Hello Fellow Aviators,
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about the PMDG MD11 Training that AOA is putting together, it’s status, and what the general deal is.
As many of you have been anticipating, we were supposed to release the training today, May 11th. Let me just discuss things in general and share with you why we are where we’re at (which is a non-release today), how it’ll be different in the future, etc.
First, an Apology
I want to apologize right out the gate. I know a lot of you guys have been waiting patiently (and for a long time) for the MD11 Training. We’ve announced changes along the way, some good, some that weren’t received so well. Much of what I’ll share with you throughout the rest of this post will give you a better idea as to why these things have happened.
So, if you’ve been waiting anxiously for this product, we apologize for all of the delays. It is not out quite yet, but it’s probably closer than you think.
Lots of Learning
In my mind the biggest holdup for this project has also been the biggest benefit. Personally I have been learning a lot about business, the community and my customers in the last while. For this reason I have had to make some judgement calls to go different directions on things because I saw some trouble coming that way.
Mostly this part is all good but learning something is much easier when you can take a step back and look at the whole picture. I have done that quite a bit this last year and I have begun to finally mold AOA into the brand that it’ll be now and for the future. One that is successful and here to stay.
One of the big things I’ve learned is to have tremendous transparency in all that we do here at AOA. That means there are posts and emails like this; posts that I could easily get away with not writing. But I don’t really feel good about that. Our community at AOA is tighter than that, and at the core is an integrity you can expect.
That isn’t saying we are going to be perfect all of the time. In fact, I think the more perfect we try and make AOA the more we’ll waste time on things that don’t matter rather than just getting great training material out there for the flight sim community.
We are a small company that has a passion for training flight simmers. We’re embracing our size as a benefit so we can interact more one-on-one with the trainees, you, on the inside.
New Stuff
The mission of AOA is ‘Spread a Wealth of Knowledge Through Aviation’. That means that we aren’t really married to the idea of JUST doing products on great airliner addons like we started out doing, with the 767 and 747.
With that said, we’ve started a lot of new and great things that are sending shockwaves through the flight sim community. This started in earnest with our Aviator90 series. This 90 day, 45 part video training series that is free to all has been a huge success for us.
Some other things happened during the advent of Aviator90 that I didn’t expect.
One of the big ones was the motivation to keep on going by releasing things one section at a time. It was great to have the encouragement from comments and emails day-to-day.
Because I also committed to do 1 video every 2 days, that meant that I learned a lot about what AOA was realistically capable of. Turns out that we can push out of a lot of stuff and fast!
In addition, we can get feedback along the way on the project to make sure we’re meeting the needs of viewers. That’s a big one!
That leads me into my next point about the way things will be done here in the future.
Immediate and Progressive Release
From now on we will be releasing things immediately. That means that when section 1 is done and we have a sales page up and everything is working correctly to get your enrolled, you can start getting your training. You can then get the training section-by-section as it comes out and you can give us feedback as we produce.
This does one MAJOR thing that I think is pivotal for the success of Angle of Attack and the success of your training: It FORCES us to get it done.
When you’re self-employed like I am, it’s really difficult to not only be the ‘boss’ of others, but also the boss of myself. That means that the schedule we commit to will now be the boss of all of us here in AOA.
You can see this right now with AviatorPro and exactly how Aviator90 was; we say we’re going to deliver X episode on X day and it’s there.
This is a far cry from trying to produce a 7 hour project all at once. It makes the process very manageable, rather than borderline impossible.
Conclusion
So where do we go from here?
I am still working diligently to get the first few sections completed on the MD11. I’ve enrolled the assistance of a few video editors that are WAY better than I am to assist in pushing out the training faster.
So keep your eye out, sign-up for the checklist above, and be ready to jump onboard when the time comes which will be VERY soon.
In the comments I’d like to have a bit of a Q&A from you. Ask any question about the MD11, no matter how direct, and I’ll answer honestly and to the best of my knowledge. I think you’ll learn more from that interaction than anything I can say above.
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