As we continue to adapt to a new normal of living in global pandemic, the division continues to adapt to the change in circumstance. For many members, staff or not, we find our lives extricably changed. Some people find themselves with much more time, and others, with less as they try and balance childcare with remote working and a myriad other real-life issues including of course restrictions on daily life and concerns about health of themselves and others. Across the world, VATSIM has of course become much busier online, and has seen an increase in staffing and events. There come with that challenges around retaining an enjoyment factor as well as supervising the network in an effective way. As countries move into a new phase of their restrictions, the network reacts with lower online figures and is trending towards something more like normal.

As a division we continue to ask that members continue to exercise patience when it comes to meeting requests; our team is working as hard as it can to provide a timely reply and intervention where necessary. Not everyone is available any more than they were prior to this situation, so please bear that in mind. Despite the real-world strife, the division continues to move forward on  number of projects which we can update you on below:

VATSIM UK Live

In accordance with UK Government advice hotels and conference centres are currently closed. This includes Conference Aston, where we typically host VATSIM UK Live.

At the moment the UK Government has said the earliest that non-essential hospitality businesses may reopen is 4th July, and this is still subject to several tests being met.

It is not clear when the go ahead for hospitality businesses to open will be given or if indeed these tests will be met prior to our event. Even in the case that our event were possible, it would have to happen in an extremely modified form. Additionally, bringing members from several countries together to do an online hobby is clearly not an essential or necessary activity. For these reasons we have decided to cancel our event for August 2020. We will aim to deliver the next event in summer 2021. We will liaise with the Marketing team for an online replacement for our planned event over the same weekend.

Training Department

As you may have seen, Daniel has made some appointments to the instructor team this week which will help support the transition from geographical training groups into rating specific groups. This has been in the planning for some time and hopefully will enable the training team to do what they do better. In parallel the pilot training team are working full-steam on the revisions to pilot ratings which will be introduced towards the latter part of 2020. This is a rich time for training, with increased mentor and student availability. We do know that some individuals have struggles relating to their availability and encourage them to contact us to discuss individual situations.

Member Services

Tom and his team are now functional in running many administrative and member facing elements of the division. They have taken key tasks over from other departments as well as streamlining their own processes. Tom is beginning a top to tail review of the visiting and transferring controller process which will aim to bring some more clarity to the process as well as offer members the best opportunities to being successful. This will be balanced with ensuring the onus is on the individual to be responsible for their education and of course the training of our own members in the division.We know that many people have feedback on this, and Tom will be informing members how they can share that feedback.

Web

The web team works tirelessly to not only support our activities locally but also in liaison with external parties. The web team have brought in new changes to the CTS system to support the training department, added new features to the controller plugin, taken significant steps forward on the new training system and found time to update our existing technology to the latest standards offered by VATSIM centrally. We continue to do this on a very small budget and in an open-source manner. This is happening while all of the team are balancing their new professional situations of continuing their day jobs working from home with domestic life. Contributions are welcome where individuals have relevant expertise to enable us to do more in the future..

Marketing

Loui provided a short update a few days ago. We have seen a very busy period for events with many partners - both in terms of virtual airlines but also within the various divisions and vACCs we have worked with. The number of events we run will go down now, to reflect the relative popularity of the network. But please do get in touch with Loui and Ben if you have ideas for future events. Loui will now continue to work with the Training Department to organise Training Evenings where needed, and also organising events whilst also working with a wider audience to gather event ideas. Ben will continue to focus on our Medias, we have seen positive feedback regarding the Runway Cameras and Radar Views that have ran during some events recently. Members also have opportunities to be involved in the activities of the marketing department (e.g. via graphics or livestreaming)

Operations

The department continues to produce monthly output in line with the AIRAC cycles. In the last two releases we have added, corrected or updated nearly 100 new features in the sector file thanks largely to the team of contributors. As with the web update above, we welcome contributions at our open sources repository which can be found here.

In addition, thanks to several volunteers sending in their updates we have published several updates to documents which were in dire need, and have a plethora of documents on the way in the next AIRAC cycles. I will continue to run the department in parallel with the division director role and the department will expand it's man power in the next months in order to further support network activities.

We know that many members of our community are particularly affected by this crisis, either in terms of their livelihood or in terms of the health of themselves and their family members. Naturally our community stands in solidarity with those most affected.