How has the idea born?
I have to go to history a little bit. It was in 2008 when I tried virtual flying for the first time. I became a member of IVAO and Slovak IVAO Division. Later then, I became a member of staff of our division as Membership Coordinator and Webmaster of our web-page. We had also an official IVAO virtual airline as a part of the division and I was a member of it too. But the airline had no management. No finance strategy, growth, pilot salary. After a while it was boring a little bit. In 2012 I ended with that, because I became a husband and later a father so my free time was rapidly reduced. (I do not regret it, of course.)
Actually, the kids play their own games and sleep all night so I found a little gap for virtual flying again. I bought X-Plane 11, some plugins, panels and yoke system and started to fly. :) But after some time I felt that I want something more, I wanted to fulfill some goals and tasks, so I tried Air Hauler 2.
For a while, it met my expectations, and I joined the existing virtual airline in the system, but I found that Air Hauler 2 is more focused on managing a company with AI pilots than on managing a "real" virtual airline.
I decided to investigate a little bit on the internet and I found the FSAirlines system and it gave me what I need, I think. It’s multi-platform (MSFS, X-Plane, P3D), it's specially oriented for virtual airlines, it’s free for pilots which just want to fly for a virtual airline, it's about (virtual) finances and fleet management and the pilots are real people.
Maybe it will be hard for Brown Pelicans VA to be interesting for pilots among so many VAs in the system, but I believe that we will find ourselves.
Why a Slovak guy from central Europe wanna be a brown pelican in Turks and Caicos?
The answer is simple. Time shift. When I sit down into my virtual cockpit, it’s usually 20:00 or 21:00 of my local time. Apart from summer, daylight is already gone and even in summer it is already a sunset and this is not a very good time for VFR flights. Someone could say that I can set the time in the flight sim but I use some add-ons, oriented more for real time flying and I also like it ARAIG (As real as it gets). I decided for TCI because once I worked for a company from TCI. I was working on SEO for their web page and I fell in love with the islands from visual materials. Maybe someday I will get there personally too. :) However, the location fits me very well because the local time is 5 hours less over there against Slovakia so I can do the island air service as VFR flights.
And why Brown Pelicans?
When I was thinking of the name for the virtual airline, I knew that the schedule will be largely oriented to the Caribbean area but I didn’t want to name it as Caribbean 'something' or 'something' Caribbean. I wanted something more special and I thought that if I would find a typical bird for the Turks and Caicos Islands, it could be nice connection between the area and flying. I investigated a little bit and I found that the brown pelican is the national bird of the Turks and Caicos Islands. Did I need more? :)
Why do you have so many aircraft types in the fleet?
I know this is not ARAIG so much. :) In the real world an airline operates with a couple of aircraft types, but in the virtual world it'd be real limitation for us. We have a few flight simulators on the market. Each of them has different default aircrafts in the package. Also there are many freeware or payware models of aircrafts, better or worse, but some of them are developed for an exact fligth simulator only. In example, in the Caribbean area the Embrear 120 is operating quite a lot, but there is no (payware) model for X-plane on the market, but there is very nice and good model of the Saab 340A by LES for X-plane and we can say that these aircrafts are similar as regional airliners. So we'd like to cover more options for incoming pilots for different flight simulators.
(Answered by Bruno Zvolensky)