Hi,
I am back on duties now (at least on a relative way of speaking) and I want to answer some of your posts ...
Well, first of all I would like to thank your answers. Some of them, in my opinion show a constructive effort on getting a better FAC algorithm, others, unfortunately, mix other situations that don't really need to be discussed here.
As you all know, the current FAC algorithm doesn't actually reflect pilots that spent more time flying on ProPilot, comparing to others that can do only one flight and gain a direct entry to the Top Ten chart.
This situation is completely unfair, and it should be changed as soon as we, MT, had a chance to think about it.
This new FAC algorithm should reflect pilots who actually spend
more time flying with more flights and have less penalties than others. And we cannot assume that the pilots will put the airplane on the air and go to sleep because we dont' have a camera pointed on his bedroom to check that.
We
must assume that when a pilot does a long flight, he is following EHM rules, and those rules tells us that he must not leave the computer for more than 15 mins. So, where's the big deal here ?
If someone doesn't follow EHM rules, and if we caught him, the flight is, logically, not approved. And if we suspect of that we will talk to the pilot and ask him some explanations for that.
We based the new FAC algorithm to previlege pilots who do more flight minutes (and not longer flights), that is because they put more effort, and sacrifice their personal life time on behalf on our VA. Because of that, they should be more rewarded than others that do smaller flights and jump to the top ten with only one flight.
Because of that, we are introducing a new variable here that must do all the difference and it's fair. It wasn't on the past, where pilots Bruce Woodbridge (not to mention others) who dedicate their personal life to fly, and still they don't get rewarded because of that.
Some of you are saying that we are pointing to previlege longer flights. We don't. We previlege the
total flight minutes from all of your flights. It's better for you to have two flights counting 60 minutes, than 1 flight counting 60 minutes. So, again, why so many incorrect conclusions where you all say we want to give relevance to long hauls?
This topic is already going much far, and I will try to give more answers along time (if my baby permits it) but the ProPilot system was made for two reasons, flight analysis and simulated airplane movement, and the
real-life simulation part is not on the flight analysis (pilots on real life don't get their salary cutted off if they do a flight where they overspeed the airplane) but on the airplane movement operations.
In conclusion, we are always opened to new constructive thoughts, but much of what I readt here was not on that side and if it were, the necessary conclusions were not right. For that I give some answers from some of you:
Willem said:
"First this system dont change anything to the system, many pilots will be end in negative numbers and it will take them years of flying without penalties to become positive.(put it in a spreadsheet amazing figures)."
Of course not. As soon as you start to stop the penalties on your flights, you will grown your FAC much more quicker than on the current way where the FAC doesn't took in total minutes condition neither the online flight condition.
"One other thing get rid off the ridicules system off suspension, ít’s a hobby, also it takes some work away from the hubmanagers (they don’t react and if they do its to late) . "
I apologize if you got some late answers. We already corrected that by talking with our Hub Managers. If you still have problems, please send us an email.
The suspension is necessary so you can relax a bit without getting another airplane on the air and crash it again without knowing the reason why you crashed. This is also a way for us to see why our pilots crash, and try to improve our services.
Jim said:
"There seem to have been a number of management decisions in recent months that have punished those of us who dont have a huge amount of time....."
We didn't took any of those decisions outside of the ProPilot world. Even so, I don't understand why you say "recent months" while we didn't made anything on that matter until now.
But even so, you're not right because I already explained that we previlege pilots who fly more often, and also do more flight hours. Not only one part of that sentence.
"Now it seems i have to fly every day, for many hours in order to be considered a good EHM pilot - well rubbish to that i say and i hope that is not what management are wanting to achieve."
We are not considering this outside of the ProPilot world. ProPilot is a piece of our VA. But we have much more options that can fill you up, so, you cannot judge us like that because of one rule that we applied, on one piece of our VA.
Regarding to Iain's conclusion, I must say that even now it's possible to have a worse FAC score at last, than crashing the airplane. You can get almost a 2000 FAC score on a flight right now (!!), and on the future it will continue to be possible because the penalties are accumulated on your flight.
The only way to solve this is to give the crash penalty a bigger value than the sum of all the flight penalties that you get. That way we could have Iain's conclusion solved out, but if so we would open a Pandora's box where pilots that crashed once, simply would leave the ProPilot system because it would had become impossible to recover from that mistake.
To end, when we build a so special system like ProPilot, it's impossible to be appreciated by everyone. And it's normal to be like that because all of us are different.
But what we didn't create was the obligation to fly on ProPilot and we will never do. Like we don't create the obligation of using the Flight Logger on every flight that you do. So, you will always have the possibility to choose to fly on it or not. What we cannot accept is pilots that somehow don't accept ProPilot and his rules, don't fly on it as they should, and still come here saying that it's unfair this new algorithm.
Finally, we are completely opened to constructive opinions. If some of you want to wash out the dirty clothes from things from the past, please send an email to us. As you know we are always here to listen to you, because without you we wouldn't exist.
Regards,
