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Plans for 2017

Overview With the new community cohesion plans, Community Championships/Leaderboards, Central Training, and Pilot Training exercises all announced, it is a good opportunity for me to outline the plans for our department as we go forward and some of the technical challenges we need to overcome. Quarter 1 The most noticeable change for our members that are embarking upon ATC Training will be the rebranding of the RTS System to the CT System to complement the new trai
Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence in Web Services

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Community

Home is where the heart is...

Dear All From 00:01z Thursday 15th December, you will be asked if you would like to select one of 8 region-based communities from the following list: Scotland | Northern Ireland | Northern | Wales | Midlands | East Anglia | South West | South East Members do not have to join a community in which the facility they are training at is based.  There may however be benefit for the member to choose the community in which the majority of their day-to-day VATSIM activity (flying/controlli
Barrie Joplin

Barrie Joplin in Community

6
United Kingdom

[MINUTES] DSG Meeting - 21st November 2016

Folks The minutes of last month's DSG meeting are now available for download here. I'll be making a short post when the minutes are published to add some colour to them and give a short overview of what is happening in the Division.  I will aim to post the minutes and write this blog within a couple of weeks of the meeting taking place.  It's worth pointing out that this was the last DSG meeting of 2016 although we do have an "all staff" meeting in mid December. Most of what is po
Simon Irvine

Simon Irvine in United Kingdom

1
Technology

Open Source Web Services - Update 3

At the start of 2016, I outlined our plans for moving to an open source model for our core web services.  During the year this has always been a big focus for the team and has helped massively as a reminder of why we need to thoroughly document our code and ensure only high-quality commits to our repositories. 12 months ago we wouldn't have been able to open source straight away - our code styling and formatting was largely inconsistent, we had areas that were written in a different manner
Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence in Web Services

3
ATC Training

S2s and Sweatbox

To resolve any confusion between who can and cannot run Sweatboxes as an S2 across the Division and to prepare ourselves for the onset of Central Training, from now onwards, S2 Mentors are permitted to run Sweatboxes without restriction. Naturally, as with all Sweatbox mentors regardless of rating, we would encourage those who are not particularly confident with its’ features to attend a ‘Introduction to Sweatbox’ seminar which will be regularly held and details of these will be promulgated on t
Samuel James

Samuel James in ATC Training

3
ATC Training

ATC TD - Autumnal Updates

With so much going on over the last few months and with so much fantastic change coming, it's time for an update on what has actually been happening 'behind the scenes' and what is to come... OBS-S1 Program First of all some stats from the last 2 months: Number of OBS-S1s attending a Group OBS session: 98  Number of students from those Group sessions subsequently achieving their S1s to date: 47  Just for perspective - that's pretty much the same number trained in the 8 months prec
Samuel James

Samuel James in ATC Training

1
Technology

Open Source Web Services - Update 2

Dear all, As we approach the end of the year, I felt it was a good time to provide an overview of where we are in terms of open sourcing the Web Services platform. This has not yet been completed, however I'm very keen that this doesn't hold the project up.  This was always a nice to have by the time we open sourced, but we'll continue to develop this and release in due course. The team continue to work on this - we've now split the new site down into key modules, each of whic
Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence in Web Services

0
ATC Training

Heathrow Ground Training

Dear all, On behalf of the Heathrow RTS, I am pleased to inform you all that we have successfully completed the Heathrow GMC Training Trial (LL GMC Trial). This trial has indeed made a huge impact on how the Heathrow RTS will deal with training requests in the future. Our primary focus is to reduce the amount of 'unnecessary' one-to-one mentoring sessions by delegating the responsibility of understanding the Heathrow theory to the student himself, through a self-study system. I am ther
Sebastian Rekdal

Sebastian Rekdal in ATC Training

1
Community

“You used to be much more...muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.”

Dear All VATSIM UK is pleased to be able to introduce a region-based community structure of colloquial delights, with a drop of slight insanity better to accommodate the mixed bag of nuts we all make up. Starting 15th December 2016, you will be invited to join one of the new 9 region-based communities: Scotland Northern Ireland Northern Wales Midlands East Anglia South West South East British Overseas Region-based commu
Barrie Joplin

Barrie Joplin in Community

4
ATC Training

CTIB - Seeking more team members

Hi folks, Following on from my previous ATC TD update, we are looking for more people to get involved and help with the creation of moodle courses for S2, S3 and C1 ratings. Also, we're particularly interested in those S2 rated controllers or above who have particular knowledge of the following aerodromes to assist in a side project intended to improve standards and the resources we give to our members: - Birmingham APP - Glasgow TWR/APP - Liverpool TWR/APP - Luton TW
Samuel James

Samuel James in ATC Training

0
ATC Training

South East RTSM

All, Please join me in welcoming @Fraser Cooper as the new South East RTSM. He will be taking over the great work @John Batten has been doing keeping SERTS running smoothly. He brings real world aviation experience with him as well as some exciting ideas to further improve training. Welcome to the ATC Training team Fraser!  
Samuel James

Samuel James in Staff Changes

28
ATC Training

Military Radar (APC) Moodle course RELEASED

A massive thanks to @Callum Presley and colleagues for their hard work developing and testing the new Military Radar (APC) course on our moodle platform. I'm delighted to announce that it is now available for S3s to enrol and complete. Once you have passed the Final Exam, simply submit a ticket to the Military RTS and we'll get the endorsement processed. It'll be great to see some more of our Military APP positions manned in the future. Enjoy!
Samuel James

Samuel James in ATC Training

13
ATC Training

ATC Training Assistant

Folks, Please join me in welcome Alex Beard who is joining the ATC Training team as our new ATC Training Assistant. He's taking over my former role so any tickets or issues pertaining to ATC Training from an admin perspective will be dealt with by him. Alex has been a very mature, keen and motivated member of the Division, contributing many hours of mentoring both in SERTS and Essex and also on the Group OBS mentoring team and he has also been very helpful to me in my previous role as ATC T
Samuel James

Samuel James in Staff Changes

34
ATC Training

Hello and moving forwards...

Hi folks, First of all, a big thank you to Adam for all of the fantastic progress he made as ATC TD - I hope to build on the great work we started together and see it through to fruition. Secondly, regardless of past confusion or posts - Central Training is still going ahead. In the coming months I am keen to update the membership regularly on the CTIB's (Central Training Implementation Board) progress on delivering CT in its various phases. We will be rolling it out in phases for
Samuel James

Samuel James in ATC Training

0
ATC Training

ATC Training Department

I am delighted to announce that Sam James will be taking over as ATC Training Director with immediate effect.  Sam has been Adam's deputy and has been working hard over the past few months with Central Training and we hope to retain some, if not all of what has been worked on. Sam brings real world experience, along with many years of VATSIM experience to the role. I am also announcing some additions to the Lead Mentor team.  Matthew Collier is replacing me in SCONI and Sebastian Rekdal fil
Simon Irvine

Simon Irvine in Staff Changes

23
ATC Training

And it's goodbye from me

Good afternoon all, There comes a time when everyone has to take a moment to sit back and look what what's going on. That time for me, as far as VATSIM is concerned, came fairly recently. I'll explain more about my decision in a moment, however last week I wrote to Simon and explained that after the implementation of Phase 1 of the Central Training project, I intended to resign my post as ATC Training Director in VATSIM UK. Following a protracted discussion, which I think was hard for both
Adam Arkley

Adam Arkley in ATC Training

32
ATC Training

Introducing Training Tuesdays

Dear all, In conjunction with the Pilot Training team, I am very pleased to announce the introduction of Training Tuesdays. One of the biggest difficulties that the ATC Training Department face is generating enough traffic to make training viable on the live network, which in turn leads to mentors attempting to use Sweatbox more to generate traffic to train students. The vicious circle develops itself by pilots then seeing a lack of air traffic online in the UK and instead flying e
Adam Arkley

Adam Arkley in ATC Training

5
United Kingdom

VATSIM UK Open Evening - Sunday 24th July 1815z

On Sunday the 24th of July between 1915 and 1945 local there will be a VATSIM UK Open Evening, This is your chance to quiz the DSG team.  I'll be there along with Callum, Adam, Ant, Alex, James and Barrie.  This will give you the chance to ask about ATC training, events, community, pilot training or anything else that's going on in the Division. This will take place in Teamspeak. I hope to see you there!! 
Simon Irvine

Simon Irvine in United Kingdom

1
United Kingdom

Division Review - 2016

Folks We have been conducting a review of the Division over the past few weeks which you can find here. This document contains the building blocks on changes that you will start to see coming through. I'd like to thank the DSG for assisting with this especially Anthony Lawrence who sat through all the department reviews.  Also thanks to Harry Sugden, James Mack and Simon Kelsey for their input
Simon Irvine

Simon Irvine in United Kingdom

0
Technology

Open Source Web Services - Update 1

Evening all, I just wanted to provide a quick overview on where we are in terms of open sourcing our code base as we enter Q2 of 2016.  For those who haven't read the plan as a whole, please see the overview post: This has now been completed.  The SSO element of our authentication simply detects that it isn't going to work on the current setup and reverts to an alternative login process. In this scenario (of not having any of the SSO authentication information, or having any access
Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence in Web Services

0
Technology

Open Source Web Services - The Plan

One aspect we’ve struggled with in Web Services over the years is finding people who have the time to commit to web services projects.  We’ve found that the quantity of applicants for web services roles is often low, and many people don’t have much of an idea of what skill set is truly required until they’re on board. To protect the longevity of the web services and to benefit from members being able to donate a few hours every few months to resolving an issue/implementing a feature, our lo
Anthony Lawrence

Anthony Lawrence in Web Services

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