Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler

Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | Airline Operations | Adding airlines

DVA13609
Captain, B767-300

Joined on January 24 2019
Century Club
B737 50 Club

"Live your dream, and positively impact everyone around you!"
Midwestern United States

189 legs, 358.9 hours
188 legs, 356.7 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on February 23 2019 15:11 ET by Caleb Mcbrier

Hello!

I was sitting here looking at the list of all the airlines we can fly here at DVA, and I was curious what all it takes to add a new airline? Finding route structures, adding them to the site, finding someone to manage the flight reports?

Just kind of curious what all it takes to make the magic happen.

Caleb Mcbrier

Captain, B767-300

DVA2018
Chief Pilot, ERJ-170
OLP, 737-ATP

Joined on November 23 2004
B757 100 Club
50 State Club
Globetrotter
DVA Fleet Master
US Mountaineer Club
US Coastal Club
Everett Tri-Millennium Club
Eight Millennium Club
Ten Million Miles and Beyond
Online Thirty Century
DVA Twenty-Year Anniversary

Ralston, NE

11,926 legs, 26,922.8 hours
3,951 legs, 7,571.5 hours online
10,685 legs, 22,329.8 hours ACARS
4 legs, 10.7 hours event

Posted onPost created on February 25 2019 21:39 ET by Matthew Whitaker

Caleb, I guess the first thing is finding them to be a codeshare or for the historical ones, some sort of connection to Delta or it's skyteam partners. An example would be North Central Airlines, which ran flights in the midwest up until the 70s when it merged with Southern Airways in 79 to become republic airways which then was merged in with northwest in the 80s and then northwest merged with Delta in 09.
Now, finding the flights and destinations is done using research, which on some of these airlines is close to magic. I've tried finding old timetables for airlines from just 10 years ago, let alone from 40 or 50 years ago. I think that is the skinny on it but I am sure Andrew could probably go into a whole lot more of the particulars.

Matthew Whitaker

Chief Pilot, ERJ-170

Posted onPost created on February 26 2019 10:06 ET by Caleb Mcbrier

Thank you for the information!

Finding schedules can be fun, and an interesting project for an aviation lover. Itd something that would be fun for me, but sadly the airline I was interested in was a part of Oneworld. Oh well!

Caleb Mcbrier

Captain, B767-300

DVA2887
Senior Captain, A320
OLP, 737-ATP, VFRADV
E-MAIL

Joined on January 30 2006
50 State Club
Globetrotter
Tri-Jet Triumph
US Coastal Club
Millennium Club
DVA Fifteen-Year Anniversary
US Mountaineer Club
Toulouse 250 Club
Online Eight Century

Charlotte, NC

1,283 legs, 1,792.7 hours
837 legs, 1,044.3 hours online
1,265 legs, 1,770.7 hours ACARS
31 legs, 49.6 hours event
3 legs dispatched, 2.5 hours

Posted onPost created on February 26 2019 17:15 ET by Andrew Vane

Its a fun but very time consuming endeavour Caleb. We have added about 7,000 flights from 5-6 years ago to our historical codeshare airlines. And, we keep adding new ones regularly. Delta has quite a large family tree of mergers and acquisitions. We are currently working on adding more historical airline codeshares and flights to our database.

keep in mind if there is a flight you really want to fly that's not in our database, you are welcome to open a help desk and request a charter. We will add the draft flight report to your log book so ACARS will allow you to fly it. So long as the privilege is not abused, we will continue to offer this to our pilots. In fact, I'm surprised more pilots don't take advantage of it. We have 17,000 flights in our database and nobody has flown them all....yet. smile

Posted onPost created on February 27 2019 22:39 ET by Matthew Whitaker

you know Andrew a cool feature would be when selecting your flights how we have the airports not visited yet, how about the routes not flown yet. So even though you may have flown to both airports at one time, you may not have flown between those two particular city pairs before. Not sure how much that might clog down the system but that would be a cool feature to have

Matthew Whitaker

Chief Pilot, ERJ-170

Posted onPost created on February 28 2019 09:53 ET by Andrew Vane

Hmmm. So sort of a city-pair database? That would give you quite a list since there are a lot of routes. I'll see if that's something we can implement.

Andrew Vane (DVA2887)

DVA13608
Captain, A320

Joined on January 26 2019
Moose Club
Century Club
Eurocap Club
Toulouse Century Club
Online Century Club

Edmonton, AB Canada

143 legs, 242.3 hours
140 legs, 235.1 hours online
140 legs, 238.3 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on February 28 2019 10:41 ET by Gerard Beekmans

Matthew, based on that "plot all in a KML" exercise I did a while back and based on the PFPX file I exported at that time, there were 9,042 unique flights in the database (20,962 in total but remove the duplicates due to various airlines flying the same routes) and 4,797 city pairs (this removes any reciprocals so if there's a flight from CYYC to CYEG it doesn't then count the return CYEG-CYYC as it's just the same city-pair only in reverse).

Matthew, you can download the KML file I had generated and use that if you like until something more formal could be implemented...be warned, it's a mess. ~4500 lines on Google Earth is hard to read especially in the continental US but you could then "unselect" flown routes manually in the KML file and dwindle them down.

Files are here if you'd like to take a gander https://cloud.andromgx.com/s/KEGT8qWSXni2GzQ

Gerard Beekmans

Captain, A320

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