The MaldAir Story

MaldAir was formed by Tim on 24 December 2014. It immediately stood out from the crowd, making a point by having a different approach to aviation simulation - being the first known FSX dedicated Virtual Airline. Tim invested a lot of his own time and money into making MaldAir the best he could, he learned how to program a website, mastered the use of PHPVMS (management system used by virtual airlines for day-to-day operations) in addition to programming custom software from scratch to track flights and cargo operations.

Within the first two months of operations, MaldAir had established itself as a serious player in the Virtual Airline world with 30,000 website hits in a month, of these just over 1000 were unique hits, 312,000nm flown, 136 Pilots, 466 Flights, 860 hours flying time and a Virtual Shop selling nostalgic items such as a Virtual MaldAir Cup and a Desktop Jet. These would become TeamSpeak 3 icons / Ranks. These were very popular amongst the members with pilots often completing extra flights and all-night flights to gain the virtual currency to purchase these ranks.

By mid-July, the airline had already amassed 1000 pilots and 5,000 combined flight hours, which was at a record-breaking speed. Along with this huge increase in pilots, there were numerous new aircraft being painted and released to members.

Tim decided after around a year as the Virtual Airline continued to grow that he needed help with the day-to-day management of people. From this, Airport Security (Similar to SkyCore’s “Community Helpers”), was born. Lenny had the privilege of being the first “Airport Security”, with Tom J following closely behind in second, the team would continue to grow to include Reina S, Ian B, Matthew, Ben, Tom R and Fabian.

Tim developed several sidelines for the Virtual Airline over the years including:

• MAGLAS (MaldAir Group Landing Assessment System)
• MagHops (A set of 4 or 5 airports flown between in a series of ‘hops’)
• Eur0Zone (European focused partner Airline to MaldAir)
• FraglieAir (Virtual Cargo Airline)
• AsiStar (Asian Virtual Airline created by Tim and run by Reina)
• Malitary (military Virtual Airline), KangAir (Oceanic based virtual airline)
• EUSart (A search and rescue mission based virtual airline)

Also came several minigames including a virtual bitcoin market, a weekly MaldAir lottery and virtual scratch cards. On the 28th of April 2019 at 14:30 UTC MaldAir closed its doors indefinitely due to a database security breach, which prompted the escalation of SkyCore Virtual’s Creation. At the time of closing MaldAir had over 9000 Pilots and was four years old, over 86500 hours flown with a total distance of 35,359,343 NM flown.

Some throwback names for you:

• Tim Walters – MAL0001
• Tom Johnson – MAL0014
• Reina Suzuki (MMMGames) – MAL0810
• Ian Bazeley – MAL2775
• Matthew Widdowson – MAL2800
• Ben Lewis – MAL5936
• Mohammed Shaamil (Flight Freak) – MAL6671
• Michael Janezic (S5JAG) – MAL2684
• Tom Roskell (Ripply) – MAL4129