The Fly Bar is a group for UK heli pilots and has been on Discord since December 2020. We’ve had voice chats literally every evening between 8 and 10pm since then, and the text chats have been busy too. We’ve had tech evenings where technologies have been demonstrated, as well as multi-player sim sessions where we share moves and learning techniques.

If you know what Discord is and how it works, here is your invite.
https://discord.gg/7AUqsFvQke

If you’d like to know more about it, here’s the skinny.

Discord is a free service that has text and voice channels with decent app support and no adverts. It’s been used by gamers for a long time but is seeing wider use outside of that community. As a result, the messaging features are refined and easy to use, and the voice chat has been flawless. Text channels include features like pasting of images directly, automatic parsing of links and embedding of YouTube videos. The voice features are excellent too with the ability to adjust volume levels of other users or to mute them if there’s too much background noise. Sharing your desktop, applications or streaming from your simulator is also supported and we use it often.

To partition the chat a bit, we have text channels for General, Sales, Video, Tech, Flight reports and News. There are 3 voice channels consisting of The Queen Vic, Rovers Return and Wonky Donkey for evening discussions.

We allow international members and have a few regulars who drop into the voice occasionally and let us know what’s going on in their part of the world.

It’s a great place to be and the feel is quite different from Facebook’s endless memes, GIFs and off-topic chat.