Cross the Ditch - June 20/21

[Kevin Finch]

Virtual United Airlines is working with VATNZ and VATPAC on a Cross the Ditch event for our quarterly VATSIM Partner event.

We've been back and forth on dates and times. The working date, from VATNZ, is June 21 (June 20 for North America/Europe) and I'm guesstimating it will start up around 1800Z/June 20, subject to confirmation from VATNZ/VATPAC.

Virtual United Airlines always leaves the door open for any VATSIM pilot to join in our events and since this is also a VATNZ/VATPAC event, consider yourself invited.

Kevin Finch
VP-Events
Virtual United Airlines

[Nick Johnston]

Details on Cross the Ditch 18 are available in this forum and at the Cross the Ditch 18 website.

If you're flying for Virtual United Airlines (or any other VA), make sure to mention them when you book your flights so that your support will show up in the Virtual Airline Leaderboard.

Look forward to seeing you all on the day: we've got a great series of flights lined up for this edition of the event.

[Kevin Finch]

vUAL has withdrawn its support for this event.

We have been in constant e-mail contact with the event organizers for months and learned today about the sign-up site being up and running, and that our requested destination (YMML) was not part of the event.

An e-mail went to VATPAC Events today, asking how we slipped through the cracks.

We also removed Sydney RealOPS from our event schedule.

[Andreas Fuchs]

A bit over-sensitive? Who cares what route you can fly as long as you'll get full ATC, it's going to be a great event. And your VA is listed as well in the line-up: https://crosstheditch.net/winter2020/virtual_airlines

[Nick Johnston]

On 6/7/2020 at 4:28 AM, Kevin Finch said:

We have been in constant e-mail contact with the event organizers for months and learned today about the sign-up site being up and running, and that our requested destination (YMML) was not part of the event.

An e-mail went to VATPAC Events today, asking how we slipped through the cracks.

 

Hi there, Kevin,

Picking the airports and scheduling the routes is one of the toughest parts of the CTD planning process. There's really three major airports on the Australian eastern seaboard and three again on the New Zealand mainland, so as I'm sure you'll appreciate, it's a challenge to make sure that we don't repeat ourselves too often - especially when most CTD events have five separate sectors! (When we do revisit routes, we try hard to ensure we do so at a different time of day so that pilots for the same part of the world won't be forced into flying the same route again.)

The different stakeholders in the event have different priorities as well - each participating division wants to maximise the time spent in their airspace, and may have strong preferences for the type of event and for which of their airports are used; whereas the CTD organisers might have other preferences focussed more on how an individual CTD event fits in with the previous incarnations. Ultimately, as the event organiser, the final decision is mine, but it is always made in coordination with the hosting divisions. We work extremely hard to balance everyone's desires/visions for the event, and as a result the negotiations around format and airports typically takes several weeks.

The format and schedule decisions for CTD18 were made some time ago, and at no point was any request for using Melbourne raised as part of that discussion. (For the record, Melbourne was excluded because we've been to the Greater Melbourne area in three of our last four events; it's currently tied for third most visited CTD airport, featuring in 10 of 17 previous CTD events.)

I'm sorry this wasn't better communicated to you - you and I have never had any communication outside of this thread, and I'm not sure what conversations you've had with the individual divisions.

We very much appreciate the support that our event has received from the VA community over the years; we added the Virtual Airlines Leaderboard to the CTD site a few years back precisely to acknowledge the contribution that VAs make to the successful running of the event.

I'd invite you (and any other VA that is interested) to contact me directly - either here or via the Contact page on the CTD website - to discuss what you'd like to see in future CTD events. The format and scheduling decisions for the December event will likely be finalised in September, and while I can make no promises about honouring requests, I would be more than happy to include and present any input from VAs in the planning for the event.

 

 

Nick