Nice weather at Corona, but grungy everywhere else. Woof. There are only so many touch-n-goes a person can do, I suppose.
The grey day provided a great opportunity for us to noodle around with an idea we've had. To wit:
Some pilots have mentioned that booking planes, particularly on the weekend, can be difficult. This has been made doubly infuriating by certain folks booking huge blocks of time and then not flying. We've chatted with the worst offenders, and this problem doesn't seem to be improving.
While it is not a solution, we have tweaked our schedule to send out updates when someone cancels a booking. We are using twitter for this.
Twitter is one of those web ideas you probably hear about all the time, but may not be "hip" about -- sort of like Facebook, which some of the staff are playing with currently.
Twitter will, at no cost to you, allow you to subscribe to updates that your friends may post about themselves -- via Email or a text message on your phone. I don't have any friends on twitter (that I know about), and I certainly don't need to know in real-time when they prepare a cheese sandwich, however, this medium is sort of ideal for tracking our planes and their various misdeeds.
So here is the experiment:
Each of our planes has a twitter account.
The schedule will automatically "tweet" an update when a cancellation happens anytime in the next week, or in the next FOUR weekends. The idea being, if a juicy spot opens up on the schedule, you can know about it and pounce.
We also plan to tie it into our maintenance tracker, the Digital Walsh (longtime FlyC friends will understand this name :) ), and "tweet" when a plane is coming close to a routine inspection such as 100hr or annual. We are thinking about tweeting this 15 hours prior to its due date.
We'd love to know if this is valuable. We are also thinking about adding this to our CFIs, so you can track their availability as well, but we'll start with the planes. :)
Our planes' twitter pages are:
http://twitter.com/flyc17j
http://twitter.com/flyc1es
http://twitter.com/flyc739
http://twitter.com/flyc20u
http://twitter.com/flyc68u
http://twitter.com/flyc630
http://twitter.com/flyc25r
http://twitter.com/flyc85y
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And now you can sound cool at the mall, or talking to youngsters, when you look at your phone and say "oh, wow, my favorite plane just tweeted an opening this weekend! wanna go flying?"
..just watch their jaw drop at THAT one!
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I'd love to hear any comments. From our research, twitter is about as benign as possible, and won't punish you with spam, however, please let me know if the service turns "evil", and we'll cut it out. Heck, it doesn't even need a valid email address, from what I can tell. And it will get in touch with you in any way you allow it to, making it rather convenient.
If your cell carrier charges you for inbound text messages, you may want to try this via email or other sort of method first, as updates can get lively, especially on a weather day. Also, we're happy to "tune" this to limit the update frequency, currently running at about 3 or 4 per plane per day. Some are livelier than others, of course. Check with your cell carrier if you are uncertain of your SMS allowance.
Blue Skies,
- Mike
