ISSUE 03/2002, VOL. 07 / PAGE 2
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF NORDIC Dear 330 pilots of NOR today! This is a brief history of our past five years. Why to look back, yes because I have a slogan "If You do not know from where You are coming, You can´t know where You are going!". And that applies as well as for historians as modern business life. But I´m not writing a long history book for You, instead just an array of facts showing our growth form a small but also innovative VA, to the worlds largest VA group by number of airlines and a cooperational partner in WVAR (World Virtual Airline Register) together with AGA at the world largest simsite flightsim.com. That has taken almost five years, and over 10.000 hours of time from the management. But let´s look back in time. Stockholm, Sweden, 04 AUG 1997, Nordic Air, was found by NOR9001 Kirstoffer Labuc, still a member and SVP, ATC-issues. What did they do he and his friends then? Yes they created not only the still oldest operating VA of Scandinavia, but more important also a sub-divsion of NOR of which further history we can be proud of. That was Nordic Air Simulated ATC, the first SATCO partnership divsion outside USA, which still the same year became SATCA "Simulated Air Traffic Control Associtaion". Next spring UK get their own SATUK, and SATCA changed name to SATSWE, for little bit more than one year. In march 1999 the company had a crisis, we almost shut down, but survived, and SATSWE was gone, operations taken over by SATEUR which is VATSIM EUR today. And the airline continued in smaller format only on Nordic routes with the the 737 You can see hereunder.  NORDIC AIR B737-500 by Daniel Sjöberg of 19 AUG 1998. Well already in november 1998 I joined NOR, and happened to be the 100th pilot. My first task was to establish operations from EFHK. But due to the crisis in march 1999, that was never done. Instead on 25 JUL 1999, I took over as CEO, and Kristoffer became SVP. Here starts our second face of operations. THE SECOND STAGE OF NORDIC I call this the the second stage. When I became CEO then in July 1999, it was clear that the airline needed a fast upgrade. What to do? Not much pilots joining, and most old quite inactive. The only solution, to be a very realistic VA. We changed completley the format of the VA to become a "wet-lease operator" for many known "airlines", such as Finnair, SAS, VARIG, Qantas, just some to name, and we "leased" some of their aircfrats operating interesting routes. This was quite good, we had also introduced the FPL service, and we got our first Chief test pilot NOR9148 Tony Coles of Harwich, UK. So we published only test-flown routes. But the the competion grew on the VA market that autumun very fast. Until that only some of the major airlines had their VA copies, but suddenly the market exploded. So we had a new question at stake. Should we go one with wet-lease, or change completetely. A short study showed pilots prefered whole VA´s, so we decided to slowly downgrade the wet-laese but during a period of 8 months starting from november 1999. THE THIRD AND CURRENT STAGE OF NORDIC The third and current phase meant and means "to operate many VA´s as real as possible as the real counterpart under one and same "umbrella", meaning, all administration, pilot rosters,etc. are centralised, and pilots can fly with any of our airlines. This policy showed immediatley to be good. |
The first airline opened was LACSA VA of Costa Rica, and also the introducing of a policy of local COO´s, NOR9160 Juan Pablo Urbina of San José became our first local COO. Here You can see a picture of our first A320 in colors of LACSA
 LACSA AIRBUS A320-232 We decided immediately to have three categories of VA´s.In-house (managed from the HQ), Subsidiaries (managed by COO in-house) and franchising ones (managed by COO indepenedtly). This helped us both establish own VA´s and to "purchase" others, of the last category we have two: LAN Chile VA and Virtual Aerpostal.  OUR LAN A340 operating the route SCEL-LEMD-EDDF. This policy with sometimes introducing even three real airlines a month so that we have now 56 showed to be good, also the inclusion of a real fleet use plan from where You can see which register number (which aircraft) is operating what flight on a specific day has been much appreciated. Antoher was the partership with AGA, and the main break-through was the cooperation agreement together with AGA to set up WVAR together with flightsim.com. Our 50th VA opened on 11 MAR 2002, British Caledonian Airways VA, to which a special historical reasearch was made, as a tribute to the old airline. And the newest is Qatar Virtual Airline (which A300 You can see on page one) headed by our "veteran COO" NOR9181 Roberto Pontiggia of Sanitago de Chile, fomerly with LAN. Under constrcution are many that will give the pilots even better and more enjoyable rotes to fly with. But a VA is nothing without it´s pilot and staff. A special Thank You goes to our current SVP NOR9232 Teemu Saarinen of Vantaa Finland, and among the pilots who has recntly became VP of the JVAL-subgroup, to NOR9218 Patrick Au-Yeung of Hong Kong. And I continue to Thank all of You, both pilots and staff, without Your valubale input this VA would not be the great VA group it is today. Our 200th member from Colombia joined us in early septemebr 2001 and our 300th was Tim Muchow of Gothenburg, Sweden on 04 JUN 02. This summer our activites has due to the staffs work issues, holidays and the fantastic warm summer of Finland with almost 30C daily, reduced somewhat the activities, but now from this week we are back more active again than ever! But our pilots have been active all the time, only during july we recieved 110 assignement reports, representing around 700 pireps, and due to some PC problems at our HRM, our SVP is currenlty calculating the hours, so a new pilots page will be published asap. HAPPY 5th ANNIVERSARY OF NOR TO ALL OF YOU! Hans Peter von Knorring CEO Nordic Air Group NOR9100 Espoo, Finland |