I believe it would be very useful to add a dedicated forum category for aircraft rental requests between users. This would allow members to post messages asking others to make an aircraft available at a specific airport, on a given date and time (Zulu time).
Concrete example:
If I’m planning a flight tomorrow in an A320 from LFKJ to EDDF, I could request to rent someone’s aircraft for that route, negotiating for example a 50/50 revenue share on the rental.
This would boost forum engagement, encourage interaction and negotiation between pilots and aircraft owners, and give more flexibility to junior license holders when choosing destinations.
My personal situation:
I own several aircraft which I regularly rent out to other pilots.
However, I sometimes find myself in trouble when I don’t anticipate my needs early enough (about 24h in advance) to keep one available for myself.
A system like this would allow me to use aircraft from other users while still keeping freedom in my routing choices.
Possible alternatives:
Set up a weekly availability schedule, so certain aircraft are available on specific days.
Allow PAX payments to speed up ground operations, similar to the upcoming feature for aircraft repositioning or license upgrades.
What do you think? Any other suggestions?
A feature like this could really improve operations on the network and strengthen collaboration within the community.
It could be sure a start. Even if i would also add, a possible “live” rental request. I usually don’t schedule so much, I mean what I do is start the sim/webpage, and decide where to go, and in this case if I want to continue after my landing somewhere, to keep on flying and would like a plane to rent after I land, I would prefer to ask a user right after my take off to let me rent his aircraft at my arrival. That’s why I would also prefer a “live” communication method to a user that is also flying (forum might not be so fast), maybe by just going to his detail page and send him a direct message.
@antonio.ferrara the ChatFS is nice, but no way to integrate it in Discourse and SimFly. I am working on Discourse chat tho, we can do something similar…
Concrete example:
My personal situation:
Possible alternatives:
What do you think? Any other suggestions?
because I always wait your plane to be available 