vAAirlines Historic Fleet Departing Shortly
A while ago our staff set out on a mission to begin work on paying homage to the legacy aircraft that have been the backbone of the American Airlines and American Eagle operation. Our VP of Flight Operations, Jorge, has spent countless hours on creating the infrastructure and heading up the initial implementation of what will be a multi-staged release of historic schedules and aircraft into our normal route system. This has been an extremely large project that we have put a lot of time and effort into to ensure that we have a comprehensive and extensive route network for our members to utilize for their flight simulation hobby and career with us.
Today we are very excited to announce that we are in the final stages of completing the first wave of our historic program which will bring a comprehensive 2007 flight schedule to our database for pilots to use. Wave 1 of our historic program will go live at 1330 CDT (1830z) on 18SEP21 and should not bring any downtime to the system or affect any flights that are being completed. This wave brings back aircraft such as the ATR 72-500, Saab 340, MD-80, the A300, and more! We have also gone back to a more recent timeframe (late 2019) to bring back favorites such as the ERJ-190, B757-200, B767-300, and the A330 family to give life to the recently retired aircraft once more. The best part? These come to you absolutely free and require no payment or heightened level of membership to access. As long as the aircraft type that you wish to fly is available to your current fleet group, you can go ahead and fly now!
For the full list of aircraft brought back please take a look at the new update to the SOPPHB which is now v1.9 that is live and ready to download on the main website. There are a few key changes to the SOPPHB that you will need to familiarize yourself with before utilizing the historic fleet on historic schedules, including how to tell if an aircraft or schedule is indeed “historic”.
Our commitment to your experience will always remain a focus of ours, and we will continue to improve this program with additions going further back in time to allow you to fully simulate the entire history of American Airlines and American Eagle. As development of this program continues, we will also look into integrating it with our current promotion system to allow historic flights to count towards promotion by completing AOMs specific to each type allowing us to create testable material for the Flight Academy.
We hope that you all are as excited as we are about this first step in the historic program, and we look forward to seeing the vAAirlines skies filled with these aircraft very soon!