Operation fly

frfly172

frfly172

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Joined
Oct 22, 2008
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mass fla
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Display name:
ron keating
The board seems to be very quite ,was wondering if the pilots on this board are giving up?
 
I wouldn't describe the board as quiet, but I will agree there has been what I perceive to be a shift. I have noticed in the past six months or so a severe drop in actual legitimate aviation content. The amount of crabby men bickering and slinging **** has been pretty consistent with what it has been in the past though.
 
Arbiter419 said:
I wouldn't describe the board as quiet, but I will agree there has been what I perceive to be a shift. I have noticed in the past six months or so a severe drop in actual legitimate aviation content. The amount of crabby men bickering and slinging **** has been pretty consistent with what it has been in the past though.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure the OP was referring to this board, started by Nick and taken over by Dale.

http://www.operationfly.com
 
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Everskyward said:
Pretty sure the OP was referring to this board, started by Nick and taken over by Dale.

http://www.operationfly.com
Click to expand...

And taken back over by Nick.

I've got other things going on, but in about 6 to 8 weeks I hope to claim some more airports in Oregon. My problem is a declining number of nearby unclaimed airports. Autumn seems to be a good time to fly to airports in eastern Oregon anyway.
 
Jim Logajan said:
And taken back over by Nick.

I've got other things going on, but in about 6 to 8 weeks I hope to claim some more airports in Oregon. My problem is a declining number of nearby unclaimed airports. Autumn seems to be a good time to fly to airports in eastern Oregon anyway.
Click to expand...

Claimed Airports??
 
Unfortunately, I think Operation Fly is dead. We dont get much participation anymore (like 3 or 4 claims in a busy month), and between working too much, having two demanding children, and my racing, I don't have time to push it like I used to.

Dale still hosts it, but I took back the development and maintenance about a year ago. We are thinking of archiving and retiring the site very soon. I think I announced end of July being the end a bit ago, but I never shut it down....
 
SkyHog said:
Unfortunately, I think Operation Fly is dead. We dont get much participation anymore (like 3 or 4 claims in a busy month), and between working too much, having two demanding children, and my racing, I don't have time to push it like I used to.

Dale still hosts it, but I took back the development and maintenance about a year ago. We are thinking of archiving and retiring the site very soon. I think I announced end of July being the end a bit ago, but I never shut it down....
Click to expand...

Thanks Nick,that's the info I was looking for,have been keeping my own info for years,just my thing. Thought the site was great thanks for the work you and Dale did.
 
petrolero said:
Summary... what is Operation Fly?
Click to expand...
Click on the link in post #2.

As a summary, it started out as a site created by Nick called "Go Fly America". The goal was to land at all the public airports in the country. Pilots could 'claim' an airport by posing a photo of an identifying feature along with a piece of paper which said, "Go Fly America". Pretty sure you had to be the one doing the landing, which cut down on airports for me since I fly in a crew and only do half the landings.

For instance...

1075.jpg


That was one of mine.

It looks like we ended up with around 61% of the airports claimed.
 
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Everskyward said:
Click on the link in post #2.

As a summary, it started out as a site created by Nick called "Go Fly America". The goal was to land at all the public airports in the country. Pilots could 'claim' an airport by posing a photo of an identifying feature along with a piece of paper which said, "Go Fly America". Pretty sure you had to be the one doing the landing, which cut down on airports for me since I fly in a crew and only do half the landings.

For instance...

1075.jpg


That was one of mine.

It looks like we ended up with around 61% of the airports claimed.
Click to expand...

Thanks Mari!

Some background on how it started: I had a self-made goal of landing at every public use airport in New Mexico within one year (if you search POA, you can find my progress and status reports). I failed, but had a blast doing it, so I thought it would be fun to expand the goal and bring in everyone else to do the same, nationwide.

I partnered up with Chip Gibbons, who created the Go Fly America website, and we launched. When we launched, we were getting at least 100 claims per month (sometimes much more). After a few years, we decided it was time to shut down the challenge in 2009.

I received a bunch of requests to start it back up, and 2 years later, I built a new site with a new name (someone stole the old domain after it expired), and relaunched the challenge, using the same old claims, but inviting people to submit new claims alongside it. This happened in 2011. Again, at first, we got a bunch of claims, and we sustained about 50-80 claims per month for the first year or so.

After I lost my medical, I transferred ownership and maintenance duties for the site to Dale Botkin in 2012, then resumed ownership in 2014.

We have over 61% of total airports claimed - almost 3000 airports. Originally, we limited the challenge to only CONUS airports, excluding Alaska, Hawaii, and outlying islands, but now the challenge includes everything with a K or P ICAO id (4,766 as of the last database update).
 
I joined the effort,as my goal is to see how many airports in the country I can land at.
 
Maybe we should hit reset and make some new challenges - or do something like Waze for airplanes!? I claimed some airports.
 
WARNING: NECROPOST!!

This is just an FYI:

After SkyHog had discontinued operationfly.com it eventually got bought and changed so that its DNS entry was pointing to a malevolent site.
This last weekend I was culling old links from my iPad browser "favorites" list and came across that URL. After determining that yes, it still pointed to some evil site, I was curious to see if it was in fact still owned by whoever hosted the IP address. Surprisingly it did not - I presume lacking any new parking address the old address will stay cached. So because that domain is referenced here and several other places (including on one video of mine) I purchased it for 2 years. For now it points to a parked site at godaddy.com. I have other machines I can point it to (once I figure out what to display) but my only intent for now was to redirect an old favorite to a decent and proper burial site. If SkyHog has any of the old data and willing to allow me to put it up, I would host it indefinitely. Otherwise I may consider using it to resurrect a similar challenge at some future date.
 
Thank you for grabbing it! Sometimes I hate the evil that lurks on the internet.
 
SkyHog said:
Thank you for grabbing it! Sometimes I hate the evil that lurks on the internet.
Click to expand...

No problem. A cheap $11.34 for 2 years on the domain registration.

I temporarily redirected http://www.operationfly.com/ to http://www.shortfield.com/

I think some future challenge would need to satisfy these goals:
  1. Present a personal challenge (with reward by public recognition) that requires a visit to as many (or distant) airports as possible.
  2. Present an airport challenge - a motivation to make people visit airports that are otherwise rarely visited. And possibly do it sooner than later, and by more than one pilot.
  3. Make it so it is a perpetual challenge that does not require any form of manual "reset".
One possible set of rules that I think might satisfy all those requirements uses a rating system involving distance and time:
  1. A member accumulates points by declaring and providing proof of taking off from one airport (which may have been previously visited) and landing at any airport they have not already landed. Any number of refueling or rest stops of any duration are allowed between the two airports - it is only required that one airport was departed by air and the other arrived by air with ground travel limited to a minimum (e.g. taxi, takeoff, landing).
  2. The number of points awarded is proportional to the distance in nautical miles between the two airports multiplied by the number of days that has elapsed since the last visit at the landing airport by any other member. If no previous member has ever landed then 30 plus the number of days since the web challenge was started is used as the elapsed time since the last landing. In the event more than one member lands at an airport on the same day, all such members are awarded the points they would otherwise have (i.e. it's a tie.)
  3. Members are ranked and listed by the number of points they have accumulated.
So a collection of points gradually opens on all visits to all airports, making rarely visited airports more valuable than more frequently visited ones. And since a person can't get points for an airport more than once, they are constantly challenged to venture farther afield. A map provides a permanent record of what they've personally accomplished.

Rule 1 has the side-effect of allowing a person to get points for their "home field" when they return from their first landing airport. The rule also implicitly sets a (rather high IMHO) limit on the number of points a single pilot could ever get (there are only so many airports and a (so far) finite lifetime to fly to them.) Also, there probably should be some refinements on the refueling or rest stops aspect since I could see that getting abused.

Rule 2 makes rarely visited airports become increasingly valuable - more to more distant members than nearby ones! Rewarding such XC trips is a good thing IMHO. And a member may collect just as many points for going from A to D direct as by going A to B to C to D even if they've already got points for B and C. Also, a bit of game theory comes into play into determining WHEN to try for an airport you have yet to visit - wait for it to build points since its last visit reset - or go for it before somebody does a reset on it by visiting first?

The rating system allows new members to come on at any time and have a good chance of challenging long-time users by didn't of persistence.

Anyway - just some ideas.
 
Jim Logajan said:
No problem. A cheap $11.34 for 2 years on the domain registration.

I temporarily redirected http://www.operationfly.com/ to http://www.shortfield.com/

I think some future challenge would need to satisfy these goals:
  1. Present a personal challenge (with reward by public recognition) that requires a visit to as many (or distant) airports as possible.
  2. Present an airport challenge - a motivation to make people visit airports that are otherwise rarely visited. And possibly do it sooner than later, and by more than one pilot.
  3. Make it so it is a perpetual challenge that does not require any form of manual "reset".
One possible set of rules that I think might satisfy all those requirements uses a rating system involving distance and time:
  1. A member accumulates points by declaring and providing proof of taking off from one airport (which may have been previously visited) and landing at any airport they have not already landed. Any number of refueling or rest stops of any duration are allowed between the two airports - it is only required that one airport was departed by air and the other arrived by air with ground travel limited to a minimum (e.g. taxi, takeoff, landing).
  2. The number of points awarded is proportional to the distance in nautical miles between the two airports multiplied by the number of days that has elapsed since the last visit at the landing airport by any other member. If no previous member has ever landed then 30 plus the number of days since the web challenge was started is used as the elapsed time since the last landing. In the event more than one member lands at an airport on the same day, all such members are awarded the points they would otherwise have (i.e. it's a tie.)
  3. Members are ranked and listed by the number of points they have accumulated.
So a collection of points gradually opens on all visits to all airports, making rarely visited airports more valuable than more frequently visited ones. And since a person can't get points for an airport more than once, they are constantly challenged to venture farther afield. A map provides a permanent record of what they've personally accomplished.

Rule 1 has the side-effect of allowing a person to get points for their "home field" when they return from their first landing airport. The rule also implicitly sets a (rather high IMHO) limit on the number of points a single pilot could ever get (there are only so many airports and a (so far) finite lifetime to fly to them.) Also, there probably should be some refinements on the refueling or rest stops aspect since I could see that getting abused.

Rule 2 makes rarely visited airports become increasingly valuable - more to more distant members than nearby ones! Rewarding such XC trips is a good thing IMHO. And a member may collect just as many points for going from A to D direct as by going A to B to C to D even if they've already got points for B and C. Also, a bit of game theory comes into play into determining WHEN to try for an airport you have yet to visit - wait for it to build points since its last visit reset - or go for it before somebody does a reset on it by visiting first?

The rating system allows new members to come on at any time and have a good chance of challenging long-time users by didn't of persistence.

Anyway - just some ideas.
Click to expand...
Those are great ideas - i would love to help. I don't have the time, unfortunately, to write and maintain it this time around though. It was a pretty big undertaking.

If you launch something like it, I will both participate and help with whatever you need. I did it twice before (with Chip Gibbons help the first time) and it is incredibly rewarding and fun to run.
 
SkyHog said:
Those are great ideas - i would love to help. I don't have the time, unfortunately, to write and maintain it this time around though. It was a pretty big undertaking.

If you launch something like it, I will both participate and help with whatever you need. I did it twice before (with Chip Gibbons help the first time) and it is incredibly rewarding and fun to run.
Click to expand...

Thank you for offering to help - I'm hesitant to accept much since I appreciate the effort you had to make to create and run the original challenge web sites. I do not have a lot of spare time either, so it will take a while for anything to emerge from my musings here.
 
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