Lukas Jankauskas

Further to our communication in 2020 on Pegasus release, we are now announcing end of life for smartCARS support. As of 22nd April, we will render no support for PIREPs filed using smartCARS. Previous PIREPS filed using smartCARS will remain open-able at least until vAMSYS v4 and will retain scoring/processing support until 22nd April. Past this date, we will offer no ongoing smartCARS support. If you have not already – it is now definitely the time to upgrade to Pegasus – our in-house tracker. If you have Issues with Pegasus, you can report them using the support links in Pegasus download page on your VA. If you have not installed Pegasus yet – visit Resources section of your Virtual Airline. As of 22nd April, pilots will not be able to login to smartCARS and file PIREPs bar several VAs we have extended support agreement with, who we will work with, in due course, to retire smartCARS functionality. To avoid any doubt, VAs in question use their own trackers using smartCARS technology – if you track your flights using smartCARS application, you are not in the special category and must upgrade to Pegasus immediately. Pilots of these exempted VAs will be able to use smartCARS functionality and file PIREPs, but they will not receive new scorers/parsers utilising Pegasus technology. We do expect to retire all smartCARS APIs by the release of v4. We receive hundreds upon hundreds of PIREPs a day filed using Pegasus and smartCARS PIREPs are almost non-existent – we strongly urge the use of Pegasus to file your flights and report any and all issues so we could address them. Team vAMSYS

During our Christmas Message posted at Discord last year, we announced our intent to stop active v3 development and focus our efforts on v4 at the start of 2021. But we found ourselves not quite done yet and you have offered us some amazing suggestions, which we worked to implement in v3, pushing away our intended end of active development date to the point where most of you probably do not even remember we announced in the first place. As of 22nd April, we are stopping active development of v3 and refocusing our efforts to vAMSYS v4. Be not afraid – v3 is not being forgotten – it will still receive a lot of love in terms of bug fixes, which we will continue to implement as soon as we can as a priority. However, we will stop adding 3.X releases unless we receive a compelling idea on ideas.vamsys.co.uk with 15 or more upvotes. Ideas with that high upvote count will be evaluated for usability and application to all VAs using vAMSYS and will be implemented on a case-by-case basis into v3 codebase. All other ideas, including some with 15+ votes will be deferred to v4. Our v4 codebase is still young and we will be sure to update you with development progress as we push ahead. We hope to have v4 ready by the end of the year – this is our optimistic timeline. We have a lot of code to write and increasing number of ideas to implement. Whilst we do not have set promises, these are our development goals: • No downtime due to migration from v3 to v4, unlike v2 to v3 • Code improvements to make adding new features and fixing issues easier and quicker • Orwell improvements to allow Owners and Staff to manage VA better • Greater utilisation of JavaScript and its derivatives for a more seamless experience and better error reporting. Those are the big 4 guiding principles which we will govern ourselves under; we will however do our best to implement as many ideas tagged for v4 as we can for initial release. Needless to say – we will have a lot more to say once we pick up v4 development properly. We expect sprints in May followed by a little hiatus before we pick up again in July and over the summer, ideally resulting in some sort of Alpha before winter. Keep those ideas coming and bug reports flowing – your involvement keeps us at the top of our game and enables us to deliver the best possible Virtual Airline Management System out there. Team vAMSYS

How to enable the system? VA Owner or a member of Staff with Management access needs to navigate to Orwell => Management => Airline Options. Scroll towards the end of the page where 'Miscellaneous Settings' are located. Toggle 'Enable Claims System' switch if it is not in the 'on' position already. Click Save. How to access the system? Once the Claim System is enabled, it can be accessed as follows: Submissions by Pilots => Phoenix -> Flight Centre -> Claims Reviews by VA Staff with PIREP Review access => Orwell -> PIREPs & Liveries -> PIREP Claim Review How to make a Claim? Claims can only be made by Pilots. One claim is for one flight. If you want to claim multiple flights, you will need to submit the form for each flight. In the claims page, on the right hand side is a form which needs to be submitted: Departure Airport - 3 or 4 character IATA or ICAO code of the airport from which the claimed flight took off. Arrival Airport - 3 or 4 character IATA or ICAO code of the airport at which the claimed flight landed. Takeoff Date and Time - Time of takeoff, or as close to it as possible. Landing Date and Time - Time of landing, or as close to it as possible. Further, there are options to include 5 files and 3 links. It is expected that pilots will use these options to attach proof of flight - screenshots of Pegasus, STKP, Volanta etc or links to VATSIM/IVAO statistic repositories. What classifies as proof is up to each VA to decide and we hope they will publish guidelines for their pilots if they choose to enable this system. Once all the fields are entered (all fields are required, except File and Link fields - please populate at least 1 of the 8 fields there) click 'Save'. Page will reload and on the left hand side you will see your claim history: Pending - claim has been submitted and is waiting review from the staff. Accepted - claim has been accepted and a PIREP has been created for you. Rejected - claim has been rejected and no PIREP has been created for you. If you feel you made a mistake with your claim and it has not been processed yet - you may click on the X button in the Previous Claims list. This will remove your claim. How to Review Claims? Orwell Claims page lists all pending claims and data which we think is relevant in processing a claim. Claims are ordered in ascending order - i.e. oldest submitted claims are shown at the top (similar to PIREP review). Staff Claims Dashboard: Field information: General Information: Name - Pilots Name Username - Pilot Username Departure - Departure Airport Name - ICAO/IATA Arrival - Arrival Airport Name - ICAO/IATA Pilot Claim History: Last 5 Claims - In descending order, last 5 claims made by pilot. Data: Departure - Arrival Airports | Claimed Hours | Departure Time | Status (not pictured) Last 5 Accepted Claims - In descending order, last 5 claims made by pilot. Data: Departure - Arrival Airports | Claimed Hours | Departure Time Last 5 Rejected Claims - In descending order, last 5 claims made by pilot. Data: Departure - Arrival Airports | Claimed Hours | Departure Time Submitted Proof: Files/Images - list of links to the files/images uploaded by pilot. Clicking will open the resource in new browser tab. Links - list of links to outside websites submitted by a pilot. Clicking will open the page in new browser tab. Computed Data: Pilot Estimated Time - how much time pilot is claiming. Difference in hours:minutes:seconds between Landing and Takeoff times. Pilot Average Time - Pilot's average time across all their PIREPs. Departure - Arrival Pair Average Time - Average time for this Departure-Arrival pair among all PIREPs of the VA. If VA Statistics for this pair does not exist (no flights have been made or the routing does not exist for your VA) it will show 0. Pilot Average Time for Same Pair - Average time for this Departure-Arrival pair among all PIREPs of the Pilot who made the claim. If Pilot has not made a flight for this pair before, it will show 0. Pilot Average Points = Pilot's average points across all their PIREPs. Departure-Arrival Pair Average Points - Average point for this Departure-Arrival pair among all PIREPs of the VA. If VA Statistics for this pair does not exist (no flights have been made or the routing does not exist for your VA) it will show 0. Pilot Average Points for Same Pair - Average points for this Departure-Arrival pair among all PIREPs of the Pilot who made the claim. If Pilot has not made a flight for this pair before, it will show 0. On Accept: Award Hours - how many hours should the manual PIREP have - default is Pilot Estimated Hours. Award Minutes - how many minutes should the manual PIREP have - default is Pilot Estimated Hours. Award Seconds - how many seconds should the manual PIREP have - default is Pilot Estimated Hours. Award Points - how many points should the manual PIREP have - default is Departure-Arrival Pair Average Points. Buttons: Accept - Claim will be marked as 'Accepted', will disappear from Staff Claims list, manual PIREP will be created for the pilot automatically using the information provided in 'On Accept' section Reject - Claim will be marked as 'Rejected' and will disappear from Staff Claims list. FAQ: Can VA Staff make a claim on behalf of pilot? No. In this case, VA Staff should make use of the option available here

We have added a claims system (beta) as part of v3.6 release. It was built to provide an option for VA Owners to collect some data from Pilots in order to help create manual PIREPs to compensate for the ones which went missing between 18th and 20th March. How does one use the system?

This is no longer applicable. It has been superseded by PIREP Claims and Pilot Invite options available. Follow these steps: Compile the Pirep submissions.csv - you can download it from the question above. Note: You can open it in Excel, Google Sheets etc - be sure to save it as CSV before upload Fill in all the columns for each row pilot_id must contain pilot Username - for example VAM0005. Wrong entries include VAM 0005, vam0005 or lukas@vamsys.co.uk hours must include a numerical value - for example 2 or 1.5 or 0. Wrong entries include 'twenty', 15/3 etc. points must include a whole numerical value - for example 100 or 150 or 0. Wrong entries include fractional values such as 100.55 or 0.00 or 150.00 or words. bonus_points must include a whole numerical value - for example 100 or 150 or 0. Wrong entries include fractional values such as 100.55 or 0.00 or or 150.00 or words. Sanitise your data pilot_id - capital latters, no spaces. You can use excel formula in E2 such as this -> =UPPER(TRIM(A2)), and copy over the result from E2 to A2 then delete column E. Check that columns B, C and D contain numbers only - no letters, no spaces. Check instructions in step 2. Save as comma separated values - CSV Check data Open CSV in notepad and check - values should be separated by ',' there should be no "s or other artifacts or extraneous columns: Upload file in Orwell -> Data -> Importers -> Data: PIREPs Each row in the CSV create a new 'Credit' PIREP for the pilot. There can be multiple rows for each Pilot. Be very careful reuploading file in case of failure! You are very likely to cause duplicate entries which we will not be able to remove for you. If the importer failed - check all the steps again - you made a mistake. Once you fixed it, check your VA PIREP list and remove rows for which PIREPs got already created.

This is no longer applicable. It has been superseded by PIREP Claims and Pilot Invite options available. Applicable to Pilots already registered Using the CSV attached Pirep submission.csv