Launch Weekend at FSimUK

OnTime Turnaround is out in Early Access. It went live at 09:00 on Saturday 10 October, from a stand at Aerospace Bristol, at the first UK flight sim event in seven years. Here is how the weekend went.

Thursday 8 October

James and I met at around 19:00 to pack the stand and run through the kit list before the trip over. We checked everything twice and still managed to leave a surprising amount behind. We set off for Dublin Airport at about 01:00 on Friday morning.

Friday 9 October

The journey was longer than it looked on paper. By the time we reached Dublin at 04:00 we had both been awake all day on a couple of short naps, mostly because neither of us could quite settle. After check-in we decided the sensible move was the largest fry-up we could find, on the theory that the resulting food coma would carry us across the Irish Sea. It did not. The flight was rough enough that neither of us slept a minute, and the fry-up began to look like a planning error.

We arrived at Aerospace Bristol at around 11:00 and started building the stand. By 14:30 the lack of sleep had caught up with us, and since our PC had not yet arrived there was little more we could do, so at 15:00 we went to the hotel for a few hours.

The PC turned up that evening. We finished the build, got the stand ready for the morning, and were asleep by 21:00. Launch weekend glamour.

Saturday 10 October

Nat was already in Bristol with family, and at 09:00 he pressed the button. I had been on site since 07:30 making sure everything was exactly as it should be, which in hindsight was the last moment of the weekend I was not simply rolling with it.

Within a few minutes of going live, OTT had its first user.

Nat joined us at about 10:00, just as the doors opened. The next few hours disappeared completely. We looked up and it was 14:30. Talking to people who fly this stuff every week, watching them try the app for the first time and tell us straight away what they wanted from it, was easily the best part of the weekend.

We closed the stand, sat in on a talk from a former Concorde instructor, and went back to the hotel, where a few beers were had.

Sunday 11 October

I think the whole venue had a sore head.

Sunday was a quieter day, which worked in our favour. It gave us time to record two interviews: one with a beta tester who also makes content, and one with a new user who had found OTT through our YouTube videos and bought it on the Saturday.

We packed up at around 16:30, as our neighbours were doing the same, and caught the 20:00 flight out of Bristol. Which brings us to right now, 01:52 on Monday 12 October. OTT is live in Early Access, with a whole new group of people putting it through its paces.

So far we have had no bad experiences with using the app reported back to us, which is more than we dared hope for on a launch weekend.

What happens next

Early Access means the roadmap is open, and we would rather it was shaped by the people flying with it than by us guessing. If you have picked up OTT, join us on Discord and tell us what you want from it. That is where feature requests, bug reports and the next round of decisions all happen.

Thank you to everyone who joined us this weekend, in Bristol and online. We will see you in the Discord: discord.com/invite/rtSXwcQQds