My Addiction to Virtual Airlines, a Retrospective

The crash was both literal and symbolic.

While this tale recounts flight CES712, a 12-hour flight from YSSY-ZSHC, it also reflects upon how things got to state where I realized, drastically, I needed to change.

I rue the day I ever learned about Virtual Airlines (VA). VAs are sort of like guilds in Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s not a good comparison at all. But in terms of community it’s similar. The community around VAs remains the biggest selling point to me.

Most VAs replicate the real-world routes of a given airline. For example, an American Airlines (AAL) VA will have the current-day routes for American Airlines. When I started down this rabbit hole a few years ago it was tough to get a lot of real-world routes without parsing through a ton of information you didn’t need. Flightaware is a good source, but it’s a bit of a fire hose¹. Volanta’s route information at the time wasn’t updated often. A few years ago, I started vacuuming up a lot of route information to try and make it easier to find routes.

The danger for me with VAs is most of them have a points structure to advance through the ranks. These ranks may inhibit what you can fly within the VAs. The aforementioned AAL VA I can only fly A320s until I progress through the ranks. The important thing is, this only affects what I can fly for the VA; not within the sim itself.

A lifetime of advancing in ranks in RPGs, MMOs, and damn near every game has taught me that earning big points fast is gigantic dopamine hit. I also had a strong desire to level one VA, and it was very tough to find a VA I could earn points in all the airframes I like to fly. I came close though.

Which leads me to flight CES712. The VA (which shall remain nameless since this is a me problem and not a them problem), had bonus points flying from YSSY (Sydney, Australia). This VA restricts airframes based off flight hours, and flying to or from YSSY earns me double hours. CES712, from YSSY-ZSHC in China turns an 11.5 hour flight into a 23 hour points gain. I was grinding to unlock the next airframe. One morning, I fired off this puppy to let it just kind of run. It wasn’t a route I particularly wanted to fly, but man, double points.

The flight was going perfect. Then about 11.4 hours later I was on final approach when the sim crashed. This made an 11.5 hour flight a gain of zero.

On a route I didn’t really have much interest in flying.

Now these things happen. I wasn’t upset at the sim, Crashes happen. I wasn’t upset at the VA for the failed flight submission. It’s tough to try and convince people to approve a flight where the plane impacted the terrain short of a runway.²

I was however, pissed at myself. I did this not for the fun of the flight, but the damn dopamine hit for the double points. Which is 100% the wrong reason to fly. To add to the injury, I did consider just bailing on the flight to fly something else.

My friend Tony and I often joke that “The Volanta VA is the no-stress VA.” In addition to providing route information, Volanta also tracks and records your flight data: time flown, route, airframe, landing rate, etc. I also keep a log with all this in Excel and use a reporting tool to give me a summarization. About a year ago, Volanta got much better about route information.

As I sat there staring at a crashed sim, I had one of those obvious moments of introspection.

With Volanta and my Excel tracker I don’t really need a VA. I even built a little scorer into my flight logger. I’d been fighting against the urge to bail on VAs.

Instead the perfect VA was staring me in the face.

1. For example this the departure board for KBOS. It’s just tough to dig through and find specific flights. It’s easier if I input a city pair but a lot of time I’ll just know the departure city I want to fly from ↩
2. Even on my Excel tracker I debated keeping this one. Usually a flight that fails to complete I scrub. I couldn’t on this one, though. I keep the entry. ↩