Fusion Airways Launches Seniority Based Bidding

Greeting!

I am very pleased to announce that with the help of Rex King, we have been able to launch our long-awaited bidding center. This complex system brings something that has never before been seen in a Virtual Airline, the implementation of seniority based bidding! This industry leading move now allows our crew members to simulate real airlines like never before.

Our system has full functionality, and more information on the Bidding System can be found in the newly updated Technical Operations Manual (v2.0) from the Pilot Resources page. It can also be accessed at http://www.fusionairways.com/docs/TOM_2.00.pdf. Please read section six (6) of this manual to see our exciting new bidding center!

We hope you enjoy the new features, let us know if you have any problems. More information can be obtained through the Crew Scheduling forum.

Blue Skies!
Bobby Cosgrove
President and Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove( a t )fusionairways(d o t)com

Fusion Airways Implements Industry Leading Fleet Records

Greetings!

With the most recent release of Fusion’s custom coded Dispatch Center, we add several very exciting features that as far as we know are revolutionary in the virtual aviation industry. While our crew members may not notice immediate changes, two very complex systems have been added to track our aircraft’s ILS status, and general aircraft equipment status. When flights are dispatched, the remarks section will contain the current ILS rating for that particular aircraft, and will warn the pilot if an autoland is required for certification. Our aircraft are required to perform an autoland every 60 days which is required by both Fusion Company Policy and FAA Regulations to maintain their CATIII capabilities. If an autoland is not performed, the aircraft’s ILS status will drop to CAT II until an autoland (in conditions CATII or higher) is performed. Here’s an example of how the new releases will look:

After the pilot completes the flight, they will now have the option to complete an aircraft logbook entry for that particular airframe. Logbook entries range from items that were inoperative, bugs or errors with the aircraft, or autoland remarks if an autoland was attempted or preformed on that flight to comply with ILS re-certification requirements. When filing a PIREP this entry is completely optional, and will only appear if the box to complete a logbook is checked. Here’s an example of what a crew member will see when filing their PIREP manually:

We are also very excited to release our new Fleet Operations & Downloads center. This page compiles a list of all of Fusion’s aircraft in an easy to read and accessible format. The initial page, accessed from the Crew Center homepage, displays a map of Fusion’s aircraft around the world and includes slide out menus for each aircraft in Fusion’s fleet with that aircraft’s current livery.

After clicking on the “View Info” page for a particular aircraft, crew members have more flexibility when it comes to downloading paints and viewing information. The aircraft information is laid out in an easy to read format, with the aircraft’s name and livery taking center stage in the aircraft information screen. The fleet operations page now allows crew members to download individual payware aircraft rather than just being stuck downloading the entire Fusion Airways fleet package. The option to download the entire package of aircraft still exists for our payware aircraft, and for the iFDG MD-11F and POSKY 757-200 freeware models.

The Fleet Operations page also brings together the other side of the aircraft logbook system. Crew members can now view the aircraft’s logbook, including any PIREPs reported by other crew members in an easy to read format below the downloads section. If a crew member recently flew the particular aircraft they are viewing more information on and filed their PIREP with FSACARs, or simply forgot to complete an aircraft logbook, the fleet operations page will ask that crew member if they wish to complete a logbook entry. After a two step process, a logbook entry is added. Here’s a sneak peak of the new aircraft information page:

And here is a view of the aircraft logbook on N101FN:

This system will not only allow us to bring an unmatched level of realism, but it will also help us to manage the MEL lists on our aircraft. We hope you enjoy all the new features that we continue to add to the crew center. If you have a suggestion, please feel free to contact myself directly or post it in the forums.

Blue Skies,
Bobby Cosgrove
President & Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

2009 A Year in Review Part 6/6

Hello,

It was the end of the year here at Fusion. Even though it was the end of the year we were far from done. We had two very large changes involving our E190s and MD11s.

To start on November 30^th our new 3 E190s, after many months of proving and training were finally put to use. We quickly decided to utilize these aircraft to a totally new market for us. The Caribbean Islands. We sent aircraft daily to San Juan and Montego Bay to start off. We also sent an aircraft to Nassau in the Bahamas. We also reopened out seasonal skier destination, Eagle County, Colorado. Expanding from the previous winter, we now operated this destination with a 757-200 which ran from San Francisco to JFK with the stop to Eagle County. In addition we now chose to fly a 737-700 from San Francisco. Last of all, we chose to move out Terminal at JFK to T7. This was an important move for many reasons, one of which was the addition of immigration control which allowed our oversees passengers to connect to Fusion Airways domestic flights easier.

In the dwindling hours of 2009, our Cargo Division received its largest overhaul yet. Based heavily on real world companies, the new cargo schedule allowed us to use out fleet of MD11Fs in a more realistic and efficient manner. The new schedule allowed the MD11F to operate in a more realistic fashion, based on a worldwide rotation of aircraft.

In November and December our crew members logged 608.2 flight hours flying 156 flights. We transported 12,872 passengers, 6,374,796 lbs of cargo and burned 6,510,676.2 pounds of Jet Fuel.

Blue Skies,
Brendan Farmer
Vice President of Human Resources
bfarmer(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

Latest Changes to the Dispatch Center!

Greetings!

As many of you may have noticed, we had about two hours of scheduled downtime in the Dispatch Center Friday night which brought some new changes to our company policies for dispatched flights, and a few new features to the dispatch release. Here’s what we accomplished this past weekend:

1.) We have re-written the entire Dispatch Center, this will allow the server to parse flights quicker and will make it easier for management to edit our database of aircraft information for the dispatch releases.

2.) Fusion Airways has added an “EXTRA” fuel section. This fuel is equal to approximately 15 minutes of flying time and is required for dispatch on all flights. This fuel ensures that our aircraft land with the FAA Reserve + Alternate + Extra to provide an extra 15 minutes of flight in the event a diversion becomes necessary.

3.) In the top of the releases, the airport elevation is now shown for aircraft with manual pressurization controls to easier set the landing field elevation.

4.) Cruising Altitude has been added between the filed TAS and the Cost Index on the Flight Strip located below the Passenger and Cargo values. For flights that have been dispatched prior to Sunday, February 28, 2010 this value will read blank but for flights from now on, the value entered for altitude in the Dispatch Center will display on the releases.

5.) The distance between the departure airport and arrival airport, and the arrival airport and alternate airport has been added in Nautical Miles.

We hope you enjoy the new features, please let us know either by commenting below, or on the forums if you have any suggestions you would like to see on the website. We are very excited about a new Fleet Operations page that will be released here in a few weeks with some exciting new features (more information to follow).

For now though, Blue Skies!
Bobby Cosgrove
President & Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

2009 A Year In Review Part 5/6

Greetings!

Almost wrapping up the year, part 5 of this series brings us to September and October of 2009. These two very important months brought Fusion’s first delivery of a brand new aircraft. Fusion started receiving the first of our five Embraer E-190′s that we ordered beginning mid-September. Fusion Airways ran these aircraft through extensive test runs, operating them to the cities that they would serve in the future and before the end of October the first two Embraer E-190 aircraft began service to 3 new cities from Fusion’s new hub in New York.

Fusion Airways launched inaugural service to Washington, D.C.; Boston, MA; and Burlington, VT with the airline’s first two Embraer E-190 aircraft. In the coming months, three more E-190s would be delivered but where those aircraft began service to will be discussed in the conclusion of this six part series. The Embraer E-190 opened new opportunities for Fusion Airways, as the airline could now begin building a more diverse spoke to hub system, bringing  new service to cities that service with larger aircraft did not make fiscal sense. The Embraer E-190 has already proven itself as a valuable tool in Fusion Airways’ route network, and continues to provide reliable, cost efficient service to many cities throughout the Eastern United States.

Now onto the stats, in September and October Fusion Crew Members flew 143 flights for a total of 451.1 flight hours. Fusion transported 13,342 passengers and 3,913,310 pounds of cargo. Flying those 143 flights, Fusion aircraft burned 4,271,906.5 pounds of Jet-A fuel. Check back next week for the conclusion in this six part series looking back at 2009.

Blue Skies,
Bobby Cosgrove
President & Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

2009 A Year In Review Part 4/6

Howdy!

With the weather beginning to deteriorate in many parts of the county, lets take a look back at Fusion’s growth during the hot Summer of 2009, specifically in July and August. These two months were ones that will never be forgotten to any Crew Member at Fusion during that time. July and August brought Fusion’s first aircraft orders, and paved the way for Fusion to open it’s second Crew Base at New York’s John F. Kennedy International.

One of the largest milestones Fusion hit is when we transported our 200,000th passenger in just over one year. The passenger was flying to Madrid, Spain on a Boeing 767-300ER July 17th, 2009. The lucky passenger received two free roundtrip tickets on any Fusion flight, and a yearly membership to Fusion’s “The Rock” frequent flyer club. With our growing route network, we decided that we needed to tap smaller markets around our hubs to provide better service and connect with customers in smaller towns that our existing aircraft fleet didn’t make economic sense to serve. Fusion announced the solution to this problem when it was reveled that we would be adding 1 757-200, 1 767-300 and a contact with Embraer of Brazil to purchase five brand new Embraer E-190 aircraft.

The Embraer order was placed in early May, but due to Securities and Exchange regulations we did not get clearance for payment until July, so the aircraft were already reserved but we decided not to release the details of the contact until we were sure we would be flying these brand new aircraft. With the new Embraer 190 orders, Fusion Airways announced in Early August that we would be opening a new Crew Base in New York, New York. This base would provide better flexibility to both our international and domestic crews and would serve as the initial operating base for our entire fleet of Embraer E-190 aircraft.

Now, lets take a look at the stats during these two very important months in Fusion Airways history. Our Crew Members flew 286 flights for a total of 828.40 flight hours, burning over 7642024 pounds of jet fuel. We transported 21,266 passengers and carried 6,182,273 pounds of cargo!

Check back in a few days for part 5/6 of our review of 2009 segments, and until then blue skies and stiff tailwinds!
Bobby Cosgrove
President & Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

2009 A Year In Review Part 3/6

Greetings!

Sorry about the 4 day delay in getting the 3rd part in our 6 part series about 2009 posted! We have been working on some very exciting new features for the Fusion website that will bring a completely unmatched level of realism to Fusion Airways. May and June 2009 were very important months for Fusion Airways. Fusion celebrated it’s first birthay on May 1st, 2009 which was a true milestone in the Virtual Aviation community. Studies done by our management indicates that most Virtual Airlines will shut down in their first year of operations if they are going to shut down, and Fusion is still going strong almost two years into our operations.

Our birthday also brought our first Fusion event, where about ten Fusion Crew Members, and the members of management connected to the VATSIM network and staged about two hours of “real-time” operations from San Francisco. We had Ed McCoy as our dispatcher, and were managing gates as if we were a real airline. Look for more events news, our Events Coordinator, Luis Cortez, is soliciting help in planning our next event in the forums, so please leave some feedback for him here.

June also was a very exciting month for us here at Fusion. We completed testing and implementation of our new ACARS system utilizing FSACARS. Our system uses the FSACARS client written by the folks at SATA Virtual, but we took it a step further. Myself and our other webmaster, Tom Eddy, re-wrote hundreds of lines of script, and debugged for many hours to finally develop a system that is fully compatible with our very extensive fleet tracking and status pages. We are always looking for new ideas, so if you can think of something that will make Fusion great, feel free to let us know.

During May and June 2009, Fusion Airways Crew Members flew a total of 196 flights, totaling 591.2 flight hours, transporting 21,374 passengers and 4,377,054 pounds of cargo. Fusion’s fleet of aircraft burned 4,512,302.03 pounds of fuel.

Check back here in the next two days, Brendan will be back to discuss July and August 2009 at Fusion Airways.

Blue Skies Ahead,
Bobby Cosgrove
President & Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

2009 A Year In Review Part 2/6

Hello!

March and April were two of the busiest months Fusion has ever seen, bringing about many new and exciting changes. To start, on March 1^st we purchased four new B737-700s from Alaska. These were ferried to Fresno and would later be put into service in the San Francisco hub.

A mere fourteen days later we announced even more expansion, this time with a new schedule and new cargo stops. Cancun now became active and soon became one of our best vacation spots. Cargo received a major overhaul and switch to a weekly rotation of aircraft that serviced new destinations in the Far East and Europe.

One month later another change came to Fusion. The John Wayne Orange County destination was scratched and replaced with LAX. Opening strong, SFO to LAX quickly became one of the most popular routes for pilots.

In the month of April, Fusion also announced its new Twitter page. Here we would continue to post pieces of news so that members of the virtual airline community could easily see what was new here at Fusion.

Finally on April 18^th we saved the best for last. Using our fleet of 767-300ERs and 757-200s we started service to three European cities: Gatwick, Madrid and Amsterdam. This had been a long time coming and we were thrilled to get the chance to give passengers and pilot alike the chance to explore this part of the world. Not be overshadowed by this announcement we also started nonstop services to Charlotte and Detroit from San Francisco; as well as non stops to Las Vegas and San Diego from New York’s John F Kennedy airport.

These two months brought about so many changes for us, but we had not even gotten to the real big game changers yet. During March and April Fusion Airways Crew Members flew 350 flights equating to 1024.4 hours. We transported 29,051 passengers and 1,363,409 pounds of cargo. During March and April we burned 8,766,081.46 pounds of Jet-A fuel.

Bobby will be back posting part 3 on January 5th, 2009.

Blue Skies,
Brendan Farmer
Vice President of Human Resources
bfarmer(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

2009 A Year in Review Part 1/6

Howdy!

We thought it would be interesting to look back at the past year and see how 2009 helped to shape where Fusion Airways is now. For the next 6 days various members of Fusion Management will be posting re-caps of 2009 in two month increments. So, please join us as we take a look at our history. This first post will cover the months of January and February in 2009.

Fusion Cargo was officially founded in January 2009, which means that coming the 31st, our wholly owned Cargo subsidiary will be one year old. We first started Fusion Cargo in response to a contract from the Virtual United States Air Force to provide logistical support for their Civil Air Reserve Fleet (CRAF) contracts. After realizing our Crew Members enjoyed flying the McDonnell Douglas MD-11F, we ordered three more and officially began worldwide cargo service.

Today, Fusion Airways serves over 30 cities around the globe with a weekly rotation of five McDonnell Douglas MD-11F aircraft. Fusion Cargo has been a huge success, and watching the operation grow has just been awesome.

Fusion Airways also hired our existing Vice President of Human Resources, Brendan Farmer, on January 25, 2009. Brendan will celebrate his one-year anniversary with Fusion Airways. Brendan was originally hired as the Managing Director of Flight Crew Standards and Training and during his time in this position he helped to develop numerous Procedures, Checklists and FCOM’s, some of which will be released in the coming weeks. We thank Brendan for his time serving this airline.

In January and February our Crew Members flew 280 flights, for a total of 4422.1 hours transporting 127,145 passengers and 41,608,950 pounds of cargo. Our aircraft also burned 40,361,234.29 pounds of fuel.

Brendan will post on January 3rd, 2009 part 2 in this 6 part series.

Blue Skies,
Bobby Cosgrove
President & Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com

Dispatch Center Updates!

Greetings!

Happy Holidays from all of us at Fusion Airways and just in time for the new year, we are excited to announce a very innovative feature in our Dispatching system. Fusion Airways now has the ability to have MEL/CDL’ed items on our aircraft. As far as we are aware, we are the first in the virtual aviation community to model this level of realism for our pilots.

If pilots experience a failure, or problem with the aircraft they need to note that in the “REMARKS” section of their PIREP. A Fusion management member or dispatcher will then check the FAA Minimum Equipment List (MEL) and determine if the aircraft can fly without that part, and if so what the consequences would be. If the equipment can be operated with the problem MEL’ed, the dispatcher will add that note to our aircraft database. If the aircraft is then dispatched, the pilot is notified that the aircraft has a MEL’ed item, and confirms that the route can still be flown as planned.

If the route cannot be flown as planned, the system will allow the crew member to dispatch another aircraft. If the route can be flown as planned, the MEL’ed item will appear in the MEL/CDL section of the dispatch release, and the Crew Member can simulate this failure through Flight Simulator by either manually disconnecting this system, or using failure systems to take the item offline.

After the aircraft has been taken out of service and the MEL’ed item fixed, the MEL will be cleared and the aircraft will return to it’s original state.

Let’s take a look at what a MEL’ed item looks like:

MEL 24-01 ENGINE GENERATOR DRIVE 1 DISCONNECT
MAY BE INOPERATIVE EXCEPT FOR OPERATIONS BEYOND 120 MINUTES PROVIDED APU GENERATOR OPERATES NORMALLY AND IS USED TO SUPPLY BUSSES OF INOPERATIVE CHANNEL THROUGHOUT FLIGHT

This says that the in the MEL list, Section 24, Part 01, the Engine Generator Drive 1 has been Disconnected. In the line below, the release shows the possible conditions or effects of having this item MEL’ed.

We are very excited to implement such a revolutionary system for our Crew Members. So feel free to report any discrepancies you have with Fusion Airways aircraft and we will take the necessary steps to “fix” them.

Blue Skies,
Bobby Cosgrove
President & Chief Operating Officer
bcosgrove(a t)fusionairways(d o t)com