of its power redundancy systems to ensure corrective action is taken to address the problem. I will certainly post any additional relevant information I come across. I should also thank our dedicated Social Media team, including Tom (tofutwitch11) and Brandon (bcarter755), who dutifully kept us up-to-date through our Facebook profile (http://www.facebook.com/BVATC) and Twitter page (http://twitter.com/#!/BVATC). Those of you following us on social media were kept updated throughout the course of the day. And those of you who weren't...shame! You'll know better next time, I'm sure.

There has been a great deal of forum activity surrounding the release of PMDG's 737 NGX product which was recently released. My personal opinion of PMDG is that its aircraft tend to be top-of-the-line, and all releases prior to this one have been compatible with multiplayer. For the past several months, the FSX multiplayer community has been aware that communication issues are almost exclusively caused by a "bad" (for want of a better term) aircraft. The aircraft does not have to be on a specific frequency or even be powered; the simple presence of the aircraft in the server can cause the communication fidelity to drop. We have observed this behavior with a handful of add-on aircraft, of which most have created patches that resolve the issues. You can find more information about the phenomenon at viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1725. According to one poster, the issues are caused by "incorrect" and "very ineffecient XML (& C) programming". BVA is now investigating the possibility that the PMDG 737 NGX consistently or intermittently causes communication issue within our server. The consensus seems to be that there is an issue with the aircraft but that it does not always affect the session. It is therefore possible that some users might be able to fly the aircraft without negatively impacting others' experience. The good news is that, despite the original response, PMDG has indicated that they have resolved this issue and plan to address it in the first service pack or patch they release (http://forum.avsim.net/topic/341571-pmd ... ng-thread/). The bad news is that, until the patch is available, anyone flying the PMDG 737 NGX in our session may be subject to ejection in the event that the server communications begin to lag with that aircraft online. You will, of course, be sent a PM before being ejected. For this reason, BVA advises members not to purchase the PMDG 737 NGX until the patch is confirmed to resolve multiplayer issues, and those members who have purchased it to be prepared to cut flights short in the event that communication issues appear. Additionally, BVA will ask for the support of those who have purchased the aircraft in evaluating the impact of the patch of the performance of the aircraft on communications. My opinion, having not used the aircraft, is that it is worth the money and something I will buy once the issues are resolved. PMDG has a great reputation for quality aircraft and to my knowledge, none of its other aircraft cause issues in multiplayer. I really hope they address this issue quickly and effectively so they can maintain it.

Our website will be offline temporarily, likely for about an hour, beginning at 11:30pm on Saturday, August 13 and continuing into early Sunday morning as necessary. The update is to address some back-end functionality with the WYSIWYG text editor that should not affect website performance or look and feel. We will be remaining on our current DNN version. The forums and FSX server will not be affected.

Can do.

Didn't we cancel the HTC after two attempts? The latter of which was plagued by the problems with the e-mail and website which, had they not been problems during the lead up to the HTC, probably could have drawn even bigger crowds. We had at least 2 HTC events in New York, one in Washington, and one in Chicago. I also consider the multiple (at least 5) Dance in New York events that we've had as part of those. I'd say the Dance in New York / HTC events took place for a period of 3+ years before being supplanted with the Et. The HTC wasn't canned because of traffic, either; the fact that members signed up for the event and didn't fly showed that the concept wasn't working. Since the HTC had effectively become a twice-a-year event anyway, it made more sense to replace it with other major events like the Flight for the Fight, 60 Hours of ATC (different concepts), anniversary celebration, etc., which have been more popular. Right, that's why I said: This isn't a "let's jump ship and give up" post. It's an honest attempt to garner additional feedback to see whether there is something obvious and easy that people would prefer to be changed or whether it's just a matter of giving people more time to join in. Since I plan to discuss this topic with controllers during our next meeting, I'd love to hear from some more members outside of our community of controllers.

That's very good feedback, actually -- thanks for providing it. I'm curious to know whether you are in the minority or not. Everyone may not be training for a real-world IFR rating, but if that change of charts/phrases/procedures is what's keeping people away, then there are things we can do to change that. Other thoughts?

Those who flew during this afternoon's European Tour (featuring Manchester and London-Heathrow) knew that we had another day of weird charts, new procedures, and funny/sad attempts at British accents, fortunately (for everyone) not by me this time. For once, I didn't have to correct people who readback "climb to FL110" and I got to use phraseology that's a little closer to home to what we use in Canada. I've thoroughly enjoyed controlling the first two European Tour events. I hope those who have participated enjoyed the change of scenery and procedures as much as I have. Given my enjoyment of the challenging airspaces and different procedures, I was surprised to see that most people flying in these events tend to be the same people who fly our regular events. I was expecting, given the number of requests we've had on these forums for ATC and events outside of our regular airspaces and times, a little more traffic, and some new voices. For example, I often see the "Tango squadron" getting together on Tuesday afternoons to fly our Regional Circuit routes. I thought the event would be great for this group and have been surprised not to see them online. Many of our members from time zones for which our 8-11pm ET events don't work haven't made it to a Tour event yet. That, along with a lower-than-normal attendance during today's event, got me thinking that I should "take it to the streets" to see what you guys think of the event. I'm well aware that it takes time for people to accept and become committed to new things. It will, of course, take even longer for an event that we hold once a month to consistently draw in new members from different time zones. That's understandable, and I'm not about to cancel the European Tour event after just two attempts. A lot of people have and continue to put a lot of effort into making the events work. But that being said, I want to make sure that the events we're putting on are aligned with the wants of our members. In a recent Poll Question of the Week (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1147&start=20#p11574), 83% of members said they would be interested in participating in the Tour again. I was expecting today's event to be a little busier than it was, so I'm here asking you: what are your thoughts on the Tour? Have you been flying in the events? If so, why? If not, why not, and what can we change? We have a large compliment of members from around the world and in different time zones. Today, we've had ATC consistently since 3pm ET, but we've seen the biggest traffic during our peak hours (the highest-rated controller online now is BOS_A). All of that's making me wonder: why?

Frequent users of our website will likely have noticed that, along with the links to our Facebook and Twitter profiles, we recently added an "Admin" section to our website's navigation bar that adds links to two new pages. These pages are now viewable to the general community. The A-Team page provides members with an overview of the A-Team (BVA's administrators) and profiles for each of those involved. The Our Expectations page is a response to requests for a formal policy/conduct document to be available to our members. All users can view this page, which talks about BVA's shared values and our vision to become the best FSX-based aviation community through realistic and professional pilot-controller interactions, exciting and appealing events, pilot training, and software and add-on technologies. There shouldn't be any surprises here as the information should be congruent with the values and policies that have been adhered to by our administrators for the past several years. Now, however, users have a more formal and visible way of determining what those are. Information on the "Our Expectations" page is provided for members to have a better understanding of what constitutes acceptable behavior at BVA. It supplements our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and the Privacy Statement for New Members. As always, please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns about our policies, shared values, or expectations of members. You have any number of ways of reaching administrators, including the forums, our individual e-mail addresses, and an anonymous form on our "Contact Us" page. I hope we have done our best to make our expectations clear to the community, and make ourselves as available as possible to address any concerns, given the real-world limitations on the time of our members, controllers, and administrators.

I think so.

There's some room in the schedule. I'm going to add an event on Sunday, August 28 that will be a repeat of the Tuesday night event that we do. For old-times' sake, we'll do KBOS & KJFK on August 23 (Tuesday) and August 28 (Sunday). If there is still interest in a bad weather event, then we can make the Tuesday night event a bad weather one. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1691 Originally the plan was to do the foul weather on the Friday night...but since we might have a Tracon Tour going on the next day I wouldn't want to impinge on anyone's good time.