January 2024 VA Update

Happy New Year and we wish you all the best for 2024!

This month's news update will highlight some of our development updates, as well as future plans.

Development updates

We have completed our work on individual airline load factors, with every airline having been assigned a custom load factor mirroring real world operations. The passenger and cargo levels on your flight are now based on these airline load factors, and should be a more realistic representation of real-world load factors.

We are investigating adding score bonuses when completing a tour based on tour distance. These will apply retroactively, as well as to newly completed tours. We don't have a solid time frame on this, but hope to implement this in the coming few months. Moreover, we are working on adding a new filter on routes for only showing tour legs to help you in finding new tours to complete. To coincide with this, we are also investigating improving discoverability of tours. If you have any ideas on how to improve this, please let us know.

Airline updates

Alaska Airlines has submitted a bid for a takeover of Hawaiian Airlines. When this deal receives regulatory approval sometime this year Hawaiian Airlines will be added to the VA.

Throughout the industry there is still a drive for further consolidation and we will follow real-world events closely and keep you informed in these posts of future happenings.

Tour updates

We have introduced a numerous new airline tours and location tours. Throughout the coming year we will slowly be reworking and replacing older tours that have been active for more than two years.

The monthly tour takes you across the South-East Asia. If you have any suggestions on tours you would like to see please let us know on Discord.

Closed airspaces

Current scheduled flight time durations may need to be amended due to longer flying times on account of closed airspace. We would recommend checking your route prior to departure especially if it crosses and known airspaces with known security warnings. A complete overview can be found here.

Please adhere to these closures when performing flights on the VA.

Event Updates

We are working with the vACEPG initiative to co-host more VATSIM events. Please check the Events page for more details, we hope to see you there! Please let us know via Discord what kind of events you would like to see! If you have other events on online platforms that you feel are a good match to include on the VA please let us know. To receive more frequent updates please subscribe to the Event Announcements notifications on our Discord server.

Closing words

As always if you have any suggestions or questions do not hesitate to let us know.

We would also like to remind you we have a Discord server. To join it, use discord.gg/EAKR7Qe.