We interviewed the CEO of SASva

I am a 19 year old aviation enthusiast from Denmark, and grew my passion when I was around 10 years old. I actually used to be absolutely terrified of flying, but then had two two amazing trips with SAS and SWISS. This led me to ask my dad to find a “flight game”, and that is how I started playing Microsoft Flight Simulator X – and I have not stopped since! The thing I enjoy the most about flight simulation is the level of realism you can attain in all sorts of ways, all the way from realistic airplanes to realistic flight planning, graphics, weather, you name it! I always wanted to create a virtual airline, where the realism is set to a high level, with real-life routes, procedures, schedules etc. That is how I decided to gather some good friends that knew a lot about SAS’s real-life operations and start SASva!

We opened the doors of our Virtual Airline mid-January 2020. However, the development stage started much earlier, a month prior at least.

We are fairly new and yet have already gained the membership and trust of over 150 pilots after only 1.5 months and 700+ flights. We are growing steadily, so the answer is a definite yes! We are also implementing new features and realistic additions to the VA very regularly, which to me is important to maintain a good realistic VA

It is fascinating to see how many people from around the world have joined our virtual airline, even though all our operations are Scandinavian! We have people from literally all around the world who fly with us regularly, and they seem to enjoy flying in this beautiful part of the world!

Thankfully, none to date! Our operations have been running smoothly and very successfully ever since SASva’s inception, with no major hiccups or issues. Maybe one element which my staff team and I did not entirely foresee is the sheer amount of regular work which needs to be put into running a VA of our caliber – but that’s why you have a team, and that is why I surrounded myself with people I can trust to run SASva.

As mentioned earlier, SASva has most of its operations in northern Europe, so I do not blame VA pilots who perhaps wish to fly in other parts of the world for not finding our VA the most suitable. However, we most certainly have more people joining than leaving us, and we are grateful for that!

To retain pilots, we develop and organise events on a monthly basis, with added bonuses and perks upon completion. And how could I not mention our vEuroBonus scheme, which allows our pilots to earn virtual currency after each flight or event, allowing them to purchase coupons for well known Flight Sim retail brands.

We only operate the airplanes that SAS operates in real life. These are the A319/320/321/320N (soon the A321N) for our medium hauls, the A333/343/359 for our long haul operations, and the ATR72 and CRJ9 for our short haul hops. In addition, we have decided to integrate iconic aircraft from SAS’ past fleet: the B736, B767 and DH8D.

With regards to liveries, we are official partners of iniBuilds, whom we mandated to create state of the art liveries with the most true-to-life accuracy. These liveries are exclusive to SASva members only. Therefore, it is safe to say our liveries are among the most realistic you will find anywhere else out there!

We allow our VA pilots to fly on whichever network they prefer. Some of our staff members are ATC Officers on Vatsim, allowing us to open air traffic coverage for selected events.

We use SmartCARS by TFDI. Not the most exciting tracker, but that’s on purpose. It does the job perfectly well, with no issues so far – reliability over aesthetics! The website is supposed to be the center of all operations, the tracker is just to track the flight

We are always open to work with developers and already do! In this way we can show gratitude to our pilots for their dedication to us.

We use PHPVMS, but we work on customizing it as much as we can to be exclusive, and we are often adding new features that not all Virtual Airlines offer. Therefore, it can be said that the skeleton of our operations is pre-made, but the largest portion of user-viewable and user-interactive elements are heavily customised or custom-made.

Grow, grow, grow! We will continue to have monthly tours, events, groupflights and prizes, and help build a community! Our first (and latest) goal was to reach 30 new pilots and 500 flights over the month of February. On the 29th of February, we passed both goals with 550+ flights and over 45 new members – all this in one single month!

It’s safe to say this says a lot about our future, so come and check us out!