How Times Have Changed

The Beginning Of A New Era

Although many smaller airlines had popped up (and subsequently disappeared) on small BBS's and the major network online services that were dominant at the time, there were very few on the open Internet, which was still almost completely limited to academia and the network gurus with the resources to enable a home Internet connection. My, how times have changed.

Broadband Internet connections are fast becoming more the norm than the exception, from DSL to high-speed cable links, as dial-up goes the way of the Betamax and -- some say -- even VHS with the advent of recordable DVDs. Video conferencing around the world no longer means choppy images at 2-3 frames per second and sound slightly better than that you'd get as a kid with two tin cans and a string. Of course, even that analogy is dated. Kids these days are more likely to be carrying cellphones and pagers. Pretty soon, parents may even be buying their children pocket GPS locators.

In the ten years that this organization has been around, the virtual airline industry has gone through some large changes, as well, mostly in fits and spurts. The spurts tended to coincide with the release of each new version of Flight Simulator, but not always. Virtual airline holding companies, large organizations with a number of smaller virtual airlines under their top-heavy corporate umbrella were all the rage for awhile, and for at least a few years it was a sin even we were guilty of. More and more, though, those of us who've spent some time dedicated to this hobby realised that like the dinosaur, the time of the big conglomerates has come and, thankfully, gone. You'll still find the odd t-rex trying to rampage its way around the industry, but with more of us beginning to understand the paradigm differences between real-world airline operations and virtual airline operations, there will be less and less room for that behomoth to move about in.

The disscussion to dissolve Atlantic Aerospace Corporation, and the efforts it took to make that decision once settled a reality, began almost a full year before our 10^th anniversary. We knew that the business model we had tried to build was failing, and that due primarily to the two things most to blame for the failure of any VA: Pilot attrition, and a lack of time on the part of management to properly operate the organization to the full extent it had been designed. We've been lucky. Former Chairman Brad Hodges and a number of others had designed and put in place one of the first airline automation systems, and that allowed them and the management that followed the abilty to focus on development rather than the daily grind of updating rosters and assigning new flights. When other commitments took us away from the airline, it continued to run on it's own with only a minor modicum of attention. Sometimes no attention at all.

It is, of course, reassuring to know that we can leave it for weeks on end without it falling to pieces, however the time still comes when attention and effort is required in order to move the organization forward, to promote, to evolve with the changing times. Having a half-dozen subsidiary airlines meant spreading what attention we could give thinly amongst them, even with the automation systems. The close connection between our pilots -- our primary customers -- was becoming weaker and weaker as a result, and it started to make less and less sense.

The virtual airline industry will continue to grow and expand and push the envelope as Atlantic Skies and those airlines that came before us only to be lost in the history of this industry did more than ten years ago. Sometimes we'll go in a direction that only leads to a dead end, but as long as we're willing to admit that and step back a few paces, we will continue. And as long as we remember who our clients are, we will always be a strong and stable voice.

Feedback is always welcome:

Patrick Riley
Chairman of the Board Of Directors,
Atlantic Skies