Virtual Airline Group Flights/Events Idea

[Evan Reiter]

As I was working a BA Virtual group flight into KPHL yesterday, I had a thought that might interest some of the event planners with Virtual Airlines. 

It seems to me the traditional thinking for a group flight is: let's get a bunch of people to go from Airport A to Airport B in a giant line. That makes good sense if you're BA Virtual and want to fly across the pond westbound (and is plenty of fun regardless). I'd also like to suggest Virtual Airlines consider an event to replicate what real-world "banked" hubs look like. Using my BA Virtual example, if you were instead flying east across the Atlantic, instead of doing a giant line of airplanes from KPHL to EGLL, you could consider departing 1-2 aircraft each from the several U.S. destinations British Airways serves, timing your flights to land at EGLL within a few minutes of each other. Now, you'd have aircraft depart from 20 destinations and converge on one. 

As a virtual controller, I've thought merging traffic from multiple directions would be more fun to manage. For pilots, you won't have to be speed restricted in the lineup for the entire flight but will still get the fun of hearing everyone as you fly into the arrival airport. For us at Boston, it would be really neat to see 10 airplanes approaching from the west, southwest, and east that we then have to merge at the airport. (Though, please time these so not everyone arrives at the same time, unless you really like airborne holding. Ideally, you slot out arrival times in 2-minute intervals. Or, you just tell people to arrive within a 60-minute window and hope not everyone chooses to get there simultaneously.)

Say you're a VA that flies American Airlines flights. Pick a hub airport like KCLT and schedule flights to arrive within a 60-minute window. Take the full American schedule into KCLT and encourage pilots to pick one each. Or, pick one of the hub cities with multiple airports (like how New York has KJFK and KLGA). Schedule flights to arrive at both airports, staggered 2 minutes apart. Challenge your pilots to depart from airports around the network so they land within that 30-60 minute timeframe. Of course, you'd have to make sure ATC coverage is available by reaching out to the local vACC.

For those who are in VAs, would that type of event be of interest to you? For those who plan VA events, have you tried doing something like this? 

Edited September 6, 2020 at 01:12 PM by Evan Reiter

[Trevor Hannant]

Yesterday's flight was  between those destinations for a few reasons:

- part of BAV's "goodbye" to the B747 fleet as the BA has retired the type now for good
- LHR-PHL was the inaugural 747 route for BA (before carrying onto PIT
- one of BAV's Training Managers was a flight deck member on that inaugural service

In terms of the idea, it is a good one and BAV run a couple of events through the year that have a similar idea - they take a single day's schedule and create a day long event of it, so we have traffic moving all day in and our of LHR according to that schedule (with associated knock on effects of delays etc).

[Evan Reiter]

1 hour ago, Trevor Hannant said:

Yesterday's flight was  between those destinations

Please don't get me wrong, I think the "line of group flight" traffic is great too! Especially in the scenario where you're a Europe-based airline, you obviously can't have people flying into KPHL from across America! We get plenty of those group flights and enjoy them. When we get an email with a heads' up about them (ideally 2 weeks ahead but the earlier, the better), we normally try to staff up whenever we can. Fortunately, we had enough people around yesterday that we could make it work. We actually ended up splitting Center and asking for some underlying support to help make it possible.

I had the pleasure of working the line as you passed through Boston Center and it was good fun. Please pass along to the pilots who flew that they were a pleasure to work with. Not sure if this was intentional or if it just happened over the ocean but the traffic was decently spread out so there was no one single rush, which helps a lot. I ended up having to re-route about 50% of the traffic from the SPUDS to the JIIMS arrival and I'm happy to say every single pilot accepted and complied with the re-route, over voice, mid-air. That's not at all common! 

I didn't realize the significance of the event either; that's really cool. Glad to have been part of it.

[Trevor Hannant]

Unfortunately I couldn't make this one as it clashed with another event that I was taking part in yesterday however BAV generally setup "slots" for departure when they do these.  These tend to be 10/15 minutes apart so that there is spacing however we all know that generally goes to pot with different aircraft types at different levels!   

I'll certainly pass on a link to this thread in their forums - I'm sure they'll also wish to pass on their thanks for the service received.

[Callum McLoughlin]

Hi Evan

Thanks for your warm words. As Trevor has explained, this was the first of a series of events we are holding to mark the retirement of the B747-400 from our fleet. We are always open to collaborative events however we are slightly limited as we will always normally originate from the UK. That said, we do often provide pilots with alternating routes so that the traffic becomes easier to integrate and reduces the chance people arrive on top of each other. One of our next fly-in events happens to be to Boston with over 30 pilots signed up so far. I'll be in touch to see what we can arrange.

Callum (BAVirtual Events Director)