Take the California Screaming 13 Pilot Survey Fellow VATSIM members,
On behalf of the controllers at the Los Angeles (ZLA) and Oakland (ZOA) ARTCCs, I'd like to thank everyone who took part in the California Screaming event on Sunday August 22, 2010. This includes not just the pilots who flew in the sky but also the California controllers, neighboring facilities that opened up to support us, the supervisors who were on hand to help everyone out, and the entire planning committee for the event. I only managed to check VatSpy near the start and end of the event window - and during both there were over 40 controllers connected and 150 pilots flying in California. Not bad for a six hour window!
The first California Screaming event was held on June 10, 2001 and by September 2004 we had already held our tenth CalScream! At its peak we saw over 400 pilots signup for flights from an available 850. The event nearly turned into a "West Coast Scream" for a few years as it featured flights out of ZSE, ZAB, ZDV, ZLC and included flights from as far away as Asia, Europe, and the South Pacific. It's hard to believe that since then we've only held the event in 2006, 2007, and now CS13 in 2010.
The purpose of the event has always been to simulate distributed traffic ratios across the region rather than a conga line into one airport. By distributing the traffic we're able to give more controllers a piece of the action, while focusing on a small chunk of sky as opposed to a few controllers dealing with an overwhelming amount of traffic. We've also aimed to answer one of the most often asked questions all pilots "Where should I fly today?" by providing them with all of the information required to fly to/from a new destination. By also giving them a callsign, aircraft type, and pushback time (all optional) we like to think that we've added a "coolness" factor since the flights were all taken recent real world schedules. By having people "sign up" for flights - we are able to analyze the anticipated traffic loads in advance and deploy our resources where required.
Having held only three of these events over the past six years we realize that the community has changed. We don't really know if the concept of a CalScream event is interesting to pilots anymore. Some VAs all want to fly routes from and to their hubs on their own schedules rather than the event schedule. Some pilots like to only use routes gathered from flightaware, others want to fly their equipment type only, and of course some prefer to fly a conga line with a bunch of their friends. We only had 120 pilots sign up for this event so we'd like to understand if this is because people don't like to sign up, don't like the sign up system, didn't know about it, couldn't find a flight they wanted, or some other reason.
In an attempt to gather as much information as possible regarding what the pilots in the community want from an event - we invite you to partake in the
California Screaming 13 Pilot Survey. After we've gathered the information it is our hope to tweak the CalScream event as required so that we can provide the community with an event that is as appealing as possible.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this and provide your input.
Click here to take the California Screaming 13 Pilot Survey
