What a mad week or so we’ve had. There has been lots of stuff going on over here from Passenger Mile Month concluding, celebrating two years of Virgin XL, our epic yearly 747 event and finally our rebrand and another staffing shakeup.
Well let’s get to it…
Back in April a vote as put out as there was a few discussions in our voice channels about going for the passenger mile statistic again, some interest was shown so a vote was setup with overwhelming support to just go for it in May with 9 fleets participating for the entire month. Well, we smashed it. Setting a record for the most passenger miles EVER on FSAirlines in a single month setting a record of 2.18 BILLION passenger miles while being over 300million in front of the competition in second place. The dedication and determination from our pilots won us this record and for that I am extremely grateful. Amazing work everyone. I rewarded every fleet that took part 2bil v$ as a way of saying thank you.
I know that in my last post we shook up the staff a little. Well, we have changed things up again. I would like to welcome Lucien and Ossian to our staff team two highly valued and dedicated members. Lucien will be heading up Europe and Training within Virgin XL. Ossian is now our Head Designer and oversees anything graphically within Virgin XL and is the man behind our amazing rebrand but more on that later. Carman has moved from Europe as a slight oversight on my part last time was that he managed Europe while not running a hub in Europe. Carman now manages all other continents that don’t have a dedicated manager as we are yet to fully expand into parts of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and South America. However, there are some hubs in these continents and if they need support Carman is now going to manage that.
We celebrated our second birthday last week! I cannot believe how quickly the time has gone by. We are seeing consistent growth in all areas within our operations year over year, and I can’t thank everyone involved in that enough. Simply sending friends an invite and spreading the word is working nicely for us and generally people that join tend to stick around. One of our biggest achievements this year with be the introduction of Virgin XL US. Marc from TFL took on the role of running our North American operations and since he started, we now have 6 hubs open in the US showing a huge Virgin XL presence across the pond. Talking of the US now would seem a good time to announce the upcoming US based community fleet. Things are not finalised around this, but it would mirror the EU fleet but be based in lower central America probably in Dallas Fort Worth, TX.
Now onto the rebrand. Yet again whisperings and conversations held in our voice channels hinted to a rebrand happening. As some are aware, our old logos and graphics were only supposed to be temporary last no more than 6 months. However, they lasted two years with around 50 liveries made around it from small aircraft to the Antonov 255. (RIP Mriya) As per with me I tasked Ossian on very short notice with rebranding the entire airline on extreme short notice. He had 4 days (sorry). But Ossian smashed it having mock-ups ready within hours. The livery design was voted on and continued with my very over picky opinions and tiny changes but within 48 hours half the time. Ossian had liveries, logos, and various other graphics ready for our two-year event which allowed for some fantastic screenshots to be shared from the event most of which are in our last blog post. Some are displayed permanently in our slideshow header on the main website. The change from red primarily with the XL baby blue as a secondary colour to a single darker royal blue was bold and met with some hesitation initially but since its full deployment opinions are positive towards our changes.
With the rebrand the website has been freshened up with some small changes such as the signature Virgin XL font, Century Gothic, and changes to the header to reflect the rebrand with the colour being widely used site wide over the previous red we used before.
Some small changes have been made to how members contact staff. Normally we just accepted this via Discord however things were getting lost or were 9/10 being dealt with by the wrong person. Eddie developed a new system that has a drop down where you can select your issue/suggestion. This will automatically but you in touch with the right member of staff and someone will reach out to you (normally same day) in the following few days from submission. You will find this system on the left-hand side of the dashboard [Contact Staff]
