Merry Christmas from VATSIM UK
Entry posted by Simon Irvine in United Kingdom ·
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At this time of year, it's always good to reflect on the last 12 months and what to look forward to in the New Year.
Firstly, I want to thank everyone who has helped the Division this year whether it be flying in for an exam, mentoring, helping with sector files, document writing, staff roles, the list goes on. You have all had a part in making this a great year for the Division.
Before we look ahead to 2018 let's have a quick look back at 2017 and thank some of the people that made our success possible.
In the Community Department, we have started to roll out the UK Communities including appointing community managers. We have made it easier for people to contact us with a Live Chat service which has cut down on the number of tickets we receive and in turn, gives members a speedier answer to their questions. @Barrie Joplin is the driving force behind Community and his help and support has been fantastic.
In ATC Training we had 73 OBS-S1 passes in 2017. This is by far the most we have had ever and huge thanks to everyone involved in the New Controller process especially @Fraser Cooper and more recently @Oliver Rhodes . In the wider ATC space we had 49 exam passes including 5 area passes. Central Training hasn't progressed as quickly as we would have liked but we are hoping that we can start to get moving with this again in 2018. Thanks to the TGMs, TGIs and Division Instructors to keep the day to day training on course and of course all the ATC training mentors. Thank you to @Samuel James @Alex Beard , @George Wright and @Andy Ford who have managed the behemoth that is the ATC Training Department this year.
In Pilot Training, @Daniel Crookes and his team have had a sterling year who have seen mentoring sessions and exam passes grow from P1 to P4. I would like to especially call out the great work done on the P4 course. We have had great feedback on this from an international level in VATSIM. This has been by far the most successful rating launch the Department has ever seen. I would also like to thank @James Mack for his leadership of the PTD until earlier this year.
Our newest Department is Marketing, led by @Layth Al-Wakil . We have already seen some great advances in Social Media with great exposure of the Division on Facebook and Twitter thanks to @Loui Ringer . We have also seen some fantastic events this year managed by @James Brierley at the start of the year and now @Trevor Hannant .
This was our first full year of the Operations Department. @Chris Pawley and his team made 102 commits to our repo, changing 281 files, adding 6427 lines and removing 6900 lines. The team released 8 documents and have 22 in development.
Our Web Team go from strength to strength. I was heartbroken when my good friend @Anthony Lawrence stood down from the DSG this year, however, @Calum Towers and @Neil Farrington have taken up the baton and run with it. As a Divison, we have had over 43,000 unique visitors to vatsim.uk, nearly 1 million page views on community.vatsim.uk, handled approx. 120,000 logins, to various services, through Core, sent around 200,000 automated emails, around 1400 different people have connected to TeamSpeak, using over 2TB of bandwidth and over 2000 files of code has been changed on Core with nearly 500,000 lines of code affected. Calum, Neil and their team have done a fantastic job this year.
A massive thanks to my deputy @Nathan Donnelly who has kept me sane and ran the place when I've not been here (and sometimes when I have been 
). Nathan has been a brilliant support since he came on board in the summer.
Looking forward to 2018 we are launching a new website, a new controller client, more pilot courses, an exciting new pilot skills test unique to this Division, medium and long term planning for the EGTT FIR sectors, more airports to be included for Obs to S1 and powering up the Community Department.
Finally, on behalf of the whole staff team, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!
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