The Future of UKGA......

As many of you will know I have been espousing the virtues of the UKGA web site for a while now.

It is an independent web site set up by a couple of guys who run it pretty much off their own backs.

However things have now come to a head and a decisive movement is needed.

I'll let the guys themselves tell you:

As many of you will know, devoting time to UKGA has been increasingly
difficult for Phil and me during the past few years, as we’ve juggled
the demands of family, challenging clients, and of course UKGA
development and maintenance. 

Indeed, it has been a source of
some frustration to us both that we’ve not been able to devote as much
time as we would wish to development and maintenance.  The pending
queue of content has quite a backlog, and our UKGA programming progress
is frustratingly slow.  Similarly, we’ve also found the financial
pressure of UKGA increasingly difficult to bear.  Although we’ve been
able to support UKGA for several years, it bothers us that we haven’t
been able to invest in new technology as we would have wished – hosting
platforms, bandwidth, new software and services, mapping, text
messaging, and so on, have all taken second place to our immediate
family expenses.

Unfortunately both time and money have become
even more precious recently, as I was made redundant two weeks ago. 
This was an unexpected blow, and it has certainly made both of us very
conscious of where our priorities – in time and money – have to lie.

But
we also see this as a fantastic, and perhaps one-time, opportunity for
UKGA and for us – to provide the world-leading service that we’ve
always dreamt of providing: near-instant comprehensive flight planning;
and to make UKGA the best resource possible for UK general aviation
pilots.

The only way that we can make this happen is for us to
devote ourselves to UKGA and its future, by making UKGA a commercial
enterprise.  If everyone who used UKGA this year (more than 4000 of
you!) paid a membership of, say, £25, we would stand a good chance of
being able to execute our plans fully. 

In practice, of
course, 4000 won’t subscribe, but we’d like to make this decision on
the basis of facts.  We want you to send a pledge to us to show
support.  If enough of you think we’re worth backing, we’ll throw
ourselves into it lock, stock, and two smoking programmers. 

Our
development plan includes drag-and-drop route planning, better NOTAM
mapping, terrain awareness & MSAs, more airfield mapping, W&B
calculation, take-off and landing performance, group management and
booking, and much more besides. 

Send us an email to pledge@ukga.com
to show your support.  We think it’s worth it.  Do you?  Let us know. 
If you want to talk to us about this decision, our operators (me and
Phil) are standing by: 07976 200186 or 07967 323316.  We’ll be happy to
hear what you think. 

Thanks to everyone who has helped us in the past, and we sincerely hope that we can make UKGA fly.

Nev & Phil

So there you go: cough up or potentially lose this excellent resource! £25 a year is very little: It will barely buy you enough aviation fuel to run your Cessna for 30 minutes, but it will mean keeping this excellent little site working for a good while longer.

Send an email to pledge@ukga.com. Show your support!