Again, it comes down to education. If pilots don’t know what is correct to do, they will keep doing what everyone else is doing, regardless of it is correct or not. And that is part and parcel of the problem, as what we are doing isn’t necessarily real.
Is UNICOM broken? essentially, yes; Things for it have become better than what we had. Keep in mind that both in yours and my early time on the network, we were getting calls on UNICOM for traffic landing at YSSY when we are at CYVR, because there was no range to what we had. And even with that, proper use of it wasn’t even correct. Why was it that way? Because we had no documentation or procedure on how to actually use any UNICOM or CTAF frequency. So it became a proverbial wild west that has grown out to what we have now.
As for no communications? We had that announced here, announced in email, announced on the VATSIM Discord, on the VATUSA Discord, in MyVATSIM, and announced everywhere else applicable. The only other way to get this out would be to email blast it to everyone on the network, regardless of if this is applicable to the pilot in their home country, and whether or not they fly into our out of the US. Then we deal with the backlash of sending something unnecessary to pilots who will never use it.
Finally, keep in mind that this is A TRIAL. Documentation on this and how to use it has also been sent for this, as well as the scope of the trial. What else could VATSIM and VATUSA do? They have done the right thing in getting the word out and where to find the information for it, but if pilots are not willing or are blissfuily unaware that this is happening, that isn’t VATSIM’s or VATUSA’s fault, because they did get the word out; they lead the proverbial horse to the water; but it is up to that horse to drink. If the horse doesn’t, is it VATSIM’s fault?
The solution here is getting this information into the hands of the pilots, so they are aware of it. Now that we have it, that information needs to go out. It has, but more needs to go out.
Last year, there was this thread in this very forum:
Everyone there was saying how implementing this would be a huge benefit to this network instead of cramming so many pilots at one field or even multiple fields, on the same UNICOM frequency, causing congestion and possible NORDO.
But now that we have implemented this in a trial, people are now saying that it is bad? We should be happy that this is being trialed, because given that thread and now, VATSIM can’t win for trying.
BL.