Intercontinental Airways VA

Intercontinental Airways VA (tag IAVA) was a virtual airline founded in late August 2011 by HawkbitAlpha and Darris XTMRage on YSFHQ, and a co-founder (along with Penguin Airways) of a wave of VA creations in the English YS world that would eventually also popularize Hawaiian Airways.

History

IAVA first grew its business primarily through an unconventional campaign of pilot recruiting by its CEO, HawkbitAlpha, which multiple YS servers. A week after its foundation, acf492, a real-life pilot responsible for creating the Civ-02 Civilian Group manual, joined the VA, initially as a pilot, before being promoted to the company's staff. After more than a month in activity, IAVA was officially granted Certification-In-Progress (CIP) status by YSFHQ, with 7 pilots in its roster at the time.

IAVA 737 MAX-7 in a test flight over Tohoku

However, since IAVA's staff conducted most of its business discussion outside of YS on its Forumotion board, a hostile raid on the VA's forum in March 2012 thoroughly shook its member base to the point that many of its active pilots left. Though Hawkbit and acf attempted to carry on IAVA's operations by searching out new pilots, the effort failed, partially due to the fact that Hawaiian Airways had begun to develop a monopoly of pilots within the civilian YS sector at the time. Ultimately, IAVA faded into obscurity by the end of 2012, before being officially shut down by CEO Hawkbit in 2014. The VA's Forumotion site was eventually locked for good as well on November 19th, 2017, with Hawkbit stating in a thread his interests of re-entering the civilian YS business at some point in the future.

Plagued from the start with problems, IAVA did not have a fleet pack for more than a year, and, in its CEO's words, "by the time we finally received a fleet pack, there was no one left to even fly with it." Hawkbit's wild ambitions for the VA's operations also served as a detriment to the organization: for example, one of his propositions for the VA's fleet pack was to include a fighter jet to serve as an escort (this idea is likely to have stemmed from his ongoing vendetta with the 171st at the time). Comically, then-12-year-old Hawkbit's unprofessional (to say the least) conduct could best be represented by the fact that he literally presented his proposals for the VA's livery with images of sloppy brush-over work in Microsoft Paint. Today, he refers to his dysfunctional operation of IAVA as a prime example of how not to run a YS virtual airline, and stated that he doesn't intend on "repeating the massive management missteps [he] made as a staff member for IAVA" with its successor.

External Links

http://intercontinental.forumotion.com/