Little details

[John McMurdo]

Before I plan a flight, almost always  I will  check to see if there is such a flight between the two airports I have in mind,  who fly's there,  and in what aircraft.  This is something I did pretty much from my first flight on VATSIM.  There have been times when I have not been able to be 100% faithful to the flight,  I was limited either by my collection of aircraft or liveries,  in which case I would just pick one that would be most appropriate. However  I am very flexible when it comes to aircraft type,  and it all depends on what I feel like flying that evening.

 

I know it would be easier keeping to the same callsign whichever flight,  and they are not really important details,  but I think it adds to the realism of it. At some point I plan to recreate flights that I have been on myself, but I don't expect them to be 100% faithful because of certain limitations, the departure and arrival airports will be the same, and the airlines of the ones I can remember,  but I expect that is where the similarites will end.

 

I know there are groups that run virtual airlines with real world flights,  and I suspect they pay even more attention to details like this.

Edited December 26, 2021 at 07:28 PM by John McMurdo

[Robert Shearman Jr]

Early in my VATSIM career I was very adamant about using a real world airline callsign appropriate for the citypair I was flying.

Later on I began flying more general aviation, so, began using a general aviation callsign.  I realized later that to be more realistic, I should use a different GA callsign for each different aircraft type, as it would be pretty unlikely I'd have one registration number that I'd switch between different planes.  But I typically bend realism in that regard and just use the one reg number.

I still do attempt to be faithful to real world callsigns when I reenact vintage DC6 flights, using departedflights.com or timetableimages.com as a guideline to real citypairs the aircraft used to operate between, and the flight numbers they used.

Often enough, I find myself wanting to fly between two cities using an aircraft type that would ordinarily have ordinarily have an airline callsign, but, there isn't a real-world one to match it up with.  Like you, I generally just make up one that sounds reasonable and go with that.

The beauty on VATSIM is that on any given day we are virtually unlimited on how much or little realism we choose to employ when selecting callsigns -- within reasonable boundaries, that is.  😉

[Dace Nicmane]

I've flown SKW in a B738 when I'd recently joined. 😝 Nowadays I have more aircraft in my virtual hangar and mostly stay true to real world callsigns/types/routes. Except for the two fictional airlines that I fly for.

[Don Desfosse]

@Robert Shearman Jr Thanks so much for posting these resources, and your thoughts!  Your shared wisdom adds so much to our community, and we truly appreciate it!

[Torben Andersen]

I fly for several different virtual airlines and use the callsign given to me from dispatch. However, when there is an event involving airport, which "my" VAs does not fly into/out of, I use a carrier, who mainly fly charter flights and invent a callsign for that flight.

[Mike Teague]

i put the registration # of the aircraft into flightaware and see where the actual plane has gone and i do those flights 

 

apps like volanta let me keep track of where all my fleet is parked at any given time (like 40 aircraft from over a dozen different airlines).  so say i feel like flying an airbus on the east coast of the usa, i see i have a jetblue a320 sitting at kjfk, and one at katl. i wanna fly out of kjfk, so i put that one into flight aware and see where it went the last time it left kjfk.. thats where i go. repeat as needed. with a large fleet i can do familiar stuff or find weird flights i've never done before, all while doing actual flights that were done irl (with the exact same aircraft to boot)

 

 

 

Edited December 27, 2021 at 07:36 PM by Mike Teague

[Frans DECHAENE]

I found a fun way to fly to new destinations. Having downloaded the Aerobask Phenom 300 NetJets CS-PHO livery, I went to the Radarbox24 aircraft page with the heat map for PHO, and I am 'working my way through' the 30 most frequented destinations. I am almost done with the top 20! Geneva appears to be a good base in the NetJets European network and is almost always staffed on Vatsim. 

Alternatively you can follow an aircraft and just choose one of the flights it has done that day. It has brought me to the core of European destinations a jet like the Phenom 300 visits. Good fun! 

 

 

 

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