I have this from the onlinegar developer who is currently without a means of posting:
Hi – I’m the developer of OnlineGAR.com. I’m back to my hotel room now, so able to post.
Here’s a brief history of Online GAR submissions:
1. John Murray from AOPA develops Silverlight GAR submissions, and then later the iPhone and Android apps. He literally paid for these out of his own pocket – server hosting, development licenses, attending meetings, the whole lot. An unbelievable amount of effort went into this.
2. Home office tighten up security and administrative requirements, and it becomes impractical for him to continue
3. I take over with OnlineGAR.com, and introduce a charging structure to ensure it’s got a viable future
4. A deal is done with SkyDemon to have the full OnlineGAR facility, free to pilots with piston aircraft for personal use. This is funded by SkyDemon.
5. A deal is done with AOPA to continue the silverlight app (albeit modified and bolstered up a bit) to offer free to all piston pilot
So this means that as we stand, onlineGAR is the only route for any GAR forms – nomatter how you file, they go through this single engine.
The number of GAR forms is growing nicely, trending upward each week – however, we’re still handling a tiny percentage of the overall GAR forms submitted to the UKBF – from the figures we’ve heard, it’s a single figure percentage.
There has been much debate across several forums about the charging structures, the ethics, who should be charging who, etc. I don’t think we’ll ever find a charging model that makes everyone happy – the only thing that everyone seems to agree on is that the UKBF should really be picking up the bill…. but that’s not the case, so we need to make it pay its way. Right now it’s just about paying for the servers it lives on, so it’s still a volunteer effort essentially.
The business goal is to service airfields, FBOs and larger (jet / heli) operators, and for them to pay a fair cost that represents the benefit they gain from fast data entry, data storage, data import, etc. The operators we have on the system seem very happy with it, and happy with the costs. The problem is that we don’t have many yet! However the word does appear to be spreading, albeit slowly. Our promise is that as soon as this part of the market is sustaining the product, we’ll reduce, or even remove, the charges for private operators. We’re a long way from that yet.
-C
Only users who signed up pre launch or before April got 3 free credits, nobody else does.
I never got my 3 free credits and I signed up pre-launch, and I am flying SEP, and I had to buy one credit for £3 for a flight tomorrow to L2K. Am I doing something wrong, or have I registered incorrectly?
It is however a very good looking system, easy to use, and integrates very well with SD.
We did have a bug where some users free credits went missing – something to do with them having to select the account type wiping them out. Email me at [email protected] and i can re-instate them.
Will do, thanks Carl. I submitted one earlier, and I have to say its very slick, and once you have uploaded your aircraft and regular pilots / passenger names and details, its extremely efficient. Very nice….
It is a good product. Pricing structure is a bit unfortunate in my view but ease of use and convenience is great.
Carl, is it still the case that online gar will not handle all of the "special"paperwork requirements for CTA ( I’m thinking specifically IOM) ?
I might do L2K tomorrow and I have seen the new version of the form implemented in SD, and it looks great – if you have SD and don’t mind paying the £3.
Use is FREE for SD users and piston aircraft up to four seats and once the users and plane are set up on the Skydemon site the GAR comes right out of SD comparable to their flight plan option with all details like flight times already filled in. Huge fan! Eventually Carl may change that free use (?) but for the time being I have no complaints..
SkyDemon are funding the free use on its members behalf, and it’s been very popular. There are no plans on changing that!
That is excellent information. Thanks Carl (and Skydemon) for this great service!
