AirNav - The Most Trusted Name in Flight Tracking?

[Anmer]

Just to illustrate the total shambles at AirNav Systems LLC.

First report of an issue:

11 March 2012
multi hour delays recieving emalert emails.  is there a problem?

AirNav Responses

12 March 2012
We are aware of the issue, however its not affecting all emails in our system, support emails etc.. are being set fine so further investigation is being done.

13 March 2012
This is being looked, we should have more information on this asp.

17 March 2012
The email issue should have been resolved on Friday morning, we will run some more tests today to see whether the issue has come back.

18 March 2012
We are today upgrading our email server and outsourcing it to a different company.
This requires a few changes which may take up to 48 hours to propagate over the internet.
So this means that we will still experience some instability during the next 2/3 days and after that problem fully corrected.

18 March 2012
mailsa re not yet working due to the email server migration. It will takee 24-48 hours for them to be back on.

19 March 2012
This problem should now be corrected. Please send us your feedback to confirm everything is working as it should as your feedback is always extremelly helpful.

19 March 2012
As Dev mentioned the mail server has been moved so it takes time to propagate the change across the world. Though we expect things to settle down soon, also due the mail server move if you have spam settings check none are diverting to a spam folder as it would have picked up a different ip address and mail server.

20 March 2012
Please confirm which software version you are using and if the message is still appearing today.

20 March 2012
We are still having some integration issues with the new mail server. We are working on this today.

21 March 2012
We are still evaluating this and if the solution we found is totally stable. In the meanwhile any feedback from you is always welcome.

21 March 2012
We are still working on this issue.

22 March 2012
We do confirm that we are still having problems with this feature and we continue to work on it to fin a definitive solution. We will keep you informed.

25 March 2012
We are now processing emails using a third party email server. Things seem to be getting better still not working at 100%. We have one programmer working on this and at this time we are checking how the current solution performs.

03 April 2012
This is still being worked on, we are hoping for a resolution asp.

As you know we moved mail servers which had further capacity combat the issues we were seeing beforehand but it seems these can't handle the load either. We are looking at ways to handle the load better.

06 April 2012
This situation should now be 100% solved.
Our apologies for the delay in developing a solution for which involved our ISP.
Email alerts are being sent from the proper (sender's email) email address so reports to forums should also0 be working Ok.

06 April 2012
We are checking what has happened.

07 April 2012
We had a server problem today due to the maintenance actions we are taking.
Alerts could have stopped working because of this problem: anyway the alert routine / mail server should be fully working.

Please confirm if you still cannot receive any alerts both on Yahoogroups and on individual emails.

07 April 2012
This feature is working at 100% but we have experienced some outages during the last 2 days because of other server maintenance actions. Your input is always very appreciated so please continue to post your feedback on the forum. We have over 150 tasks to implement during the next weeks which will bring more interesting features to RadarBox.

07 April 2012
Let's wait 24 hours to see how this feature is working.

07 April 2012
Problem identified and we are correcting it. Tks for sharing. We will post more news when we have them.

08 April 2012
We have installed a brand new Mail server on the airnavsystems.com machine and uninstalled the previous mail server which was the responsible for all this lack of stability. Waiting for your feedback.

08 April 2012
We have a minor issue with the new software and we are waiting for the company's support to clarify it. Once it is done this issue will be totally solved. We will post on the forum once that happens.

It's 28 days since this problem was first reported and it's still not fixed despite AirNav telling us on six different occasions that it's working correctly.

Apart from not delivering the expected functionality, this whole saga suggests AirNav lacks the technical competency to deliver what should be a reasonably simple fix and to thoroughly test it before assuring us it's resolved.

"The Most Untrusted Name in Flight Tracking"

AirNav Update:

09 April 2012
We are waiting for an email from the company providing our new mail server. Once we get it the system will be working. We strongly believe that in 24 hours all this will be solved.

09 April 2012
At this time we have a brand new email server application running on our server, fully tested and fully working.
So and finally we believe this problem should be 100% corrected.
As usually we wait for your feedback that all is absolutely working Ok.
Again thanks for your patience during the long wait to have this feature back on.

Update 10 April 2012.

Doesn't seems to be fixed afterall!

http://radarspotting.com/forum/index.php/topic,372.msg2738.html#msg2738

AirNav Update 10 April 2012

"We need 3 volunteers to help us in finding what's wrong with the current solution we've deployed on our server.
Please send us a PM if you are interested."

[Sun Worshipper]

Would anyone like to take a stab as to who 'We' might be?  'We' as in, we are checking or we are working on the problem.

[Anmer]

Although this is a ShipTrax issue, it illustrates AirNav's poor customer service and total lack of awareness of what's really happening.

On 2 March 2012 a customer reports that the OSM map feature has stopped working.  To be fair to AirNav this was an OSM policy change that also affected PlanePlotter.

Within a few days PlanePlotter had a fix.

Eventually, on 30th March 2012, AirNav reported it had implemented a fix, nearly 4 weeks after PlanePlotter.  However, ShipTrax customers reported that the problem hadn't been fixed.  Now when did we hear a similar story?

AirNav said it would investigate.  No more news.

Then on 14th April 2012 another ShipTrax customer asked what was happening as he still couldn't use OSM or the satellite image.

AirNav responded:

"Both the Satellite Layer and OSM Layer problems are totally corrected at this time."

The implication was that the customer didn't know what he was on about.  But then Tarbat posted:

"OSM is still not working.  It is now delivering a PNG image of the correct area to the ShipTrax client.

.......This delivers a PNG image, NOT a JPEG.  I thought Andre said that you were going to convert from png on the server and output to jpg to Shiptrax as before.

I still think it would be simpler to use the Google Maps API !!"

AirNav, faced with this and other posts to the affect that the OSM wasn't working:

"Stby while we repass this one to our programmer."

ShipTrax is a new product and the OSM feature is an integral feature.  But 6 weeks since the problem was first reported, it remains unresolved.  But more worrying is that Airnav thinks it works, just like the Alert problem.  Does it not test anything before it announces that everything is OK?