The List

The List:

1. The biggest issue plaguing VATSIM is an attitude of ambivalence. From the top to the bottom. Founders, BoG, the divisions and regions. Whether it is the current economic state, or just fatigue from playing the charade for so long, people simply don’t care. There are BoG members who are in positions that REQUIRE online time who haven’t been online in 9 months. Yet, there is no accountability anywhere. As far as VATUSA goes, we have Directors who are never seen. There are ATM’s who hide behind the moniker of “working offline” to shirk the on-line time and accountability that the position demands. There are real people who demand the attention of these leaders. ATM’s that can’t, don’t, and won’t meet minimum online times that they wrote into their policies for months is unacceptable. There are people who don’t even give the common courtesy of a reply to the receipt of a resume sent in for a position opening. Unacceptable, and completely unprofessional. But it is accepted with a reply of ‘I receive a billion emails a day, and I am not able to reply because I am too busy”.

How I’d fix it: Expose the guilty and replace them. Produce, or walk. Pretty simple. Do what’s in the best interest of the organization and resign, if you know that you can’t serve the membership the way that it deserves to be served. Term limits for the BoG in order to reduce burnout, and keep fluid ideas and creativity at the forefront of the organization.

2. It is increasingly obvious that there is a severe lack of teamwork and communication at the highest levels, with fissures being seen in the details within the BoG. Where are these people? They are never seen online, flying or controlling. With all of the talk about bandwidth, how can a BoG member sit and watch the scope for 7 hours as an observer? Can this BoG member not control and supervise at the same time? In reference to VATUSA, there has been a history of administrations treating this hobby as a military organization expecting people to follow a “chain of command” acting like Generals too busy to get their hands in the dirt and actually do some work at the ground level. Not only that, but these people, who have absolutely no idea how the military structure of the chain of command really works, distort this structure to put themselves out of reach of the very people that they were brought in to serve.

How to fix it: See above.

3. Several years ago, Jeff Turner came in to be director of VATUSA. He made VATUSA his personal kingdom, acting simultaneously like an immature child, and a tyrant. He made it his mission to see the downfall of one of the most popular, and increasingly powerful ATM (then Chief) of easily the most powerful and popular ARTCC’s (Los Angeles) on the network. This was all started because Jeff Turner had a personal disagreement with Marc Sykes way of doing business. That in and of itself is irrelevant when assuming a leadership position. Instead of unifying other ARTCC’s around this facility and encouraging these facilities to get in line with the direction of this ARTCC, it was decided that the ATM was too much of a threat and cited bogus reasons for his removal. In talking with NUMEROUS other ATM’s, it was discovered that all of us were, in some form or fashion, duplicating what LA was doing trying to bring the same standards to all of our ARTCC’s. For one reason; because it worked! And it was FUN! Marc Sykes and his staff were more than willing to share everything that he had done with almost every other ARTCC. This was one decision that spun into motion the beginning of the layers upon layers of bogus bureaucracy that we see today in VATUSA. Instead of the Chiefs/ ATM’s reporting directly to VATUSA1 to encourage direct and fluid communication, the Region Director was put into place, citing “Chain of Command” as the reasoning. For no other reason than to act as an intermediary between Jeff, and the ATM’s. For the leader of an organization with thousands of members to be incapable of having 22 people work with him directly showed a tremendous lack of leadership. Understand; as an ATM, we have rosters with 50 to 150 people and we interface with those individuals directly daily. To see the Director of VATUSA put a buffer between 22 individuals with 4 people was simultaneously disheartening, and laughable.

Meanwhile, in the forum, any discussion that turned in a real debate, and there were many, was immediately squashed and locked. Often, there would be a threat of being removed, or suspended for speaking out awaiting in the email inbox. People quit going into the forums, obviously. Pressure for numbers and operations, online hours, and various other irrelevant goings on intensified from Jeff and his staff causing ATM’s and staff members to make an exodus. Of course, the common cause “Lack of time” was cited as the reason, yet everybody could see the writing on the wall. People were expendable because the membership was growing and growing.

Around this time, CTI students started showing up en masse to the network. When vacancies opened for ATM positions, there were a flood of these CTI students applying for ATM positions. These are college students, with busy class loads, a social life, and in one case, a sandy beach in near tropical weather year-round who were applying for these ATM positions. These were also kids who had never held a title of any sort in their life and were nothing short of title and rating mongers. By and large, they had zero experience leading anybody, let alone a roster full of people in a virtual organization. They turned these ARTCC’s into their little fiefdoms and strove for hyper-realism. Yet, these kids had never put on a mic and talked to an aircraft, ever, and in most cases, had never spent more than an hour on the floor of an Air Traffic Control facility. Additionally, they made things so difficult in the training process that, me, as a veteran ATC, found the process of getting qualified in a facility excessively difficult and often tedious. And I did this for a living! I frequently asked why things were being done they way they were, and the response…. You got it… “Because that’s how it’s done in the real world”. I often was left wondering what real world they were talking about because it most certainly wasn’t mine. The firing of Jeff Turner, being replaced with Dennis Whitley only exacerbated this issue. The ATM’s more often than not paper-qual’d their friends, and pals, creating bloated rosters of controllers with no quals. The C1’s and C3’s found the process, which was once fun, and only a hobby increasingly becoming a full-time job to obtain a qual. They left, tired of the antics and posturing of inexperienced ATC wanna-be’s running these ARTCC’s into the ground. When the complaints of many went unheard by the ambivalent folks on high, people grew disenchanted and left.

How to fix: See above. Additionally, work to make this hobby attractive to the hobbyist. 1st. Put the right people into the ATM position. Tighten the requirements for applicants. The position should seek the applicant, not vice versa. The right people are generally out of high school, and college. They have some experience leading people. They can be critical and objective thinkers. 2nd: Standardize the training across the board. Teach the procedures how they need to be taught for each facility, but standardize the nuts and bolts. 3rd: Seek out the C3’s who have invested countless hours into this hobby and see if they’re interested in helping put the wheels back on the bus.

4. The websites in the ARTCC have become the revolving front door of aforementioned fiefdoms for long enough. The website, the most essential and critical component of a virtual organization, has become the bane of every incoming ATM’s existence. When an ATM is removed, for whatever reason, the first thing to go with them is the website, which is detrimental to the rest of the facility. Any continuity that the facility has had gets lost in trying to re-build the front door to the facility. Stop everything! We need to re-build the website. Additionally, for an organization that prides itself on organization, there is no organization, or symmetry in the websites. Why not put all 22 ARTCC’s under the organization, so that people can’t hijack the website on the way out the door? Standardize the websites so that we have a handful of people with access to every ARTCC’s website. This removes the need for an ARTCC webmaster, and allows the ARTCC Staff to have a central contact for all website updates.