I have added a couple E170’s to the fleet tonight and cut 1 CRJ-700.  I hope this does not come back and bite me in the rear, one of the biggest problems with running a VA is MAKING THE WRONG MOVE.  It is like a chess game at times, make a move and either continue on to the next move, or die right there.  Naturally someone is always upset with a move we make and MAN I HATE LOSING PILOTS over something like that.  It happens though.  We are now serving Toronto Pearson, one of my least favorite airports, but I think others really like it.  Its the old Chevy and Ford argument I suppose.

I am really looking forward to the Premier West release, I hope by this weekend.  I started with some of my favorite destinations, Tucson, San Diego, Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario (CA), Santa Anna, Bakersfield just to name a few.  I really hope you guys like them as much as me, short flights are great in my opinion.  Looking forward to Portland too, one of my favorite places to fly, landing over the bridges, breathtaking in FSX.

Taxes being done tomorrow (real world gets in the way) but I hope to get more done on Premier West, gotta get the textures over to David (Director of Fleet Operations).

I am currently working on four projects for GLE, one is the the addition of two new charter routes.  One set will be from Wichita Kansas and the other from Lost Nation Airport in Willoughby Ohio.  The flights from Lost Nation will also cover the islands in Lake Erie, Port Clinton and Toledo.  The other two projects involve the Embraer E170.  We will begin service to Toronto Pearson airport this winter and the plane I believe will be based out of either Detroit or Green Bay.  The other is a replacement of one of our CRJ-700’s with 1 Embraer E170.  I am still working on all of them and it is very time consuming believe it or not.  I am really in need of a day stretcher to get more time.  I hope to have the four items mentioned done this week as well as get 2 routes going for Premier West.  I just don’t think I will get it all done (which frustrated the heck out of me).

Thanks for your time!!

I have completed the painting of the 737-500 aircraft which will be the first to take flight in Phoenix and Las Vegas.  I am now working on the routes for the west coast.  The good news is that most of the routes will be very very short (if you enjoy short flights that is).  Routing the West Coast is relatively simple, there are a few key cities you want to focus on, first the hubs of course, Phoenix and Las Vegas.  Next you want to key in on the most populated areas such as San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.  Los Angeles and San Francisco can get tricky, LA also has Burbank, Ontario, LAX, Santa Barbara, Santa Anna and Long Beach.  San Francisco of course has SFO as well as Oakland and San Jose.  Each and every one of these airports is very important to get the maximum passenger movement.  Some feel that if you hit one airport in a market that is enough, I beg to differ.  Southwest Airlines does a very good job hitting every airport in the LA / Anaheim market.

Premier West will feature just about every airport in the major markets in California, it will be tricky but it can be done.  Most of the airports other than SFO and LAX are able to turn a plane around in 30 minutes.  LAX and SFO just have to many delays due to congestion.  We will make it work for us though.  We will be featuring high frequency routes much like Great Lakes Express, I am shooting for 12 flight operations per day per aircraft (14 would be ideal).  Once we expand further north into Oregon, Seattle and Canada we will be looking more at 10 flight operations per day.

As mentioned earlier I have completed the design and paint for the Boeing 737-500 freeware and the WILCO / Feelthere model.  If you own it or bought it for GLE you will be pleased we have added it to Premier West.  I am also looking at the possibility of adding the 737-300 WICLO / Feelthere model as well as a freeware alternative.  At this point that is not looking good as I am sure that people would prefer the NG series from PMDG.  By the time PMDG releases the new NGX series 737’s we will be looking at connecting Premier West and Great Lakes Express.  For now though I think the only way we will be able to connect the two airlines may be through Dallas or Denver.  We will not be flying from Premier West hubs to Great Lakes Express hubs, to far and not in our business model.

I got an email from a pilot this morning asking me about regional flights with Premier West.  I responded to him simply saying that we have absolutely NO plans of adding any planes smaller than the 737-500 just as I have said GLE will not see any planes larger than the 737-500.  I have to stick with the original plan.  I also want to state that we will not offer ANY cargo flights any time in the near future nor will we bring back the Canadian Division Premier Airways had.  I think that everyone gets the feel of what we are doing with Great Lakes Express, I am working on that same principle with Premier West (with slightly bigger planes).  So I can put this topic to bed now, Great Lakes National Holding Inc will not be adding any international flights other than flights to Canada and maybe to Mexico, MAYBE MEXICO.  We will not be offering any Hawaii service other than our current charter operations.

OK, all of these no, no, no’s, why???  I want the pilots who are coming back to Premier West to understand that it will not be what they remember, I went a little crazy with Premier (grew to big) before and this will stay very manageable for me, which will make a better airline and experience for you, that I can promise.

I will update this blog once I get some more going with Premier West, thank you for your time.

I am currently looking at the possibility of replacing the Bombardier aircraft with all Embraer equipment.  This decision is basically due to the lack of quality payware aircraft on the current airframes, WILCO and Feelthere are hard at work on the new ERJ’s.  One of the goals I have at GLE is to not have every type of aircraft on the planet in the fleet, rather the finest of freeware and payware aircraft.  In talking with the other staff members at Great Lakes Express we all seem to be in agreement.  The CRJ-200 seats 50, the E145 seats 50, the CRJ-700 seats 70, the E120 seats 70, so there you go.  The E145, E170 and the E135 have excellent payware where the CRJ’s have been overlooked for some reason.  I am a big supporter of Feelthere on many of their projects, mainly the Classic 737’s and the Embraer fleet.

Great Lakes Express will continue to offer the CRJ’s for those who love to fly them, they will be offered as part of the alternative fleet which currently includes the PMDG J4100 (alternative to the E120 and Dash 8 Q200) and soon the PMDG 737-60NG (alternative to the B737-500).  We are trying hard to give you as much variety as possible and I think we are doing a pretty darn good job at that.  Hope to see you all in the air a lot this month.

Blue Skies,

Paul

Great Lakes Express has begun a fairly extensive service from Omaha Nebraska.  This is a pretty big gamble for Great Lakes Express as there is not a lot of clambering for Omaha service.  If you look at our “business plan” though, Omaha fits in perfectly, small aircraft and short flights that serve into larger airports (Milwaukee).  We are not looking for huge numbers out of Omaha but at lease 5-8 flights flown per month per aircraft is reasonable.

I am looking into painting up the PMDG 737-600 as another alternative to the Wilco 737-500 aircraft.  The Wilco models do not work under the 64bit operating systems and that is the direction the world is heading so we are going to be prepared.

I am also looking into the possibility of getting another 737-500 in the system yet this year, we have a fairly good route set up for it, Chicago Midway to Detroit to Buffalo to Boston to Washington DC.  There are more destinations we are working on but this will give you a nice opportunity to fly the 737-500 on flights right around 40 minutes.

Well after hours of getting the night textures to work correctly the PMDG JS4100 aircraft is finished.  I have put it on the forums section for now under Fleet News until I figure out where I want to put it permanently.  That was a rough one for some reason but it is complete.  I will now be working on our new focus city in Omaha but would like to get a few flights in myself this weekend (at least thats the plan).

Well the JS4100 looks great in the day time, nut the night textures are a nightmare.  PMDG and most payware companies now use a .DDS conversion with a DXT5 compression instead of a 32 bit DTX3 compression.  This is specifically for FSX and can be a royal pain in the… well you know.  So when all the textures are “flattened” to go into the sim the night alpha layer goes away thus the plane GLOWS in the dark.  This is no good and has to be fixed.  O when I get home from work I have most likely an entire night night of pulling my hair out, lots of cussing, then lots of confessing.  I have been told when you pray for patience you are given a lot of opportunities to be patient… gee, thanks.

I am putting further expansion of Hartford on hold for a bit even though I have the routes all set to go.  It seems the BDL hub is taking off a bit slower than I anticipated which happens.  While Cleveland and Milwaukee are doing well Hartford will need to pay for itself a bit before going further.  We put an “ad” up at flightsim.com to see if we could get some new pilots for Hartford and that ad is not really producing what I had hoped for “so far”.  We will wait and see what the weekend brings.

We are looking at an extraordinary month so far, we may actually hit 600 flights which is amazing considering I took the airline over two months ago with virtually no pilots other than myself, Zane and Chris.   I think the short flights and the smaller regional aircraft are a really big attraction and this is the reason for the growth.

Well I did not want to buy this one as I have always thought that the Jetstream planes are some of the ugliest birds in the sky.  I know it is a good plane and all but it still is ugly.  So I bought the ugly bird and am beginning to paint it in GLE colors.  PMDG makes the finest paint kits in the business which makes it nice to paint.  I have completed the main fuselage and am now waiting for the plane to download.  I hope I don’t have any issues with the .dll files and the Wilco planes I have on board.

I have a feeling that once I get the new colors on her and fly it, it will no longer be an ugly bird but one of my favorites.  I am a big fan of just about anything PMDG makes, although I could do without the 747-400 and MD-11 (I am a regional equipment guy).  I would like to get this thing done tonight but I have a feeling it will not.  Everything needs to be converted to DXT5 files and flipped upside down.  The templates are HUGE and my computer LOVES to flip large images (NOT).  Just the GLE texture has 27 layers and once I bring the 27 layers into PMDG’s 40 layers everything kinda goes to a slow CRAWL.  I know, my problem, not yours.

Obviously I will let you know how that goes.

I thought I would start a little blog of my own, me sharing my thoughts and projects I am working on.  This may bore the heck out of you but I am putting it up anyway, who knows, it may spur some interesting discussion.  So there it is…