Happy Holidays From The Simple Flying Team

Wishing you the best during this holiday period.

On behalf of the entire Simple Flying team, I’d like to wish all of our readers a happy holiday period. After the chaos of 2021, this year saw a solid recovery across the aviation industry, with 2023 on course to be a largely normal year (touch wood).

The year started fairly bleakly for airlines with the surge of the omicron variant. However, the aviation industry was really able to boom in the summer, with many large aviation events taking place for the first time in years. Of course, the Simple Flying team was fortunate enough to make it out to many of these events.

I was fortunate enough to travel to Nigeria in March to celebrate two years of Royal Air Maroc in the oneworld alliance (COVID-19 had canceled the joining event and the one-year event) and joined Amadeus in Dubai in September. Jo, our Managing Editor, found herself hosting the launch of startup Northern Pacific in January, while deputy editor Sumit got to fly across the Atlantic on PLAY’s inaugural flight to New York Stewart Airport.

One of the highlights for the team was, of course, this year’s installment of the Farnborough Airshow, attended by myself, Jo, Sumit, and Justin. Special thanks to Evergreen Manager Jake for stepping up to keep the site running behind the scenes. The show was definitely a scorcher, with the Tuesday going down as the hottest on record. However, it was great to see so many faces in person again after so long.

We were also able to expand our team throughout the year, welcoming many new writers, video editors, and a dedicated social media manager. Of course, Simple Flying isn’t just articles. Our YouTube channels continued to grow, with almost 100,000 new subscribers joining the main channel. Our video on the destruction of the Antonov An-225 became our second most viewed video of all time with 1.4 million views, just short of the 1.5 million views of the current record holder “The New Air Force One: What We Know So Far”.

Jo and I have also been busy with our weekly podcast, with episode 150 due to air next week. Finally, we continued our series of “Future Flying” airline executive interviews this year.

As we move into 2023, we’ll continue to bring you the aviation news that you know and love, but we also have some exciting plans to continue the development of the website. If you have any wishes from Simple Flying for next year, let us know in the comments below or send us an email.