We interviewed the CEO of The Delta Virtual

My name is Mark Springsteen, and I am honored to be the CEO of The Delta Virtual Airlines. I have been a flight sim enthusiast for over 20 years. I have always been fascinated with aviation, and would liked to have been a commercial pilot, but due to some eyesight issues, was never really successful in that field. Flight sim is the next best thing. I didn’t set out to create a virtual airline when I started The Delta Virtual. In fact, I can’t take the credit at all, it was a combined effort with a handful of many other people that decided we could build something better that what we were getting at our previous VA. The Delta Virtual Airlines truly belongs to it’s members. We all share in the responsibilities, the financial cost, etc. It is a virtual airline that is void of drama and power struggles, like you see at so many other VA’s.

The Delta Virtual started on December 2nd, 2019. We have just celebrated our first anniversary. Within the first year, we have over 375 pilots on our roster, and average around 1500 flights a month. It is a pretty active VA.

I consider our Virtual Airline to be extremely successful. We have built a product that pilots can be proud to participate. We have an excellent website, built from the ground up, not some cookie cutter site with the same look and modules. We have an extremely active discord server, tours, event, and even give our pilots virtual paychecks every two weeks. They can take this virtual money and purchase things in our pilot shop such as special liveries and splash screens.

The most interesting thing about our Virtual Airline is the feedback we receive from new pilots. After a few days of joining our VA, many of them wonder why they ever chose anywhere else to fly. They see how our staff interacts with the pilots on discord, and how we really do live up to the family atmosphere.

So far in our first year, we have had little to no bad experiences. Honestly, it’s hard to believe, but it is true.

We use several avenues to try and attract new pilots. The Virtual Airline list is one of these avenues. Along with the typical social media outlets, we have advertised with FS ELITE for a couple of months. All of these yield great numbers of new pilots, but there is nothing better at recruiting new pilots than our existing pilots. We do see some turnover in pilots, people that join and never really do a flight. I think that happens in almost every va. I don’t know what they are looking for that they don’t find at The Delta Virtual. Maybe they aren’t big fans of Delta, who knows, we certainly are huge fans of Delta Airlines.

As a virtual airline that is based off the real world Delta Airlines, we stick to what they fly and their codeshare and Sky Team members fly. This gives our pilots a wide variety of aircraft to choose from. We only allow our pilots to use liveries from these airlines and think that sticking to this policy is the best way to stick to our roots. You see so many VA’s that have every airline in the world available to fly. What’s the point of being in a Delta VA if you are allowed to fly United, American and Southwest flights. We do have custom liveries for many of the payware aircraft out there. These can be purchased with the virtual money our pilots earn with every flight.

Yes, our VA plans weekly group flights on VATSIM and we use other networks such as FS Cloud, etc to do planned group flights. I have always been a huge fan of VATSIM, and never fly offline. I think it builds a sense of community flying together on the different networks. It is not a requirement to use a network to fly with our VA. We fell that people enjoy this hobby in so many different ways. It shouldn’t be up to us to dictate how they should enjoy it.

We use Smartcars to flight track our flights. We are extremely happy with the program and their product support.

The Delta Virtual has many sponsors and partners. They are listed on our webpage and in our news magazine. Our sponsors have been extremely generous in give away products for some of our larger events. We are very fortunate and grateful to have so many, and to have such great support from all of them.

We have the best website of all the virtual airlines. It is custom made as are all of the modules that we use. Our website developer is the greatest. We wouldn’t exist without him.

I expect The Delta Virtual to continue to grow into the most popular VA on the internet. We have accomplished so much in our first year, and the trends seem to suggest that we have only just begun to scratch the surface. I am proud to be the leader for this great organization. It is the people and staff around me that make my job easy.