Covid19

[placei]

Hello fellow virtual pilots. Please tell me if we are taking any notice of the outside world? Most real airlines have shut down operations! I have substituted smaller aircraft on all my Emirates routes! Is that within our guidelines? Or should I carry on living in our virtual bubble?

[Alan Black AS122]

From the scheduled Division perspective, we're leaving it to the pilots to do what they want to do. It would be a daunting task to go through each airline and figure out who is still flying and what they are still flying. In addition to that, there has been alot of time spent by many folks getting it where it is, and if we removed flights now, we would need to have a way to put them all back in later. Based on that, I think it is best to just leave the schedule as is and let folks choose what they want to do.

Some folks like to fly a specific airline, and if that airline has shut down ops, then they are essentially grounded until this is over unless they choose to broaden their horizons. Since our entire existence is essentially based on a "make-believe" premise, I think it is OK to temporarily ignore the facts and let flights continue.

That said, I'm like you.... I like to keep things as they are and have only been flying flights that have actually operated that day. I've actually been surprised by the fact that I'm still finding passenger flights to fly and haven't been forced to move to strictly cargo ops.

Anyway, I hope this helps explain the thoughts that have been had and why things appear as they do. There realIy isn't a cut and dry answer to it. I know Don has put some specialty flights out there around Covid, and I've heard discussions about other Special Covid flights.

Alan

[placei]

Alan thanks for your reply. I hope we will get through this nightmare together Keep safe--Ian alias placei

[Leemazz]

Cargo is booming , multiple charters out of China and Hong Kong , PPE is hard to find at the minute

[AS668 Geoff]

Cargo is booming , multiple charters out of China and Hong Kong , PPE is hard to find at the minute

It certainly is - I work in supply chain logistics and we're having capacity issues in both air freight and ground freight currently, though not all related to high demand (there are also fewer aircraft and trucks - or at least crew/drivers right now). Sea freight is one mode that's not doing well anywhere...but I digress.

My thoughts on the above are that, while I really enjoy keeping things as real as possible, this is also a nice distraction from the stress of real-life and gives me a few hours a week where I can be in denial about what is happening currently . So, I am quite happy to pretend that most flights are being cancelled and everything is as it was a few weeks ago, when it comes to the airlines...

[AS37 Norm Edwards]

The magnitude of how airlines are being affected is demonstrated in this video, airlines of any size will be impacted while they have so many aircraft sitting on the ground, it may take a while to recover. Sit back and relax watching the video (nice music!) and see how many airlines are your favourites!

Note: As Alan as mentioned above, we won't be going through all the schedules on our database because obviously we have hundreds of thousands, as time passes and airlines end up returning to schedules, and updating them, adjusting them, our fantastic team of flight managers will work to keep things uptodate as much as possible when this difficult virus period passes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcARWU2-x-w