1 January 2005
To All Of Our Pilots,

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are enjoying the new year. I celebrated New Year's by flying overnight on a 757-200 and never experiencing a midnight because of time zone changes. Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out our annual survey, the final results of which can be seen here. For the most part, the survey results were very clear about the direction we should be going, and that is reflected in our 2005 Operations Plan. I hope you will look over this document to see our goals for this year and how we want to improve SimAirline.net even further. I encourage you to give me your feedback on it. To avoid repetition, I won't include the goals in it in this letter. All new pages and sections on the website can be found through the main SimAirline.net page. Part of the changes resulting from it are revising our Pilot Manual, so please do take the time to read the new version.

Air Canada Virtual had the best opening month of any new virtual airline for all of 2004, and second all-time behind Delta Virtual. Congratulations to everyone for Air Canada Virtual's success so far. This was also our best month ever in other areas as well; we set new records for flight hours, active pilots, and retention. Korean Air and Northwest also had record-setting months. Virtual British Airways will be added in the near future and will be our most ambitious virtual airline yet. It will include not only the operations of British Airways, but their franchise partners and regional affiliates as well.

FS2002 Downloads to be Discontinued
Because only a little over 20% of our members currently use FS2002, a figure expected to fall below 15% by July, we will discontinue checking for aircraft's compatibility in FS2002 as before, and in July, we will no longer offer FS2002 downloads.

Management Hiring
As a reminder, we are always seeking people interested in the position of Aircraft Developer. This position involves repainting aircraft to be available for download on our site. If you are interested, please go here. Additional management positions will be created this year.

Aircraft Retirements
Northwest will be retiring the DC-9-10 from its fleet on January 2; the last two flights will be the last Detroit-Grand Rapids, MI and Madison-Minneapolis/St. Paul flights of the day, with the latter being the final flight. Continental will be retiring the MD-82 from its fleet in January as well; details on the final flight will be announced when available.

Notice to SkyTeam Timetable Users
Please be sure to check for timetable updates from the opening screen at the start of every month, as there is not an automatic reminder feature as in other timetables.

Advertisements Removed From Site
The Icarus Solutions banner advertisements that were previously at the bottom of the main page of each virtual airline have been removed. Icarus Solutions is our website host provider, and supplied us with free services for the first year of operations under the SimAirline.net name. We are now on a full membership basis with them because we use so many services.

We'll be celebrating five years of operations on April 22 this year, and we hope to have something special to celebrate that day with. Thank you for choosing us as your virtual airline home and for your important contributions to our success. I hope that the next five years will be as exciting as the first.

Aaron Robinson
aaron.robinson@simairline.net
AOL Instant Messenger: SimAirlineNet