OnAir Reference

1.1 Sidebar Menu — what every section does

Top of the sidebar

• Search, Menu help (this panel) and Dashboard, a standalone button with your customisable widgets.
• Mode pill — shows the active mode and takes you to Settings, where the switch itself lives. Hidden while you work as your VA.
• Pilot location — where your avatar is. Click it to open Employees and move the pilot.
• Small badges next to an entry mark pages under review or in progress. Testers and staff see them; everyone else sees none.

Working as your Virtual Airline

The Work as button is reachable from every page, including the ones with no header at all: it sits in the title bar of the desktop app, and at the top of the sidebar in the web version, which has no title bar. It appears for Dispatcher rank and above — the ranks that can actually act for the VA. While VA mode is on, a coloured line runs along the top of the content and down the left edge of the sidebar, on every page, so a purchase or a hire is never made under the wrong flag. Click it again to come back to your own company.

Departments

Fleet & Hangar — Fleet (with Fly Now and Resume Tracking), Aircraft Market, Work Orders, Test Flight (also the way into the Checkride), Aircraft Lookup and Aircraft Moderation.

Staff & HR — Employees, Crew Market, Crew Groups and Ranks.

Operations Centre — Pending Jobs, Recommended Jobs, Freelance Job, Company Jobs, Routes, Operations Map, Flight Logs and Ongoing Flights. Routes opens onto its own leaderboard and the route-set generator; all three are open to every player.

Airport Network — My FBOs, Find FBO, Basecamps, Airport Lookup and Favorite Airports.

Industry — Industries Dashboard, My Factories, Encyclopedia, Trading Hall, My Goods, and the two trading pages, My Contracts (what you signed to deliver) and My Demands (what you paid others to bring you). Open to every player.

Company HQ — Cash Flow, Financial Health, Business Review, Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Loans, Company Lookup, Company Leaderboard, Skills, Partnerships, Virtual Airline (open to every player, with Apply or Create if you have not joined one), Mailbox and Chat.

Training — Flight Training and the Aviation Quiz. The exercises carry an Experimental badge: the grading thresholds are still being tuned and can change between builds.

Freelance layout

Same departments, fewer pages. Empty ones simply do not appear. A solo pilot keeps Fleet, Ranks, the job search and maps, Airport Lookup and Favorite Airports, Cash Flow, Mailbox, Chat, and Training.

Bottom of the sidebar

Lobby to change company or mode, Settings, and a collapse toggle that shrinks the sidebar to a narrow rail with hover panels.

Reachable, but deliberately not listed

• Flight Dispatch — opened from Fleet, Pending Jobs, Company Jobs or Tours. It needs a selected aircraft, and it is also where tracking happens.
• Freelance Tours, Rescue Missions, Freelance Charters and the rank ladders — reached from cards and links on other pages.
• Drill-downs — FBO configuration, basecamp and employee detail, Workshop, aircraft purchase or lease, route schedules.

Airport Network also includes Owned Airports in company management mode. It lists airport ownership and its recurring obligations; Basecamps and FBOs remain separate pages.

1.2 Dashboard

The Dashboard is your landing page. It adapts to your mode — Freelance (solo pilot) or Advanced / Career (manager) — and every block on it is a widget you can move, hide or configure. The header shows company name, code, world and level/XP, plus refresh, the layout picker and Edit layout. If one of your flights is in progress, a banner takes you to Flight Management to re-attach the tracker.

Saved layouts

Your arrangement is stored per company and per mode, so a second company, or a switch to Freelance, never inherits another screen. You can keep several named layouts and switch between them from the picker in the header; Edit layout creates, duplicates, renames or deletes one, and Reset restores the defaults. In the editor, tick to show a widget (hiding never moves anything), drag the grip to reorder, and use the gear where a widget has settings of its own.

Quick Actions

• Career: Recommended Jobs, Find a job (Company Jobs), Buy aircraft, Hire a pilot, Expand network (your own FBOs).
• Freelance: Find a job (Search Jobs) and View fleet.

Recommended Jobs opens its own page — the Dashboard no longer searches in the background, nothing runs until you ask for it there.

Departments

Compact tiles for the six departments — Fleet & Hangar, Staff & HR, Operations Centre, Airport Network, Industry, Company HQ. Clicking one opens a floating panel with that department's pages. Its gear offers Collapse sidebar while on the Dashboard, which folds the left sidebar while you stay here.

Stat grid

Career — nine clickable cards, most with a trend sparkline built from roughly five-minute snapshots: Reputation, Fleet (active / in maintenance), Employees, FBOs, Pending Jobs, Ongoing Flights (opens the map on your flights), Mails, Skills (out of 22, with points left to spend) and AI Flights.

Freelance — six cards: Reputation, Flights and Flight Hours (both open the Routes tab of Ranks), Pending Jobs, Pilot Level (XP gauge, opens the Pilot tab) and Cash.

Tips and Fleet Alerts (Career)

Tips are contextual cards — a work order ready to run, a flight to resume, a certification to pass, skill points waiting — each with a button that jumps to the fix. Fleet Alerts answers one question: does anything in the fleet need attention? It shows up to three chips — aircraft grounded (the server refuses to dispatch them), aircraft degrading, and aircraft due for inspection within the next 10 flight hours — and each chip's tooltip breaks down the reasons. Click a chip to open the Fleet filtered to exactly those aircraft; the most urgent inspections are also listed by name underneath. Aircraft in flight, aircraft already in a workshop and freelance aircraft are not counted (an in-flight aircraft still counts towards the inspection chip, on the countdown measured at its last landing).

Finance and notifications

In Career the balance sheet sits in four zones beside Recent Notifications: cash; assets, liabilities and company value; income over the last 7 and 14 days; then the ratios, each linking to its full page. The ROA here is a lifetime figure — income since the company was founded, over today's assets — and it now reads the same on every screen. The notification log follows your kg / lbs preference and carries the leftover-freight alerts caught when tracking starts. In Freelance it is a widget of its own.

Company Details and Charts

Company Details has three collapsible parts: company info, game settings (difficulty, pay bonus, skill tree, penalties, failures, loading times, airport choices) and progress (level and XP, industry points, badge, checkride level, and Travel Tokens with a Use button that spends one and teleports you and one aircraft to any airport). The Charts widget adds fleet-status and class rings. With no company loaded, a welcome screen offers Settings and Retry.

Leftover freight. The alert refers to the aircraft and flight being tracked. Rescue placeholders and race tickets are excluded. Cancelling or abandoning that same flight clears its warning; acting on a different flight does not clear it.

In a web browser

The Companion also runs in a web browser. There it manages your company but cannot connect to a simulator: fly with the desktop app or the Old Client. You can keep the browser open while you fly on your PC, since it does not take over your session. Nothing is pushed live to the browser: use Refresh or reload the page to see the latest state. Some gestures still reach a flight flown on the PC, notably Abort Flight on its flight page, which cancels it there too, and abandoning a job whose cargo or passengers are on board, which removes them from the aircraft — on a freelance contract it can cancel the flight.

1.3 Pilot Hub

The Pilot Hub is the home of your freelance career: four cards for Charters, Regular Routes, Virtual Airlines and Tours. One charter, one route and one VA can be active at a time, tours are unlimited, and a dismissible tip repeats those caps (the lightbulb brings it back).

Last-flight strip

The top banner shows the departure and the airport you actually landed at, registration, aircraft type, duration, date, pay, XP and an on-time or late badge. View logs opens Flight Logs on that flight, widening the 30-day window if the flight is older.

Charters card

• Arrows page through your pending charters, with an X/Y counter.
• The rank panel shows progress in the aircraft class. Hour thresholds depend on its family: light aircraft 0 / 20 / 50 / 100 / 300; turboprops 0 / 50 / 100 / 200 / 500; jets 0 / 50 / 100 / 500 / 1000. Pilot Ranks explains the class families.
• The ticket carries the current leg, its weather, both airports with their size, UTC and local times, and turns into Resume mission when the aircraft is parked away from the leg's origin.
• Pay, XP, cargo (kg or lb), passengers, heading and distance sit underneath, with a boost badge when the bonus applies and a VATSIM logo on charters tied to an operator.
• Fly Now hands the leg's cargo to dispatch so the load is pre-selected, and becomes Track Flight once airborne; Abandon, Show legs and Show on Map complete the row.
• Abandoning a charter your Virtual Airline signed is now refused, with a dialog saying why: only the company that signed it can drop it, and abandoning from here booked the penalty against you personally. Switch to the VA and abandon it from there, or ask a Dispatcher or a Manager if your role does not allow it.

Regular Routes card

• Same boarding-pass layout: airline panel, ticket, then pay, flight duration, average speed and distance.
• A red triangle warns when the aircraft's design speed cannot hold the schedule: XP and credits are kept, the rank bonus is lost.
• Skip, Show legs, Route Map and Fly Now. The card refreshes right after an accept or an abandon instead of waiting out the cooldown.
• If the server keeps returning a flight that no longer exists, a recovery dialog offers to abandon the schedule; the detection survives a restart and clears itself once the schedule heals.

Virtual Airline card

• Member with an assigned flight — Fly or Ferry, Show on Map, Leave VA, plus your earnings, reputation, cargo, passengers, flights and hours.
• Member without flights — a status panel and Leave VA.
• Pending application — the airlines you applied to, each with Withdraw.
• No VA yet — Browse VAs, now open to everyone.

Tours card

A boarding pass for the current leg of the active tour, with its name, thumbnail, total distance and longest leg. Arrows cycle through active tours, Browse More opens the Activities catalogue, and Fly, Description, Show on Map and Abandon (confirmed) act on the tour.

Pilot location

• Owned aircraft — your avatar follows to the destination, moved manually in advanced mode.
• Freelance aircraft in an advanced career — the avatar does not have to be at the departure and is not moved on landing; relocate it from Employees.
• Basic career — the avatar is always attached as pilot.

Rank progress is tracked per aircraft class. Cargo weights and pay follow your kg or lb preference and your company pay bonus.

• Join the OnAir Discord

1.4 Onboarding Mode

Onboarding Mode is the opening phase of every new OnAir company. You fly as a freelance pilot — charters, routes, tours, ranks — and build up the capital your company will start with, without managing an airline yet. The amber ? next to the Onboarding pill reopens this panel at any time.

What you can do

• Charters — single trips, paid on completion, on any aircraft you can charter.
• Regular routes — apply to operate real-world airline routes, with rank progression.
• Tours — themed series of legs around the world.
• Virtual Airline flights — once you join a VA, its jobs appear in your own list.
• Training — Flight Training exercises and the Aviation Quiz stay open.
• Favorite Airports and Cash Flow — pin your home fields, import your scenery library, and read your ledger in full.
• No company chores — no payroll, no maintenance to schedule, no fleet or FBO to run.

What is not there yet

Company Jobs, Aircraft Market, Work Orders, Employees, Crew Market and Crew Groups, your own FBOs and basecamps, custom Routes, the Industries chapter, Loans, the detailed finance pages, and the Virtual Airline console. They all appear the moment you unlock Advanced.

Unlocking Advanced

Use the mode pill in the sidebar, which takes you to Settings, Company Actions. A confirmation dialog walks you through what changes:

• Starting capital — the standard first unlock gives 2 × current cash + starting equity: the existing balance stays, a matching bonus is credited once, and equity is added. Equity is 470,000 Cr. on Easy, 170,000 on Classic, and on Realistic 10,000 in a survival world or 70,000 otherwise. At zero cash the matching bonus is zero. Review the live server quotation; there is no extra fixed Companion bonus.
• Airliner Start, optional — skip the small-aircraft phase with a 1.5M Cr loan, an initial FBO, a starter crew and jet certification, enough to lease an A320 or a 737. It is a permanent choice and it adds debt.
• Certifications — in Advanced, each aircraft class needs its own class rating. Pilots start with single-engine piston only, and pass a short checkride for each further class. Flights made in Freelance do not grant them.

After the switch

• Advanced is unlocked once. Later switches between Freelance and Advanced normally require seven days between changes. The first unlock follows a separate rule: read the availability shown in Company Actions rather than assuming its first return date.
• A later return to Freelance pauses company management, ends rentals of aircraft owned by another company and removes accepted unpaid non-career missions. Review commitments before switching. It does not repeat the startup bonus.
• Career quests start appearing in your Pending Jobs as your level rises, and the welcome banner goes away.
• The Onboarding phase itself does not come back.

Where the mode is shown

The sidebar pill always says which mode is active and takes you to the real switch. In the lobby, each company carries its own badge — Onboarding, Freelance or Advanced — because the mode belongs to the company, not to the app. If an Advanced company is sitting on negative cash and the cooldown is clear, the lobby offers to switch it back to Freelance rather than let you enter broke.

There is no rush. Many players spend dozens of flights in Onboarding before unlocking Advanced.

1.5 Connect your simulator

OnAir Companion follows your flights live by talking directly to your flight simulator. Once it is connected, the small sim status pill in the top bar turns green and shows the aircraft you are sitting in.

How to connect

Already set up — Click the sim status pill in the top bar. If your simulator is running, the pill turns green within a few seconds.

First time — Open Settings → Flight Sim and pick your simulator from the list. The rest depends on which one you use.

Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS / MSFS 2024)

• Nothing to install — the link OnAir uses ships with the simulator.
• In Settings → Flight Sim, choose MSFS or MSFS 2024.
• Start the simulator first, then click the pill — the connection is picked up within a few seconds.
• Simulator on another PC — Turn on Remote simulator, generate the configuration file, drop it on the sim PC in the folder shown, open the TCP port in Windows Firewall, restart the simulator, then enter its host or IP and use Test connection.

X-Plane (11 / 12)

• In Settings → Flight Sim, choose X-Plane.
• X-Plane folder — Click Detect to scan your PC (Steam libraries, installer markers, usual folders), or point at your X-Plane executable yourself with Browse.
• Click Install / Update plugin to copy the tracking plugin into your X-Plane plugins folder, then restart X-Plane if it was running.
• Optional — the X-Plane 3D Objects Plugin, on the same tab, draws OnAir scenery inside X-Plane: rescue incidents, sightseeing and training markers, event objects.
• Simulator on another PC — Enter its host name or IP in the X-Plane remote field. The plugins have to be installed by hand on that machine.

3D scenery in the simulator

Once connected, OnAir can drop its own objects into the sim during an OnAir flight the Companion is tracking — rescue sites, sightseeing markers, and the buildings of a basecamp you pass close to. Each category has its own switch under Settings → In-sim 3D scenery, and Test 3D scenery now spawns a marker just ahead of your aircraft so you can confirm the scenery pack is installed before you count on it.

If it does not connect

• The pill stays grey — the simulator is not running, or has not finished loading. Wait for the menu or the cockpit, then click again.
• The pill turns red — the attempt failed. Hover it for the exact reason. Usual causes: simulator not started, a firewall blocking the port on a remote setup, the wrong host or IP, the X-Plane plugin missing.
• Without a simulator — use AI operations only where your world and company rules permit them. Choosing None does not turn a simulator flight into a manually validated flight or bypass tracking requirements.

Your access

A new account runs on the free 7-day trial, and the badge above the world list says exactly that: a free trial giving full subscription access until the date shown. Nothing is held back during those days. If your access lapses later, the Companion notices it while you are playing rather than only when you come back to the world list.

The moment the simulator reaches connected once, step 1 ticks itself green. There is nothing to click.

Tycoon companies. A company created in Tycoon mode (the second card when you create a company; not offered on Thunder, which refuses AI flights) never flies in a simulator, so it starts in Advanced Career mode — the unlock opens by itself right after its creation (AI crews cannot fly freelance jobs) — and this step does not apply to it: every flight is flown by AI crews, in Challenging Mode you can hire twice as many AI pilots, and there is no checkride. The simulator choice in Settings reads “Tycoon mode enabled, no simulator”, the top bar shows Tycoon — no simulator instead of the connect button, and no simulator link is opened. The choice is final for that company.

1.6 Find your first job

The step 2 card takes you to the Freelance Job page, where four cards sit side by side: Charters, Regular Routes, Virtual Airline and Tours. Each is a different way of getting work, and each is picked up differently.

Charters — the daily bread

What it is — One job, with one or several legs: cargo and passengers, but also rescue, sightseeing, medical evacuation, free flight where you pick the destination yourself, and return to base. Good pay, no long-term commitment.

How to take one — Click Browse the job market on the empty Charters card, filter the list by aircraft, range and payload, then accept. The job lands in Pending Jobs, ready to fly. You hold one charter at a time, but a charter can carry several legs.

Regular Routes — flying like an airline

What it is — Scheduled airline-style routes built from real-world traffic. You apply for one route and fly its flights one after another, climbing a pilot rank that pays a growing bonus.

How to take one — Click Apply for a Route on the Regular Routes card. Once you hold one, the card shows the next flight with Fly Now, and a Skip for a leg you would rather not fly. One route at a time.

Virtual Airline flights — flying with other players

What it is — A Virtual Airline is a player-run airline you fly for; its dispatchers can assign jobs to you directly. Virtual Airlines are now open to everyone.

How to join — Click Apply to a Virtual Airline on the Virtual Airline card. While your application waits, the card shows it with a Withdraw button. If an airline invites you first, the invitation appears on that same card and on a You have been invited screen, where you accept or decline.

Once you are a member — The card shows the flights assigned to you, with arrows to step through them when there are several. Your role and your airline also appear on your company card on the world-selection screen. A company belongs to one Virtual Airline at a time.

Tours — seeing the world

What it is — A series of legs across many airports, usually themed: volcanic islands, Alpine peaks, wartime airfields. Free-form — fly them in the order you like, at your own pace. Built by the community or by the OnAir team.

How to take one — Click Browse Tours on the Tours card and start one. The card then shows your current leg, with Browse More in its header to add another. Several tours can run in parallel; just not the same one twice.

When step 2 ticks itself green

As soon as one job of any of the four kinds is yours — a mission sitting in Pending Jobs, or a tour under way. There is nothing to click: accept your first job and the tick appears.

1.7 Plan and take off

This step turns an accepted job into a real flight in your simulator, and back. It ticks itself green once a first flight has been registered.

Open the job in Flight Dispatch

From Pending Jobs, click the aircraft icon at the right of a row. Dispatch opens with the job loaded: departure, arrival, payload and aircraft.

What to do there

• Aircraft — Pick one you can use, or let the Companion read the one loaded in the simulator.
• Destination — check the next leg and the destination of every selected load. Dispatch warns about incompatible destinations. A diversion or fuel stop does not complete a job whose goods still need onward delivery; plan the remaining transport.
• Fuel and weight — Set the fuel in your own unit and check the balance. Adjust Fuel pulls the planned fuel from your SimBrief flight plan, and SimBrief gets your OnAir airframe figures so the payloads match. The panel names the company the fuel is billed to.
• Conditions — Weather, aerodrome forecast, sun times and runway data at both ends.
• Map and Flight Plan — Two tabs: the route on the chart, and the flight plan text.
• Start the flight — review the dispatch, choose Fly in Simulator and satisfy the tracking conditions. Start Tracking is separate from the final Register Flight action after landing.

Flying it

The Companion then follows position, fuel, engine state, take-offs, landings and the whole route. You can pause, save and resume in the sim without losing any of it, and tracking can be started or resumed from a joystick button you have bound, or from the in-game panel in MSFS 2024. If your destination's weather turns bad en route, dispatch calls it out before you get there.

Closing the flight

Land, park and shut down the engines, then review the debrief and use Register Flight. Confirm that registration succeeded and inspect the result in Flight Logs. A diversion can leave goods awaiting onward delivery; warp can defer job settlement.

If something goes wrong

• The simulator crashes in flight — Reconnect; the flight normally picks up where it stopped, and what you already flew is kept.
• Interrupted before you were airborne — A registered flight left waiting shows a Resume banner on the dashboard. The server cancels a flight left unregistered 48 hours after dispatch, and the banner shows that deadline as it nears.
• OnAir cannot be reached — Flights already flown are recorded on your PC and can be registered once the servers answer; the notice says until when. Settings → Recovery says plainly when it cannot tell whether a flight is still open, instead of offering a Resume it could not honour. If it is only your PC that cannot reach OnAir, a dedicated panel says that too rather than announcing a maintenance window, and a Secure DNS option in Settings can take a broken address lookup out of the way.
• You need to divert — Land at the nearest airport. The flight is registered as a diversion and the load can be ferried on.
• Registered by mistake — Cancel from Dispatch before you push the throttles. Once airborne, it is being tracked.

When step 3 ticks itself green

As soon as the Companion sees your first registered flight. Nothing to click.

2.1 Flight Management

Dispatch

• Aircraft & Route — the right-side tabs carry the flight-plan map and the full plan. Out of range, a fuel-stop picker proposes intermediate airports and flags those whose FBO is short of fuel. You are warned when the destination you file is not the one your load is bound for, or when an airport has no runway.
• Crew — Quick Hire browses candidates; Crew Groups loads a saved set in one click and reports off-airport members. Duty and rest badges expose fatigue.
• Cargo & PAX — Find Jobs opens Company Jobs. In Advanced mode, the small target icon on an eligible freight or passenger row opens Find Similar Jobs in a window over dispatch. It searches the market from the dispatch departure airport to that row's destination. The row must be undelivered, with a known destination different from departure; the icon is hidden in Freelance. The load need not already be aboard. After successful acceptance, the airport Cargo / Passengers list refreshes without leaving dispatch. Check selection, loading, capacity and deadlines before flying: acceptance does not itself load the aircraft. Identical offers are grouped; the window also offers time-constrained and human-only exclusion filters. In the older client, the target icon instead opens the jobs page filtered by departure and destination. Each freight and passenger row also shows the five-character job code used in Company Jobs and Pending Jobs: rows with the same code belong to the same job, even across the two tables. Clicking the code selects every selectable row of that job; clicking it again deselects them. A job is paid only once all of its cargo and passengers have been delivered.
• FBO & Fuel — one fill button covering trip, reserve and alternate; Adjust Fuel pulls the SimBrief plan; Prefile on VATSIM is one click. Import plan loads a flight plan file in any of three formats: an MSFS .pln (as saved by MSFS or exported by Little Navmap), a Little Navmap .lnmpln, or an IVAO .fpl. It sets the destination, and takes the alternate the file names — the .lnmpln and the .fpl carry one, the .pln has no such field at all, so there one is computed. It also loads the file's route — drawn on the dispatch map, kept on the tracking map while you fly that flight, and written into Save to MSFS with each waypoint's type, so an FMS shows fixes as fixes instead of bare coordinates — and the file's cruise altitude. An IVAO .fpl's route is loaded only when every point of it is a coordinate or an airport OnAir knows: one point it cannot place, and no route is loaded. The identifier the file names wins over the position written next to it, and a single notice says what was read from the file and what was deduced from its position. No format carries fuel. Next to the current fuel, the line shows what the slider adds or removes and the total it aims at, and a box beside the percentage takes that total directly — in your volume unit or your weight unit, whichever you pick. When a SimBrief plan for this very flight is loaded, that plan becomes the reference: the range warning and the fuel check before tracking compare what is aboard with the plan's own figure, and speak only when you load less than your own plan, beyond a 1% margin — our estimate is a straight line at the aircraft's book burn and knows nothing of route, wind or climb. A round trip (sightseeing, rescue) is the exception: SimBrief plans only the two airports, not the circuit, so there the fuel check before tracking keeps its own floor of 20% of capacity. A greyed-out Order Refuel & Loading now says why underneath: nothing to order, not enough fuel at that FBO (with the shortfall), or an order already under way.
• Weather — every airport card shows the METAR and, folded under it, the TAF: decoded periods plus the raw bulletin.
• Launch — choose Launch AI Flight or Fly in Simulator as allowed by your world and crew. Dispatch also checks aircraft availability, required maintenance, qualification, payload and current assignments. Read the stated blocker. When your company has loading times enabled, refuelling and loading take a few minutes: Fly in Simulator then waits for the ground crews and shows the time left. Fly this leg opens a player-flown Work Order leg with its route and crew.

Tracking Conditions

Six rows must turn green: Date, Fuel, Payload, Model (with Diagnostic), Sim Settings, Location. Stop following frees the tracking slot without ending the flight or losing its pay, and Start / Resume Tracking also fires from a joystick button or the in-game panel. A flight dispatched but not yet airborne now lands here, instead of on a tracking screen with nothing to press. The leftover-freight banner leaves out rescue cargo and race tickets, which are placeholders. Location asks for one thing — on the ground, within 4 NM of the departure airport — so any stand of that field qualifies and the aircraft never has to be moved. Position aircraft in simulator is only for when you are parked somewhere else: it offers the real stands read from your scenery, the runway ends, where the aircraft actually is, or the field reference point, and leaves MSFS in slew until you press Shift+Z (2024) or Y (2020, P3D, FSX).

Balance. With Autoset ticked on Payload, the pilot seat carries your own 190 lbs on top of the job's load when the contract has no pilot of its own. In MSFS, Measure balance finds once per aircraft where its seats, compartments and fuel tanks sit — OnAir first empties the cabin and compartments (the crew seats keep their weight), puts test weights and fuel in the simulator, reads the centre of gravity, then puts your load and fuel back; the row gives the duration. If the aircraft sits on its tail anyway, the measurement still completes, puts the load back, then sets the aircraft back on its wheels; the message says if it could not. Once an aircraft is measured, the row gives the centre of gravity at take-off and with empty tanks against its limits, and Measure again is only needed if its seats, compartments or tanks changed. From then on, Autoset places the load as close to the middle of the limits as the seats and compartments allow, judged at take-off and with empty tanks, and the row shows where the centre of gravity will be. Free seats also take cargo when the compartments alone would leave the load in the outer part of the limits; when the best split still sits close to a limit, the row turns orange and says which one — expect a tail-heavy or nose-heavy aircraft. If one of its fuel tanks cannot be measured — one the simulator refills or evens out by itself, or one too small to change the weight — the fuel counts as it was aboard during the measurement: the row then gives the take-off balance only, and says so. In X-Plane, through the Web API connection, there is nothing to measure: the simulator gives where each payload station and fuel tank sits and how much each station holds, so Autoset fills every station separately and the row reads the balance straight from X-Plane. Its % MAC values, and the tracking-view warning, work once X-Plane reports a first change of balance, for example after the load has been written; once a second change confirms them, OnAir keeps them for that aircraft. After Start Tracking, if the centre of gravity is outside the aircraft's limits, a warning stays in the tracking view while you are on the ground, until you move weight inside the aircraft without lowering the total. None of this applies to add-ons loaded by hand.

Tracking view

Tabs: Overview (distance, ETA, METAR, TAF, airport layout), Map & Events (trail, prediction circles, runway centerlines), Cargo & PAX, Score (live scoring on the active phase) and Flight Plan.

ATC on your route (VATSIM). Off by default: tick Show online ATC on your route in Settings › Flight Sim. A green chip then lists the online positions (DEL, GND, TWR, APP, ATIS…) next to the departure, destination and alternate airports, on Flight Dispatch and on the Overview airport cards. While you fly your own flight, the top of Overview shows the controllers ahead on a ribbon from your position to the destination, and the flight header shows the next online controller ahead. On the Map & Events tab, the map's ATC button (off by default) adds a thin green halo along the planned route ahead of you, wherever it passes within reach of an online controller; hover it for the callsign and frequency. With the Navigraph data package downloaded, the controlled airspaces your route crosses are drawn as bands above the ribbon, placed against your altitude (flight-level limits are compared as if the pressure were standard); without it, no airspace is drawn. In range now means you are inside an online controller's sector, or within the usual reach of an airport controller — a range, not a sign that this controller is working you. Only VATSIM data is used, and nothing is shown when that data is not current or your live position is unknown. A spoken advisory can also say when a controller ahead comes online, or when an online controller's zone is about 5 minutes ahead: it has its own switch in Sound & Voice, off by default.

In flight

Rescue missions, emergencies (opt-in), de-icing, an ore detector, cabin calls, deadline and weather reminders — the weather watch warns you before the destination degrades rather than after. If the simulator link breaks, the interruption alarm sounds at most twice and then stays quiet; the message itself remains on screen. Time warp is fully allowed, the banner spells out the rules on the spot, and a flight sitting in warp is never cancelled or aborted. A crash the simulator reports after you have landed — below taxi speed (40 kt) or already parked; a scenery collision, typically — no longer cancels the flight: it ends there, as if the engines had been shut down at that spot, the crash stays in the log, and you register it as usual. A crash during the landing roll-out or in flight still cancels. Register Flight closes the leg — from the app, or from the in-game panel, which also lists the legs waiting at your airport and dispatches the next one without you taking the headset off.

If OnAir cannot be reached

Your flight is written to this PC as you fly. When the servers go quiet you are told how many flights are held here and until when each can still be registered; Recovery explains why it offers no Resume button and disables bulk deletion meanwhile.

• Realistic procedures (Wiki) older interface

Registration, warp and rest. If the simulator clock gains more than 11 minutes over real time, an eligible flight is registered in warp: flight XP, reputation and wear apply at registration, while job pay and mission XP wait for warp to end. Freelance and training flights are excluded. A pinned real-world X-Plane clock does not record the time gained; read the clock warning. Rest crew is offered when crew remain whom the server can rest; player avatars are excluded.

Updating a flight plan. After regenerating an OFP on SimBrief during tracking, use Refresh beside SimBrief to download it again. Opening the SimBrief website alone does not import it. Flight Plan also rechecks a cached OFP for a different departure or destination. Where the navlog supplies phase data, planned-route colours distinguish SID, en route and STAR. Save to X-Plane uses the detected, reachable flight-plan folder; read the displayed folder or error before saving.

2.2 Split Load — Partial Cargo / PAX

Splitting loads only part of a cargo or charter. The remainder stays at the airport as a new entry with its own ID, ready for a later flight — yours or another pilot's.

When to use it

• The cargo is heavier than your payload — take 60% now, the rest later.
• The charter has more PAX than you have seats — split it into two flights.
• Fill a return leg with the capacity left over after the outbound.

How it works

Every splittable cargo and charter row carries a quantity chip (for example 1 200 / 2 000 kg, or 3 / 6 PAX). Click it to open a panel with a slider and a numeric field. Two ways to commit:

• Validate in the panel — the server splits straight away: the original drops to your chosen quantity and a new entry with the remainder appears at the airport. Both stay on the ground, nothing is loaded yet. Use it to lock the split before tuning fuel and payload around it.
• Validate Fuel & Payload — leave the chip at your value and press the main button. The split happens during loading: the chosen quantity goes aboard, the residual stays at the airport.

Reset restores the original quantity. You can adjust several chips before committing, and the Dispatch summary tracks the loaded weight live. Once tracking starts, the read-only Cargo & PAX tab shows what actually went on board. The same chip sits on Work Orders leg loads, where only the panel's own Validate applies.

Units in the panel

• Plain cargo — your preferred weight unit (kg or lbs), set in Settings.
• Industry merchandise — whole units, each of a fixed weight. The slider snaps to whole units so the server accepts the split.
• Charters — a PAX count.

What cannot be split

• Freelance missions — all-or-nothing contracts.
• Rescue cargo and race cargo.
• Anything down to 1 unit or 1 PAX — nothing left to divide.

There the chip is a plain label and its tooltip says which of those rules applies.

Behind the scenes

The server creates a new cargo or charter row with a fresh ID and the remaining weight or PAX. Both keep the same parent mission, so the mission completes only when both halves are delivered. Merchandise and contract terms are split proportionally.

2.3 Ongoing Flights

The Ongoing Flights tab merges two live sources into one list: your own fleet's airborne aircraft, and every active flight broadcast from all worlds (other players and AI traffic). It refreshes as world updates arrive.

Toolbar

• Scope — Mine (your company only) or All (every ongoing flight worldwide). Arriving from the dashboard ongoing-flights gauge lands on Mine; the World menu lands on All.
• My Aircraft — how many of the listed flights are yours, with your company colour dot.
• Export CSV — writes the current list to a file.
• AI traffic is always part of the list; there is no switch to hide it.

The list

Sortable columns: Ref, Aircraft, Type, Class, From, To, Dist (NM), Status, T.Ofs, Eng On, T/O, Landing, Eng Off, Fuel, FL, Speed, Pilot, Cat. Click a header to sort ascending, click again to flip. By default your own flights come first, then other players, then AI — a column sort replaces that order. T.Ofs (the flight's time offset, in hours) is rounded to one decimal, with the exact value in the cell tooltip. The coloured dot next to the registration says where the flight comes from: your company, another player, or AI. Weight values follow your kg/lbs preference.

Landing time

Once the aircraft is down, the column shows the real landing time. Before that it shows an italic green estimate, refreshed every few seconds from where the aircraft is expected to be, on your own flights as well as everyone else's. It is a straight-line figure with a small pad for approach and taxi, so expect drift in strong winds. Not every row can be estimated: some flights reach us without a usable speed or destination, and nothing is estimated for a flight that has landed, is in warp, or has not left the ground yet.

Expanded row

Click a row for a three-column panel: Identity (aircraft, type, class, company, category, pilot, flight rules), Route and timing (departure, arrival, alternate, distance, engine and airborne times, cruise time, the server's ETA, flight level) and Telemetry (altitude, speed, heading, V/S, fuel on board and used, airframe condition, XP, passengers, cargo, position).

A world flight does not stream its position: the server computes one, then can sleep for several minutes. So the panel carries the position forward along the route between two server fixes, and labels it honestly — the coordinates gain a predicted marker with the age of the last fix once that age is worth mentioning. When the position cannot be advanced with confidence, the raw server fix is shown with no such marker. The panel's Landing line follows suit: the real time once the aircraft is down, otherwise a ≈ estimate measured from that carried-forward position, and nothing at all when it could not be advanced.

Warp and status

An aircraft in time warp shows a cyan flash icon and the warp end time; when the countdown reaches zero the absolute end time is shown instead. A closed flight reads Registered in grey. Otherwise the page uses the live in-flight phase from the world broadcast, falling back to the flight's own status, then to a generic In progress.

2.4 Flight Logs

Your complete flight history over a chosen period, as a list and on a map. The list refreshes on its own when a new flight is registered. Opened from another player's Company Lookup the title carries that company's code, with a button back to your own logs; opened from the Pilot Hub's last-flight strip it jumps straight to that flight and expands the matching row.

Header filters

• From / To — date range (last 30 days by default, To inclusive). A wide range loads every flight of the period, up to the 10,000 most recent; beyond that a banner gives the date of the oldest flight shown, and Show earlier flights continues from that date. The line beside the tabs gives the dates the list actually holds.
• Aircraft — one airframe. Freelance airframes are listed, but their flights may belong to the employer's company.
• Pilot — one crew pilot, or Flown by me. Hide AI flights removes the legs the AI flew.
• Cancelled — include cancelled flights (red accent, dimmed).
• Load, Export CSV, and the Strips / Table toggle.

List

A strip shows registration (click for Aircraft Lookup), class and type, route with great-circle distance, pilot (italic Player when you flew it yourself, a violet AI mark when the leg was flown automatically by the AI), Engine On to Engine Off duration, fuel in your unit, XP, Score and date. The left accent encodes ownership: my company, freelance, leased or rented. A VATSIM badge marks a flight credited on that network and a DIV badge a diversion, with a Planned … / Alt … sub-line. Status has its own cell, and a warp row reads Warp until HH:MM UTC with a tooltip explaining why. On a narrow window the columns now compress instead of running off the screen.

The table view adds sortable columns: Ref, Date, Co., Aircraft, Type, Class, Pilot, From, To, Dist, Status, Engine On, Take Off, Landing, Engine Off, Fuel, FL, Total Time, XP, Score. Fuel follows your kg/lbs preference, italic times are estimates, and every timestamp is UTC. The strips sort dropdown uses the same keys.

Flight panel

Click any row to unfold the viewer: a map with the path coloured by altitude and key-event markers, above Score, Events, Charts and Log tabs. Charts plot altitude, speed and one engine curve chosen from the airframe (RPM for propellers, Power for jets). A 3D toggle swaps in a perspective view with an altitude slab, the alternate pin and every airport within 25 NM; clicking an event highlights it on both views. Day mode and a topographic overlay are available, and the panel no longer hides its own full-screen mode — the button reads Expand while collapsed. Track data is cached per flight, so re-opening a row is instant.

Log tab

Starts with the server's own flight report when the flight has one: reputation, the XP breakdown, the condition change of each component with its reason (including an engine broken by the pilot), failures and the incoherent-fuel correction. Weights follow your unit; the report itself is written by the server in English. Below it are the server logbook lines, available for every flight including AI legs.

Map tab

Each flight is a great-circle arc coloured by class, dashed when cancelled, with an arrow at the arrival end for heading. Airport markers are sized by movement count: green for departures only, orange for arrivals only, cyan for both. Click one for up to 8 flights touching that airport.

Freelance and warp results. A freelance flight can show Freelance in the aircraft column when no persistent registration is available. Warp is not a failed flight: flight XP and reputation are already applied, while job pay and mission XP wait until its end. The server does not place Freelance flights in warp.

2.5 Map

The Map is the situational-awareness page: a full-screen world map layering your fleet, pending loads, live traffic, VATSIM pilots, basecamps, weather and ground plans over the OnAir airport database.

Airports and ground layout

Search top-left by ICAO, name, city or country; a suggestion flies the map there and drops a pulsing halo that leaves the real marker underneath clickable. Clearing the field with its ×, or editing it, removes the halo. Dot size encodes the OnAir class (0 to 5), with distinct glyphs for heliports, seaplane bases, military fields and basecamps. The popup gives name, location, size, elevation, coordinates, decoded METAR and active boosts, plus View Details, Travel here (Travel Tokens) and Open in Navigraph; it is draggable off the map, several at a time. At close zoom the ground plan of the nearest airport is drawn, or a Capture prompt reads it from a running simulator.

Aerodrome forecast (TAF)

Under the METAR, Show TAF now opens the forecast inside the popup, on the airport marker and on the METAR station model alike. Periods are decoded (flight category, wind, visibility, clouds, phenomena) above the raw bulletin, and a dashed edge marks the conditional groups (TEMPO / PROB) — what might happen, not what is expected. A long bulletin scrolls inside the panel instead of stretching the popup, and no period is dropped. EXPIRED appears once the validity window has passed with no newer bulletin, and where an airport issues no TAF at all — most of them do not — the control is simply absent.

Weather and traffic

METAR Dots (VFR/IFR) draws full station models on every size 2 and larger field, coloured by flight category. Live Traffic draws every active flight, players in orange from real positions and AI in violet; clicking one traces its route and opens its popup. Between server updates the marker is now carried along the great circle toward its arrival airport rather than an ageing heading, so the next real update no longer lands as a sideways jump; it never overshoots the destination, and it dims and freezes once the last real fix is too old. VATSIM Traffic adds live pilots, staffed ATC with 40 NM approach rings, enroute sectors and a busiest-airports panel; with your VATSIM CID in Settings your own aircraft shows in gold.

My Company layers

• My Fleet — grouped on the ground, individual in flight. The popup now names the field an aircraft is parked on, but only while the server does not report it airborne, so one that has just taken off no longer reads as still sitting at the airport it left. In flight it shows route, speed, heading, altitude, vertical speed, ETA, crew and manifest.
• My Cargo and My Pax — pending loads at their pickup airports, with lines to the drop-offs.
• My FBOs — green when the workshop is open to other players, red when it is not (your own aircraft can still use it), amber while under construction, with a red dot when 100LL or Jet falls below 25% of capacity. Hovering shows status and fuel; a click opens the same summary with a shortcut to that FBO's configuration. FBOs on your basecamps are drawn too.
• My Employees — your crew, back on the map. On the ground, one marker per airport, coloured by the most numerous role (blue pilots, green cabin crew, orange mechanics) with a count bubble over one person; hovering lists the roles and the first ten names, a click opens each person's role, status and availability. In flight, a person badge rides on their aircraft and its popup lists who is aboard. Crew aboard a parked aircraft stay on the airport. In Freelance mode only the crew of your mission aircraft are drawn.

Filters and status

Right side, collapsible. Airport Size is a cumulative slider setting the minimum class, with None hiding every paved field; below it sit the heliport, seaplane, Military, Basecamp and Lighted filters, the traffic and My Company layers, the Ground Layout checkboxes and the overlays (Topographic, Rain Radar, METAR Dots, plus OpenAIP and Weather, which need an API key in Settings). Day / Night switches the base map, and a bottom-right counter shows filtered / total airports with the database version. Filters and last view are remembered on this device; Live Traffic always starts off.

3.1 Pending Jobs

Pending Jobs lists every mission your company has accepted and not yet completed: the operational hub for cargo, charters, freelance routes, tours, custom routes and FBO orders. Tabs List, Operational Map, Split, Outsourcing (a player-to-player board where you publish legs or take someone else's, hidden in freelance mode) and Completed, your logbook. The header holds the Colour legend, the Deadlines window (status, per-item alarm, lead time), Publish and Export CSV.

Filters

Mission-type pills (Cargo & PAX, Tours, Custom Route, Rescue, Sightseeing, Medical) default to All — the page never silently filters itself after a reload. Two checkboxes complete the row: Level missions and Route flights, the synthetic weekly previews of your custom routes. If you belong to a Virtual Airline, a rail filters All / VA / For you / Unassigned: jobs owned by the VA carry a VA mark, and those it assigned to you read FOR YOU. The rail stays out of the way when you are working as the VA itself.

List

Routes and tours group under a coloured parent row with per-column totals. The left stripe is split diagonally: the bright half is what the mission carries, the dark half where it comes from, with a three-letter source tag inside that the colour legend decodes. Mixed manifests show a split-cargo badge and dangerous goods their own icon; an In flight badge resumes tracking on click. A CR/NM column compares the leg with your best eligible aircraft's cruise range, and a payload-autonomy warning flags a leg that load plus fuel would push past the take-off weight. Deadlines, weights and money use one scale across the page and your kg/lbs preference. When none of your aircraft sits at the next departure, a travel token button opens the teleport dialog with it pre-filled.

Choosing the aircraft

The picker first says whether the leg is tied to an airframe at all. A company job's load waits at the departure airport, so any aircraft standing there can take it — including a different type from the one that flew the previous leg. A freelance contract is the opposite: the employer provides the aircraft, and every leg is flown with that one. Aircraft that cannot take the leg say why (in flight, maintenance due, freelance-only), and those parked elsewhere are listed with a Ferry shortcut, a paid and timed repositioning.

Abandoning a job

The decline dialog shows the server-computed penalty before you confirm, and what else it costs: legs already delivered pay nothing, and a provided aircraft goes back to the employer. To change type on a freelance contract, Abandon and find another aircraft does exactly that, then opens the job board at the airport you are standing at. A job taken by your Virtual Airline cannot be dropped from your own company — the dialog explains why and points you at working as the VA, or at asking a Dispatcher.

Level missions, routes and map

LVL rows are your company's level missions; the trophy number is the level, its tooltip the XP. Levelling is pure XP (N → N+1 costs N×1000 XP): the level mission alone fills the bar up to level 5, then a share that shrinks as levels rise — the rest comes from any other flying. From level 6 a level mission no longer fills the bar on its own, so finishing one does not always raise your level: the next level, its two skill points and the next level mission all arrive at the level-up. When a flight you register in the Companion ends one, its debrief says how much XP is left (not for a flight in warp, nor for one flown by an AI crew); when none is pending, a line above the filters says at which level the next is generated. Regenerating one costs no penalty. Custom Route occurrences appear as synthetic rows whose departure time is coloured live (green = penalty-free, orange = slot missed); Fly Now generates the mission and pre-fills dispatch. The map draws great-circle routes and live positions, counts a mixed leg by what it actually carries, and its popups carry the METAR and the aerodrome forecast. Jobs with points of interest (sightseeing) also show each POI and the dashed circuit from their home field; a POI already overflown is dimmed.

Before dispatch or outsourcing. Even a single candidate aircraft is checked for availability and suitability before selection. A refusal identifies the blocking condition instead of opening an empty dispatch. On the Outsourcing tab, read the company code shown by Accept or Publish: the action commits that operating company, including the VA when working as it.

In freelance mode you fly for the employer, which provides the aircraft and crew. The aircraft is created when you accept the contract, with 20-40% fuel on handover, and removed when all its missions are complete. Refuelling at an external supplier is not charged to your company; no aircraft rental, landing or parking fees are charged, and mandatory maintenance does not apply. If you use your own FBO, its fuel stock is consumed and the stock cost is recorded in its accounts, without a cash purchase. Fuel is provided, but you still need to prepare enough for the flight.

3.2 Recommended Jobs

The Recommended Jobs page asks an assistant to find one good job for each of your idle aircraft. It is a curated shortlist for the day, not an exhaustive search. For every available contract, use Search Jobs in Pilot Hub or the map.

Fixed search scope

The assistant always looks at the same two mission families for every idle aircraft: PAX & Cargo and Medical. There are no mission-type checkboxes — the scope is fixed so the shortlist stays comparable from one day to the next. The only knob you set is the priority.

• Priority — Choose how cards are ranked: Credits / NM (default, best payout for the distance) or Credits / hour (best payout for time spent). Both rates are shown on every card; the selected one is highlighted.
• Lock — Once the daily search has run, the priority is read-only until the next slot opens. The value shown is the one used when the shortlist was generated.

How recommendations are built

For each idle aircraft the assistant walks nearby airports within range and scores every reachable job. It keeps one best job per aircraft per family, then sorts the cards by your priority.

• Range & payload — Only jobs the aircraft can actually fly are considered.
• Licences — Jobs you can't legally take (dangerous goods, medical, PAX, last-minute) are filtered out and counted in a small lock chip.
• Time windows — Jobs with a delivery deadline get a warning badge — a late delivery costs you a penalty.
• Heuristic, not exhaustive — A fast comparison surfaces good jobs, not always the very best one. The map is still worth a look.

Launching the search — paid assistant

Press Ask an assistant to find good jobs. Before running, the assistant opens a confirm dialog with the quote:

• Free below 10,000 Cr of company value.
• Otherwise 1,000 Cr per aircraft in your fleet (owned + rented, freelance excluded).
• Requires the Manager VA permission. Insufficient funds surface the server message; nothing is charged and the search doesn't run.

The assistant runs once per day — a 24-hour timer is shown on the button. The search runs in the background: you can leave the page and come back. On large fleets it is capped to the 10 idle aircraft nearest to you; a chip tells you how many were skipped.

Nothing to recommend

If your company has no eligible aircraft (i.e. you only fly freelance), the search is not offered at all — the page shows a plain "nothing to recommend" card instead of letting you pay for a search that would come back empty.

Reading a recommendation card

• Aircraft — Tail number, display name, class, plus the home airport ICAO.
• Mission type & flags — Family chip (PAX & Cargo / Medical), followed by constraint icons where they apply: Fragile, Perishable, Medical, Dangerous, Human-only.
• Route & legs — Full origin → destination(s), with leg count for multi-leg jobs.
• Pay / NM and Pay / hour — Both rates shown; the active priority is highlighted.
• Estimated flight time and expiry — Hover for the exact deadline.
• Time window — Amber badge when the job must be delivered before a fixed clock.
• Status — Cards flip to In progress or Delivered once you act, so a refresh doesn't re-suggest the same work.

Per-card actions

• Take & Fly — Accepts the job and opens it ready to dispatch.
• Add to pending (+) — Adds the job to your pending jobs in Pilot Hub.
• Route icon — Filters the world map to that single job.
• Resume (in-progress cards) — Hands the aircraft back to Flight Management, which picks tracking-view (airborne) or the dispatch form (accepted but parked) from server truth.

Related pages

For a full search of company fleet work, open Company Jobs. For accepted missions, open Pending Jobs. Freelance work with a supplied aircraft starts from the Freelance Job hub.

Recheck an older recommendation. The aircraft may have moved or become unavailable since the search. Take & Fly rechecks the departure and eligible aircraft. In progress resumes the relevant operation; if no suitable aircraft is available, read where the load waits and open Pending Jobs to arrange it. A card is not a guarantee of current dispatch eligibility.

3.3 Company Jobs

Company Jobs simulates customer orders (cargo & passenger charters) around an airport: commercial prospecting, not a flight planner. Hidden in VA mode. Tabs Map (fullscreen here only), List and Split, where a row click pulses its route. A pill switches between Job Market and FBO Jobs (standing orders from your FBO's logistic queries); jobs kept with ★ survive the next regeneration.

Search

Only the top row re-searches: Airport (or From Sim), Direction, Search Surrounding (airports within 100 NM), Hide Unavailable and the Aircraft picker. Apply limits writes that aircraft's book maxima into the numeric filters — never done for you on a plain page opening.

Profiles

Beside the aircraft picker, Profiles stores named sets of the numeric filters (range, weight, passengers, legs, minimum airport size). Where Apply limits fills the aircraft's maxima and hides the destinations the aircraft cannot use (the Runway fits … chip in the filter header), a profile holds the values you judged worth flying, minimums included.

• Save names the current values; tick for this type only to bind them to the aircraft type, which then offers the profile first.
• Apply writes them into the filters and moves nothing else. A profile is never applied on its own — not on opening the page, not on picking an aircraft. The chip beside the picker names it, reads (modified) once you edit a value, and its ✕ clears it and reopens the filters.
• Profiles are stored on this PC, per company, so your company and your VA keep separate sets.

Filters

Everything below the tabs is instant: the numeric ranges, the TYPE chips and the toggles for military fields, unlit runways, time-constrained and heliport jobs. The block folds to give the list room, but never silently — its header keeps counting the active bounds and exclusions, and Clear all stays one click away. The stats line above, with its N hidden by filters note, stays visible.

• The passenger range answers how many, not are there any: the Include / Exclude / Only switch beside it decides what becomes of cargo-only jobs.
• Min Size is a runway ladder — size 0 is a field under 2,300 ft and each step demands a longer runway (hover one to read it). All-soft fields never exceed size 2, water-only ones size 1. It is your own filter on airport size; whether an aircraft can use a field is judged separately, by runway length.

Payload and range

With an aircraft picked, a banner reports, for the fuel aboard: Can carry (what still fits, fuel counting against the take-off weight), Can reach (longest single leg, 30-minute reserve kept back) and the airframe's hold limit. Set a minimum weight and it also says how far the aircraft goes carrying that load; two matching filters drop the jobs too heavy or too far.

List and map

The left accent shows the goods on its bright half and special handling on its dark half. Rows carry route, distance, cargo, passengers, weight, expiry, XP, decline penalty, pay and profit per nautical mile, with a yellow badge on any leg out of reach with the load offered. Fly accepts the leg and pre-loads it into dispatch, + sends it to Pending Jobs, the arrow accepts then searches on from the destination. On the map, click an airport to filter the list; rescue popups stay open on purpose, and the aircraft popup names where the aircraft is. Missions needing a company skill stay dimmed and can no longer be accepted until the Skills Tree unlocks them — their Briefing stays readable.

OnAir documentation

• Company Jobs Handbook §7
• Skills Tree Handbook §5

Reading multi-leg limits. Minimum cargo and passenger quantities apply to the whole job; maximum quantities and payload suitability use the busiest leg, not the sum carried on successive legs. The passenger filter distinguishes no maximum from zero. Hover the hidden-jobs count for exclusion reasons. After acceptance, check the selected aircraft and payload in Dispatch.

3.4 Browse Freelance Jobs

The Browse freelance jobs page (Pilot Hub menu) is a marketplace of one-shot charters: no fleet aircraft needed, a temporary freelance aircraft is created when you accept. The board re-rolls once a day per airport, so a job you spotted stays available until the next roll.

Search bar

• Aircraft type — merges your fleet, your flight history and the type running in the simulator; From Sim fills type and nearest airport in one click.
• Departure — ICAO with autocomplete. It opens on the airport where your pilot is, the one shown under the logo; a departure you pick yourself stays until your pilot moves again. Sightseeing falls back on your home base when the field is empty; VATSIM Events turns it into a search over event airports plus an organiser region.
• Context line — under the search bar, it names what your simulator shows or, with the simulator closed, where your pilot is and the aircraft of your last freelance flight. In orange it differs from your search, and Use this copies it in.
• Min size — minimum airport size 0-5, your own filter, hidden where the category ignores it. Whether the aircraft can use a field is judged separately, by runway length.

Mission categories

• Cargo & PAX — standard freight and passenger charters. Your Favorite Airports weigh a little more when destinations are drawn, so they come up more often — never exclusively. Changing your favorites list redraws the board at your next Pull jobs.
• Rescue — fly to the incident, find the survivors, board them, return to a hospital airport. Max 18 seats.
• Sightseeing — scenic loops over local points of interest from your base. Max 24 seats.
• Medevac — medical transfer, +50% pay, 20% penalty if late.
• VATSIM Events — return charters from the public VATSIM calendar, with a busy-airports strip, a green ATC online badge on staffed airports, an ATC online (VATSIM) filter that keeps only jobs arriving at a staffed field, and a start reminder.
• Pick Destination — any ICAO destination, with two jobs on that leg: an empty positioning flight and a real loaded charter. Both paid.
• Return to Base — one-click charter home, with a real load to carry, paid like any other charter.

Categories your aircraft cannot fly are disabled, and a badge counts the jobs in each.

Tabs and filters

Three tabs: Map, List and Split (both side by side, resizable). The stats line totals jobs, cargo, pax and pay, next to a refresh countdown. Filter pills drop military, unlit and non-SimBrief airports and cycle heliports (off / mixed / only); ATC online (VATSIM) now shares that row and stays usable where the airport pills do not apply.

List view

• Strip row — route chain, distance, cargo, E/B/F seats, payload, total weight, XP, a CR/NM dot (profit per NM against an AI pilot's wage) and pay. The left stripe carries the goods type, with CHR marking a freelance charter.
• Cargo flags — fragile, perishable, medical, dangerous, time-limited and human-pilot-only now appear here and in the table, always in that order, so you see a load before taking it.
• Rescue rows — search radius, landing type and landing-zone distance are compact markers, so these rows are no taller than any other list; the wording is in the tooltips and the coordinates behind a copy button.
• Take & Fly accepts and opens dispatch, Add to pending accepts and keeps you here. A red legs warning flags a leg beyond range with reserve; an active boost badge marks boosted pay.

Sort chips sit above their column and follow your kg or lbs preference. Only one active freelance charter is allowed at a time; taking a second sends you to Pending Jobs.

Map and tips

Airport markers and mission arcs around the departure; clicking an airport filters the list to the jobs touching it, and a mission popup opens a pinnable card with the same accept buttons. Missions are generated locally. For company fleet contracts, see Company Jobs.

• Freelance Pilot Academy §3

Before Take & Fly. The confirmation identifies a disconnected simulator or a mismatch between the loaded add-on and the contract aircraft. Connect and load the intended aircraft before accepting; the simulator action in the dialog connects and loads it. An unknown or unusable add-on requires the stated test or moderation step. The provided aircraft remains bound to the accepted contract.

In freelance mode you fly for the employer, which provides the aircraft and crew. The aircraft is created when you accept the contract, with 20-40% fuel on handover, and removed when all its missions are complete. Refuelling at an external supplier is not charged to your company; no aircraft rental, landing or parking fees are charged, and mandatory maintenance does not apply. If you use your own FBO, its fuel stock is consumed and the stock cost is recorded in its accounts, without a cash purchase. Fuel is provided, but you still need to prepare enough for the flight.

3.5 Activities

The Activities page is the tour catalog and the launchpad for the tours you have started or want to start. Tours in progress are pinned to the top of the grid, and you can carry on flying straight from their card.

Sidebar filters

• My drafts — only when you have authored drafts. Ticked by default, so unpublished work stays in sight.
• Official and Community — the two catalog buckets. My VA appears only when your virtual airline has reserved tours.
• Title search, plus multi-select Authors, Areas and Tags.

The order is fixed: in progress, then your drafts, then official, then by name.

Tour card

Each card carries the cover image, the OA and VA badges, a distance pill with the total tour distance and the longest leg in nautical miles, the departure and arrival ICAO, the author and the average rating. A warning triangle appears when the tour restricts the empty weight, and a finished tour that can be replayed is outlined in green.

Card actions

• Start / Redo — opens the aircraft-type picker. The server then generates the tour missions plus a dedicated freelance aircraft, the tour flips to in progress at once, and you land on the Freelance Dashboard with the new card in view.
• Fly / Resume — appears once a freelance aircraft is bound to the tour: it pre-selects the current leg's cargo and charters and takes you to dispatch.
• View Map — the tour map with every leg, airport and progress marker. From an airport popup, Back to Activities returns you exactly where you were.
• Travel here — one company travel token teleports you and one of your aircraft to the tour's departure airport. Greyed out at zero tokens.
• Description, Comments (the badge carries the real count) and Rate — the star appears once you have flown enough of the tour: 1 to 5 stars and an optional comment.
• Abandon — the red flag on a tour in progress, behind a confirmation.

Simulator check before starting

A tour is a fixed itinerary: you cannot swap an airport out. So before the missions are generated, Companion compares its stops with the simulator you selected and warns you if any are missing, saying which ones are on the main trip and which only cost an optional side job. You can go ahead anyway or cancel. Airports the local database does not know at all are not reported, because that is no evidence they are absent from your simulator.

Publish chips (creators)

• DRAFT — your local working copy, visible only to you. PUBLISHED — the live snapshot players see, frozen at publish time.
• NOT VISIBLE IN GAME — your published copy is hidden from the catalog: typically a missing thumbnail or icon on the server, an unpublished state, or dates outside the window.
• UNPUBLISHED EDITS — the draft changed since the last publish; players keep the old snapshot until you publish again from the web editor.

Counters for fully, partially and main-trip completions are shown on your own published tours.

3.6 Rescue Missions

A Rescue mission is a freelance charter: fly to an incident site (road accident, person stranded offroad, person lost at sea), land as close as you can, board the victims and bring them back to the airport you left — destination always equals departure.

Find one

Open Freelance Job, pick an aircraft and a departure airport, then the Rescue category — it needs a small aircraft and is disabled above 18 seats. Each airport rolls a fresh board daily, over three distance bands (5-10, 10-25, 25-100 NM) and three types: Road, always at an exact position, plus Offroad and Water, exact half the time and otherwise needing a search of the zone. Pay rises with round-trip distance, extra victims, search-zone size and landing precision.

Rows and map

• Rescue rows are now the same height as every other job list: compact markers (search radius, terrain, landing zone) carry their wording in tooltips, with a copy button for the coordinates.
• Selecting a rescue in the list now traces it on the map — a line from its own departure airport to the site, plus its search and landing circles. Only the selected mission draws circles; one airport can hold 45 rescues.
• The incident marker says it itself: four white ticks radiating around the glyph mean the position still has to be searched. No ticks, exact position. The legend has the same entry.
• Rescue popups stay open on purpose, so you can compare incidents side by side — the map now says so in a blue tip.

In the simulator

With the 3D pack installed the site gets objects (boat, wreck, cars) plus an aerial marker about 300 ft above it: the ground props are life-size and nearly invisible from altitude, so the marker is what makes the site findable. It hides below 0.5 NM, returns beyond 0.75 NM, and on a search mission appears only once you have found the zone — it never gives the hidden point away. Settings → Flight Sim now has Test 3D scenery now, and the asset check looks only in the folder of the simulator you are actually connected to. Each spawn or failure is logged in the flight event feed.

Fly, board, return

A live Rescue Mission Status card on the Overview and Map tabs walks the phases: Outbound, Descend to Search below 2,000 ft AGL, Search Pattern across the grid, Homing as you close on the hidden point, then Land Near Incident and Ready to Board. Boarding needs three gates at once — inside the landing zone, ground speed under 10 kt, on the ground — then runs a countdown of 1 minute plus 3 minutes per NM between you and the victims, so landing closer boards faster. At zero, 190 lbs per passenger goes into the simulator payload and the state is saved, so a restart or a Resume Tracking never counts it twice. Fly back and end the flight at your departure airport before the chrono, started with the engines, reaches 00:00; past that you can still finish, with a reduced score.

Notes

• Rescue cargo is a server placeholder, not freight — it is now excluded from the leftover-freight warning, so a rescue waiting at your base no longer flags every local flight.
• No Board Passengers button? One gate is failing; read the panel. Usually: parked just outside the landing circle, still rolling, or a sloped surface.

3.7 Colour Legend

This page decodes the coloured strip down the left edge of every job row, the badges inside an expanded row, and the weather symbols on the Operations Map. It opens from Pending Jobs and from Freelance Charters, and <- Back returns to whichever of the two you came from.

The diagonal split — the one thing to learn

Every job strip carries a coloured bar cut in two along a diagonal, and each half answers a different question:

• Top-left half — what the job carries: goods, passengers, a rescue, a sightseeing run…
• Bottom-right half — where the job comes from: a company job, a charter, a route, your VA, an FBO…
• The three-letter tag in the bottom-right corner names that source in text — CJ, CHR, RTE, VA…

Every row has this split. A solid single-colour bar no longer exists, so if the two halves look the same the job simply carries a type whose colour is close to its source's.

Job types

Fourteen families, each with its own colour and icon: general goods, perishable, fragile, dangerous, medical, bus trip, executive, sightseeing, fighter tour, event, rescue, undercover, race, and regular route. The icon shown next to each swatch is the same one that appears on the job row itself.

Sources

Ten origins, each with its tag: Company Job (CJ), Charter (CHR), Route (RTE), Custom Route (CR), Tour (TR), Virtual Airline (VA), FBO (FBO), Work Group Relief (WGR), Level mission (LVL) and Other (OTH). Knowing the source tells you which page the job came from and which rules apply to it.

Leg badges

Inside an expanded row, each leg carries a small badge: Cargo, Pax, Mix when a leg has both, Leg for a positioning leg, and Delivered once that leg is done. They are how you read a multi-leg mission at a glance.

Flag icons

Small icons on a row warn about a constraint: fragile load, a time limit, medical cargo, dangerous goods, perishable goods, human-only (no AI crew may fly it), and a level mission trophy. They stack — a row can carry several.

Weather symbols (METAR)

The last column decodes the station models drawn on the Operations Map:

• Cloud cover — how much of the circle is filled: empty = clear sky, half = scattered/broken, full = overcast.
• Flight category — the circle's colour: VFR, MVFR, IFR, LIFR, from best to worst visibility and ceiling.
• Wind — the barb points the direction the wind comes from; the feathers give the speed (samples at 5, 25 and 60 kt). A bare circle means calm.

Tip

Hovering a colour swatch anywhere in the app shows the same name you see here, so you rarely need to come back once the diagonal split has clicked.

4.1 Routes Weekly Schedule

Switching views

The Planning button at the top right swaps the list for the resource grid. Next to it, the Strips / Table toggle picks how the list itself is drawn; that choice is remembered. Leaving Planning always clears any selection you had made.

Actions

• New Route — Blank route, opening straight into its settings in edit mode.
• Generate Set — Automatic route-set wizard from a hub airport.
• Leaderboard — World ranking of the top routes.
• Merge Similar — Merges duplicates (same departure, arrival, schedule, aircraft and crew) after confirmation.
• Export / Flight log — CSV of the filtered routes, or one unified CSV of every flight of those routes (~last 30 days) with day, departure date, status, late flag and last comment.

The week

The schedule week runs Sunday to Saturday UTC; the bar shows its dates and the time left before it rolls over. Flights for the coming week are generated by the server on Sunday, so a route created mid-week waits for the next run. The week filter (Current, -1, -2, -3) looks back at past weeks inside expanded rows — there is no view of future weeks, because those flights do not exist yet.

When an active route got no flights this week, an orange banner says why: a route added this week waits for next Sunday's run, while a skipped week usually means the company was paused when that run happened.

Conflicts banner

Above the list, a banner appears when two things in your week cannot both happen: the same aircraft on two overlapping flights, or a crew member still resting when a flight is due to leave. It only reports what can be demonstrated from the schedule — back-to-back legs are legitimate and are never flagged. If the banner is absent, nothing overlapping was found; it is not a promise that every flight will succeed.

It also names an aircraft that will not be where its next AI flight departs. That flight cannot board: the server refuses it, and nothing waits behind it — the aircraft's other flights are not held. The server cancels the refused flight, and the route loses reliability, when the aircraft next departs on a later AI route flight, and at the latest when the schedule week turns, on Sunday 00:00 UTC.

Statistics and filters

Gauges for active and inactive routes, average reliability (green ≥ 70%, orange ≥ 40%, red below) and total earnings, each with a sparkline. Filter by Status, Aircraft, Route Set and free text on route number, ICAO or aircraft. The match count sits at the right of the toolbar. In Planning mode the statistics and filters fold away — the grid needs the height more than the gauges do.

Reading a route row

• Status — Pending, In progress, Suspended, Week completed, No flights scheduled, Week missed or Inactive. Sorting lifts the states that need attention to the top. A crew resting pill appears next to the status when the route's pilot is asleep and a flight is due before they wake.
• Route #, Route, Aircraft — Flight number on its own colour, departure → arrival ICAO, and the assigned aircraft; all clickable.
• Fill Rate — One split pie per day: blue left half = PAX, coral right half = Cargo, height = forecast rate. Grey means the day is off.
• Dep UTC / Arr UTC, Flights, Reliab, Earned — Next departure and arrival, flights flown over hours, reliability, total earnings. Hover them for the same times on your computer's clock.
• SIM — A labelled cell, not a button: a red airplane means the route is flown in the simulator.
• Edit and Duplicate — Duplicate creates an inactive copy, renumbered to the next free route number.

Click a row to expand it. Each scheduled flight shows its own journal — the log the server writes while preparing the flight, including the reason it was refused. The row carries the last entry, the one that says why; the small button next to it opens the full log, which is often a dozen lines long. Under each flight's slot, the same time appears on your computer's clock (« the day before » or « the day after » when the date differs); when a flight waits for an aircraft parked at another airport, hovering the line says until when the server keeps it and how to free it.

Planning — reading the grid

One row per aircraft, then one row per crew member, and seven day columns. Each block in a day cell is one route flying that day, coloured by that route's own colour (the one you pick in its settings); the number inside says how many times it flies that day. The same route-day therefore appears twice — once on the aircraft row, once on the pilot row.

• Red cell — a conflict falls on that day for that resource.
• Purple cell — that crew member is resting during that day.
• Clicking a block opens its route.

There is no time axis inside a day, and that is deliberate. At the app's minimum window width a day column is about 113 pixels: a two-hour flight drawn to scale would be nine pixels wide — unreadable and impossible to click reliably. Equal-width blocks say density and ownership honestly instead of faking an accuracy the space cannot carry. Read exact times from the expanded row in the list.

Changing crew from the grid, step by step

1. Switch to Planning, then press Select. Until you do, clicking a block simply opens its route — selection is an explicit mode so a stray click can never write anything.

2. Click the blocks you want. A tick replaces the number. Picking a route-day selects all of that route's flights that day. The bar under the grid counts what you really hold: "24 flights selected on 10 routes".

3. Choose One pilot or Rotation.

• One pilot — pick someone from the list; every selected flight gets them.
• Rotation — click the crew groups that should take turns, in the order you want them to fly. They are numbered as you pick. A preview appears: every flight, sorted by departure, with the group and the pilot who will take it. Read it before you press anything — a round-robin that lands badly is impossible to spot afterwards.

4. Read the button before pressing it. It names its real target — "Assign to 7" — and a note next to it says how many are left alone. Flights already in progress, completed or cancelled are never touched.

5. Press it, then read the report. Three counts: assigned, skipped, failed — and every failure named with its route, its departure and the server's own words. A batch that half-worked says so.

In the rotation preview, a rest marker means the pilot that turn lands on is still asleep at that departure time, and the flight will not leave with that crew. Only a rest already under way is shown — nothing here guesses at a rest that has not started.

What crew assignment never changes

Assigning crew rewrites the pilot seat only (or, in rotation, the whole seat set of the chosen group). A replacement aircraft you set by hand on a given flight, its fly-in-sim override, and — in single-pilot mode — its copilot and cabin crew are all preserved. Assigning the route's own default pilot to a flight clears that flight's override rather than duplicating it, which is how you put a flight back to normal.

Two things are refused before a request is even sent: an occurrence that has already flown, and a pilot who is already the copilot on that same flight.

Crew duty and rest

When your company has the employees' duty system switched on, a crew member may work a 14-hour duty window and then must rest 8 hours. The window is wall-clock time from the start of duty, not hours flown — waiting on the ground consumes it just as flying does. A flight scheduled to end past the window costs a penalty per AI crew member, and a flight due to leave while its crew is resting is simply refused. Your own avatar is exempt.

This is why the rotation exists: three crews taking turns on a loop keep every flight inside someone's window, where one pilot cannot.

Before a route can fly

A route must be Activated from its settings, and the settings page runs a checklist first — aircraft, crew, departure, arrival, alternate, days and times. The alternate airport is required and is the one most often missed; its card is always shown, with a warning when it is empty. Ticket prices are computed by the server when Auto Pricing is on.

4.2 Route Settings

Full configuration panel for one regular route: settings on the left, map preview, demand heatmap, forecast and the week's flights on the right.

Pre-activation checklist

A banner at the top lists what must be true before the route can be activated — aircraft and pilot assigned, departure and arrival times that differ, at least one seat or some cargo offered, all three airports set, both slot durations set, and every airport big enough for the aircraft. Green means ready, orange lists what is missing, and Activate refuses locally with the count of remaining items rather than a block of server text.

Header actions

• Edit / Delete — Save is blocked until departure, arrival and one operating day are set; Delete removes the route after confirmation.
• Duplicate — Creates an inactive copy, renumbered to the next free route # so Activate no longer fails with « already in use ».
• Activate / Deactivate — While active, airports, times and slots are read-only; aircraft, crew and capacity stay editable. Before activating, the app checks where the aircraft will be: if activation would create a flight it cannot fly — typically the return of a round trip, activated after its outbound time has passed — it asks first, naming the flight, that the server would refuse it while the aircraft is elsewhere, without holding the aircraft, and when to activate instead. Deactivating, like activating, brings the route's reliability back to 50 % if it is higher.

Settings

• Activation days — Monday to Sunday, at least one required.
• Aircraft, Route #, Color, Tag — Company aircraft (freelance excluded), flight number, group colour, and an optional label grouping the routes of one set.
• Departure / Arrival / Alternate — ICAO auto-resolves; each side carries Time UTC, Slot Start UTC and Slot Duration, and editing a time syncs its slot. Adjust appears on arrival when the time deviates by more than 5 min and 20 % from the standard duration. The Alternate card is always shown, marked Required to activate this route while empty.
• Time fields — What you type stays until you leave the field or press Enter (Escape cancels), and « 930 », « 9 » or « 9h30 » are understood. Unreadable input flashes red rather than being dropped in silence. Each time also shows in your computer's local time, with « the day before » or « the day after » when its UTC day differs.
• Operations — Fly in Simulator, Force Crew Rest, Auto Pricing, and the weekly status badge (Scheduled, or « No flights this week » with a tooltip explaining which).
• Default Crew — Pilot, optional co-pilot and enough attendants for the offered seats; uncertified crew is blocked, and the Crew Groups bar loads or saves a local preset in one click.

A slot belongs to a day, not only to an hour. Departure and arrival windows repeat weekly on each operating day: a Monday flight has a Monday slot and no other. Starting or shutting down the engines outside it costs 5 % of the route's maximum pay, per end — so a flight caught up on a different day pays both. Airports of size 0 and 1 carry no slot, no slot fee and no timing penalty.

Map, heatmap, capacity and forecast

Great-circle route to the arrival with a dashed hop to the alternate, over a 24 h x 7 days demand grid at the departure airport (PAX or Cargo, grey on off-days); the orange line marks the departure hour and follows the time you are editing. Outside edit mode, click the cell of an operating day at the departure hour to show that day's forecast; while the times can be edited, a click on any cell also sets the departure hour. The purple box is the cell the forecast reads. Capacity & Pricing holds Eco / Bus / First seats and cargo in your weight unit with their prices; they lock under Auto Pricing and then show the reference prices the next flight charges; without it, a price still at 0 takes the server's reference price. Forecast Computation recomputes reliability, modifiers and fill rate (green ≥ 70 %, orange ≥ 40 %, red below) shortly after each edit, ticket prices included when Auto Pricing is off, since each price moves the fill rate.

The forecast describes one weekly flight. Pick its day at the top of the card (the first operating day by default). The server never loads more than it forecasts: for each class it puts on board the smaller of the demand and your offer, and pays your prices on that load. Outside edit mode the forecast uses the fill rate stored at the last save or completed flight, the one the next flight is generated with; when it differs from the rate just computed, a Next flight uses line shows it.

• Expected — The passengers and cargo forecast for that flight: this week's demand at the departure hour, capped by your offer. Bold means sold out; the tooltip gives the demand. The demand grid is redrawn every 7 days.
• Resulting fill rates — Route fill rate × the demand cell of that day and hour, for passengers and for cargo.
• Expected pay per flight, Pay if all sold, Slot fees per flight and Expected after slot fees — Slot fees are debited at every flight and computed on the pay if every seat sold at the saved prices, so seats you offer and never sell still cost you. An airport you own charges no slot fee.
• Weight check — Weighs the expected load and the all-sold load against the aircraft's limits. Red when the expected load does not fit, which the server would refuse when the flight is created. Orange when only a sold-out flight would not fit.

Scheduled flights

• Live window chip — On pending rows: green when flying now lands in the on-time bonus window, orange when the departure slot is missed. The tooltip spells out the early −5 % rule and the bonus.
• OFF-SLOT — Flagged when the server's comment mentions a slot penalty, even on successful flights.
• Override (gear) — Swaps aircraft, crew or Fly-in-Simulator for one flight; those rows go orange with an OV badge.
• Fly Now — Enabled on pending flights with Fly in Simulator on and an aircraft on the route, otherwise greyed with a tooltip. The server generates the mission, debits the slot fee, and dispatch is pre-filled.
• Local time — Under each slot, the same time on your computer's clock. When a flight waits for its aircraft parked at another airport, hovering the line says until when the server keeps that flight — and the aircraft — and how to free it.

Fly Now still checks the aircraft. A generated occurrence and an assigned aircraft do not override grounding or required maintenance. Resolve the stated availability problem before dispatching the flight.

Automatic fuel purchase at departure requires one FBO with enough stock for the whole amount. Your own eligible FBO is preferred, then your VA’s, otherwise the cheapest eligible FBO. Stocks from multiple FBOs are not combined.

Company regular routes are separate from Freelance Routes: the company operating the aircraft pays for fuel. AI-flown routes buy it automatically. If no FBO can supply the purchase, nothing is bought; the flight needs onboard fuel for the destination, alternate and 30 minutes of cruise or it shows Not started with the reason in the journal. With Fly in Simulator, prepare fuel yourself through dispatch.

4.3 Route Set Generation

The Route Set Generation page is a wizard that builds a batch of regular routes as a single chained rotation: the aircraft hops hub → A → B → ... → back to hub, with each leg departing where the previous one landed (aircraft continuity). All routes are created and activated in one server call.

Layout

The screen has three areas: a dataset panel on the left, a configuration + results stack in the middle-right, and an interactive map at the bottom right.

Dataset (top-right tabs)

• Airlines — Browse the FR24 airline database and pick a real-world carrier. Its route network is shown as thin red arcs on the map, and its hubs feed the Starting Airport dropdown. Filter by text, ICAO used, fleet size, or country. The colored left border of each card reflects the fleet-size bucket.
• Favorites — Pick from your favorite airports (tick/untick each one). Use Manage to jump to the Favorite Airports page. At least two selected airports are needed.
• Manual — Paste ICAO codes separated by spaces, commas, or newlines. A live counter shows how many were recognized.

Aircraft and Crew

• Aircraft — Pick a non-freelance aircraft. It sets max range, cruise speed, and seat/cargo capacity for the whole rotation.
• Starting Airport — The hub. Choose one from the dropdown (airline hubs, favorite airports, or your ICAO list depending on dataset), or leave Any (Auto) to let the engine pick.
• Crew picker — Appears once an aircraft is chosen. Pilot (required), co-pilot (if the type needs one), and the required number of cabin attendants. Uncertified employees are blocked. Crew already assigned to other regular routes is flagged. VA member pilots appear in the pilot list too.
• Crew Group quick bar — Same preset bar as Dispatch, Work Orders, and Route Edit. One click loads a saved crew group.
• Fly in Simulator — When on, every flight in the rotation must be flown in the sim. Automatically forced on and locked when the pilot is your player character.

Routing

• Distance Min / Max (NM) — Accepted leg distance. Automatically clamped to the aircraft's max range.
• Number of Routes — 1 to 21 legs.
• Weekly Frequency — Flights per route per week. Capped at 7 / ceil(numRoutes / 3) to prevent saturation.
• Start Flight # — First flight number. The dice button rerolls a random base.
• Set Name (Tag) — Shared label stamped on every route in the set.
• Color — Shared color (native color wheel + hex input) for map arcs and route lists.

Generation

Click Generate Preview to build the rotation. The engine:

• Resolves ICAOs from the local airport database.
• Filters candidate legs by distance and range.
• Runs a DFS chain from the hub (open-chain with a ferry fallback if no closed loop is possible).
• Balances legs across the week and picks each departure at the local PAX/Cargo demand peak (heatmap).
• Computes seat mix (Eco/Bus/First) and cargo weight from capacity and available payload.
• Picks each leg's alternate like the dispatch's automatic alternate: the nearest civilian airport at least 50 NM from the arrival and large enough for the aircraft, a military field only as a last resort. A helicopter's alternate has no size floor.
• Sets arrival times from the server's standard flight duration.

Preview, Map and Table

Every generated leg appears in the results table (flight #, per-day fill-rate pies, from → to, alternate, distance, UTC times, active days). Ferry legs get an orange badge and orange arc. Click a row to highlight its arc in fuchsia and zoom in; click again to clear. The hub gets a larger purple marker; intermediate stops are green.

Acceptance

Click Accept & Create Routes to send the set to the server. All routes are created and activated at once, then the page redirects to the routes list. The server checks every route before creating any: if one is refused, none is created, and the reason stays on screen until you close it. The server activates the set the moment it creates it: if that would create a flight its aircraft cannot fly — typically a return leg whose outbound time has already passed today — the app asks first, naming the flight and how long the server would keep the aircraft.

4.4 Routes Leaderboard

The Routes Leaderboard shows the best Regular Routes across the entire OnAir world, split into two side-by-side rankings.

Two Rankings

• Top Landings (green accent) — Routes ranked by total completed flights, with cumulative flight hours shown next to the count. Measures how often a route is actually flown.
• Top Credits Earned (amber accent) — Routes ranked by cumulative revenue in credits. Measures overall profitability.

Top / My Routes Toggle

• Top shows every route on both boards, worldwide.
• My Routes narrows both boards to your own company's entries — while keeping the global rank numbers. A route ranked #47 worldwide stays #47 when filtered; the numbers never lie about your position.
• Your own rows are also always highlighted (blue tint) in Top mode, so you can spot them at a glance without switching tabs.

Reading the Table

• # — Rank position. The top three places display colored badges: gold (1st), silver (2nd), bronze (3rd).
• Route — Flight number (e.g. #1234), followed by clickable departure and arrival ICAO codes.
• Airline — IATA code or short name of the company operating the route. Click it to open the Company Lookup for that airline.
• Metric — Landings with flight hours in parentheses, or credits amount, depending on the ranking.

Navigation & Export

• Back to Routes — Returns to your own route list.
• Refresh button (top right) — Reloads both rankings from the server. They also reload automatically every time you open this page.
• CSV button on each board — Exports the visible rows (respecting the Top / My Routes toggle) to a spreadsheet file.
• Click an ICAO code to open the Airport Lookup.

4.5 Freelance Routes

Fly a recurring weekly schedule for a real-world airline as a freelance pilot. Reached from the Routes card on the Pilot Hub. Pick an airline and an aircraft type, then generate a schedule; if one is already active, the page goes straight to it.

Airline picker

• Filters — free text over name, ICAO, IATA and callsign, plus country, fleet-size band, and an airport code the airline must serve.
• Distance filter — a single at-most field in NM that keeps airlines with at least one route under the limit. The first time you tick it, route distances are fetched for every airline, which takes a moment; they are then cached per airline for 7 days, so coming back is near-instant.
• Recently used — the last five airlines you accepted stay pinned at the top with a star.
• Cards are coloured by fleet size and show the airline logo, the codes, country, route count and aircraft count.
• Your rank — once you have flown for an airline, its card shows your rank name and icon. Hover the card for your progress in that rank and the pay bonus it earns.

Aircraft type

• The dropdown lists your fleet types plus every type you previously imported from the simulator, up to ten.
• From Sim reads the loaded aircraft and matches it on the server by weight, fuel and simulator version.
• The In your simulator line under the settings names the loaded aircraft and, when you are on the ground, the nearest airport. Use this applies them: the airport fills both the airport filter and the starting airport. Nothing changes until you click.

Schedule generation

• Starting airport — any hub of the airline, the airport set in the airline filter, or leave it on automatic. An airport set in the filter stays selected when you pick an airline. If the airline has no routes departing from it, switch back to automatic.
• Flights (1 to 10), distance min and max in NM, and a speed compatibility filter that keeps routes whose average sits between 0.45 and 1.2 times the aircraft's design speed.
• Propose schedule builds a round trip; when the loop cannot close, it falls back to one fewer real leg plus a Ferry leg home.

Map and legend

The map draws the airline's own routes in red, the generated flights in green, the ferry leg in amber and the selected leg in fuchsia. Hubs are tagged Minor (10 to 14 routes), Hub (15 to 19) and Major (20 or more). Airport popups give size, elevation, lighting, the military flag and live weather, plus a Show TAF section that unfolds the aerodrome forecast — decoded periods and the raw bulletin, capped and scrollable, with a button to hear it read out. Size and category labels are translated into your language.

Result and accept

The schedule renders as strips or as a table, switched from the header; clicking a row or a green line focuses that leg on the map. Accept creates the freelance aircraft and one mission per leg on the server, then returns you to the Pilot Hub with the active schedule card.

• Freelance Pilot Academy §3

4.6 Current Freelance Schedule

The Current Freelance Schedule page lists every leg of your active freelance route schedule. It opens from Show legs or Route Map on the Pilot Hub. When no schedule is active, the page says so.

Header and summary

• View toggle — dense flight strips or a grid of compact cards; your choice is remembered.
• Refresh reloads from the server, Back returns to the Pilot Hub.
• The summary names the airline and the aircraft type, counts the legs, and shows the Weekly Bonus Limit (UTC, one week after the schedule started).
• Show on Map opens the operational map pre-filtered on these legs. Abandon schedule drops everything and returns to the Pilot Hub.

Schedule total

A green band above the list gives the whole schedule's pay and XP as computed by the server, with your rank multiplier and any airport boost shown separately when they apply.

Speed warning

A red banner appears when your aircraft's design speed cannot sustain the average speed at least one leg requires. You still earn XP and credits, but a leg that finishes late loses the rank-points bonus.

Recovering a broken schedule

If the server keeps returning a leg it can no longer resolve, an amber banner explains the situation and offers a one-click Abandon. The same notice is mirrored on the Pilot Hub, so you can recover from either page.

Strips and cards

Each leg shows its state (Pending, InProgress, Completed, Skipped), flight number, route with clickable ICAOs, scheduled UTC times, block duration, great-circle distance, payout, a Ferry tag and the inline actions. Cards add full airport names and average speed.

• Fly dispatches the idle aircraft on the current leg.
• Resume opens tracking when the aircraft is already airborne; the button pulses to catch your eye.
• Skip drops the current leg while idle — not available in flight or in warp.
• Disabled buttons keep their place and explain in a tooltip what is blocking them: no aircraft, warping, busy.

Consistency

Cargo and passenger missions follow the same display rules everywhere, so weights, your kg or lbs preference and split cargo read the same on the Pilot Hub, in the strip and on the map. If a leg has been removed server-side and you try to skip it, the page says so plainly and reloads the schedule instead of showing a raw server error.

Flight states

• Pending (blue), InProgress (purple), Completed (green), Skipped (amber).
• The aircraft is created on the server when you accept, and stays bound to the leg in progress.
• Abandoning the schedule is irreversible and clears every remaining leg.

• Freelance Pilot Academy §3

4.7 Routes Ranks

The Ranks page, under Staff & HR in the menu, has two tabs. Routes Ranks, described here, follows your progression as a route pilot with each real-world airline you have flown for. Pilot Ranks, the tab that opens first, follows your progression per aircraft class.

What counts here

Only flights from an accepted freelance route schedule feed this tab. Charters taken from Browse freelance jobs do not — they progress on the Pilot Ranks tab instead. The same note sits behind the information icon next to the leaderboards.

My freelance ranks (left)

One card per airline you have flown for, sorted by rank XP, highest first.

• Tier badge with a bar towards the next tier and the XP earned inside the current one: Trainee, then Junior Officer at 200 XP, Flight Officer at 500, First Officer at 1000 and Captain at 2000. Captain is the ceiling, so the counter under the bar disappears there.
• The airline's code and full name.
• Mini stats: XP, Flights, Hours, Credits, and Distance in NM when there is any.

Before your first route flight the column shows an empty state with a Browse Freelance Routes shortcut.

Global leaderboards (right)

Two top-15 tables, aggregated per company across every freelance route — not per airline.

• Top 15 — Route Salary: total credits earned on freelance routes.
• Top 15 — Landings: completed flights, with the cumulative hours in brackets.

Each row gives the position, the company's airline code and the total. Your own row is highlighted in purple when your company makes the table, and a table with nothing in it says so rather than staying blank.

Refresh and errors

The refresh control in the page header reloads the ranks and both leaderboards at once. If the server refuses one of the three, a red banner names what failed instead of blanking the page; a result that is simply empty is treated as empty, not as an error.

5.1 Fleet

Header and toolbars

• View — Strips or Table. Accent colours the left bar by owner or by state.
• Filter by registration, type or airport ICAO; Sort offers the same 11 keys in both views.
• All / VA / Mine — once you have joined a virtual airline: everything, only what the VA operates, or only your own aircraft.
• Buy Aircraft, Export CSV, Refresh.

Statistics and alerts

Cards give the total (after filter), average airframe / engines / fuel, cumulative hours and the ownership split. Banners flag grounded, maintenance soon, inspection due (next 10h, click to filter) and missing certification — one chip per fleet class the owner has not passed. Gliders are excluded, and OnAir class ratings never expire.

Aircraft row

Registration, owner badge, a VA chip when your virtual airline operates the aircraft, marketplace chips (For sale / For rent / Rented out), class, location or live route, seats, three condition bars, the repair still needed and the next 100h countdown. Red wrench means grounded, orange means maintenance soon. Condition percentages are the raw values the server's own rules check, so the figure shown is the one dispatch and the workshop use. Between touchdown and engine shutdown the row reads Arrived with the field the aircraft is parked at and no arrival time: the flight only closes and pays out once the crew has taxied in, up to about ten minutes later.

Table and expand panel

Every table header sorts (ID, Owner, Type, Class, Status, PAX, Condition, Engines, Fuel, Repair, Next Maintenance); a second click reverses, a third clears. Click the caret pill or the row to unfold engines (condition, SMOH, time to TBO), seats and payload, live data in flight, current mission, recent flights and work orders.

Resume a flight

The action button of an aircraft you are flying jumps straight to Tracking instead of Dispatch. Only one aircraft can be tracked at a time; when a VA colleague is at the controls of a shared airframe the button becomes a locked read-only radar chip, because taking over would evict your own tracking slot.

Moving an aircraft

• Generate return job — for an idle aircraft stranded away from base: a standard mission home, with Dispatch pre-filled.
• Ferry — overland transport of an idle owned or rented aircraft to any ICAO, quoted (cost, duration, availability) before you confirm.
• Travel token — instant: one token teleports you together with the aircraft. Cargo and passengers stay behind; VA airframes need Manager rights.

Scheduled maintenance

Maint. schedule in the expand panel plans a weekly slot that starts on its own. Pick an airport, an FBO whose workshop covers the aircraft's class, a day and a time in UTC — the same clock your regular routes run on. The server starts the work as soon as the aircraft is on the ground and idle at that FBO after the slot, and keeps trying for 24 hours. Several slots per aircraft are allowed; each shows its state (waiting for the slot, waiting for the aircraft, started, refused and retrying, missed this week, nothing to do), and Pause leaves a slot in the list without firing it.

Tick what the slot covers. The annual checkup is only done when it would expire before the next slot. The periodic inspection is done when fewer hours remain than the number you enter; it starts at the hours your regular routes fly this aircraft in a week, and at least 10. Failures are repaired if there are any. For the airframe and for each engine, set two levels: a part is repaired only if it is below the first when the work starts, and then up to the second — for example below 70 %, up to 90 %. Wait until the aircraft is empty holds the work until nothing is on board, within the 24 hours; otherwise whatever is on board is unloaded when the work starts. Replacements and seat changes stay manual, in the Aircraft Workshop.

• Estimate — price and hours of work on the aircraft's condition today, even while it flies, for a saved slot or for the one you are editing; « nothing to do » means no level of the slot is reached yet. What it really costs depends on the state it is in when the work starts. At a player's FBO the figure is hours of work, not a duration: how long it takes depends on the mechanics on duty.
• Against your routes — when the aircraft flies regular routes, the panel says whether the work starts at the slot or when the aircraft lands, how long it then sits on the ground, and warns you when the estimated work is longer than that ground time, because the next flight would fail. If no route brings the aircraft to that field within 24 hours of the slot, it says the slot would be recorded as missed.
• Working as a virtual airline, scheduling maintenance needs Manager rights.

Manage menu

Per-aircraft hub: Events, Flights, Workshop, Dispatch, Checkride, Find Jobs, Work Orders, Find FBOs, Aircraft Lookup, rename the tail number (rented and leased included), cancel maintenance, sell or list for sale, stop the rent or the lease, renew, buy out. Every stop or buy is quoted by the server first and warns when the balance would go negative. Managers also get a button to choose which VA members may fly the aircraft.

Search and availability. The × inside the text search clears only that text, preserving the other filters. A grounded aircraft cannot be dispatched even when its status says Idle; open Workshop for the stated maintenance requirement. Lease renewal offers selectable durations and live quotations. The lease-return quotation includes the 25% repair surcharge where applicable.

5.2 Aircraft Market

The Aircraft Market lists every aircraft type available in OnAir. It is the starting point — from the Markets menu, or from the Buy Aircraft button on the Fleet page — for comparing airframes and reaching the buy, rent and lease offers.

Detect from simulator

The orange From sim button reads the aircraft currently loaded in your simulator and jumps straight to its offers page. Connect the simulator first with the SIM button at the top of the screen. The blue tip card closes with the cross and comes back through the small light-bulb icon next to the button.

Search filters

• Keyword — name, type or ICAO code. If the local catalogue returns nothing, a server search runs automatically.
• Class — SEPL, SETL, MEPL, METL, JET, HEAVYJET, HELO, ULM. The list is coloured per class and the full class name shows on hover.
• Simulator — MSFS, XP11, P3Dv4+, P3Dv3 or FSX. Keeps only the types with at least one add-on for that simulator, so you never shop for an aircraft yours cannot load. MSFS 2020 and 2024 share a single MSFS entry.
• Cash badge — the green chip repeats your current balance.
• Show affordable only — keeps the aircraft whose purchase price, rental bond or lease start cost fits your balance. One you cannot buy but could still rent stays in the list.
• Only most flown in simulators — keeps the top 30% by recorded OnAir flights.
• Community Stats — opens the Aircraft Usage treemap, which shows how the types split across the classes.

Display and sorting

The switch at the top right toggles Strips (default) and Table. In Strips, the sort selector beside it picks the column and flips the direction; in Table, click a header to sort and click again to reverse. Both views share the same sort. Units live in the headers (Cr., NM, kts, and kg or lbs depending on your preference). The header row now stays pinned while you scroll, and only the rows in view are drawn, so several thousand types scroll smoothly.

Reading a row

• Type — name, number of OnAir flights, and one badge per simulator its add-ons cover.
• Class — the coloured band on the left (short code, full name on hover).
• Avg Price — base price of a new aircraft, in Cr.
• Max Payload / Empty Weight — in kg or lbs, per your preference.
• Range / Speed / Seats / Copilot — range in NM, cruise speed in kts, seats, and whether a copilot is required.

Actions on a row

• Puzzle icon and count — the compatible add-ons: simulator, vanilla or not, tested, engines, weights, seats, speed, fuel, flights, and a download link when the author gave one.
• Blue magnifier — Aircraft Lookup for that type: statistics and economics.
• Green currency icon — the offers page: new aircraft, used aircraft, rent and lease around a chosen airport.
• Chart icon — the Economic Details of the type: costs, revenue and profitability.

5.3 Aircraft Market — Type Detail

This page covers one aircraft type and answers a single question: where can I get one, and on what terms. Three ways in — buy, rent or lease — and ← Back to market returns to the type list.

Nothing is listed until you search

Pick an airport in Search Airport, then press Search Aircraft Database. The search looks at that airport and around it, so the Dist column measures the distance from the airport you searched — a cheap airframe 400 NM away still has to be collected or ferried.

Not certified? You can still buy it

An orange notice appears when your own pilot lacks the class certification for this type. It blocks nothing: you may buy, rent or lease the aircraft and entrust it to certified pilots you hire. The Manage employees button goes straight to your crew.

New aircraft

When the type is still in production, a card shows the factory price and a Buy button. A new aircraft is delivered at the airport you searched — no ferry, no collection.

Used aircraft

The table lists every second-hand airframe found. Most columns sort — click a header, click again to reverse:

• ID — its registration.
• Hours — total airframe hours flown.
• Cond. and Engine — condition of the airframe and of the engines. These drive maintenance costs far more than the purchase price does.
• Wksh — workshop work already needed.
• Airport and Dist — where it sits, and how far from your search.
• Sell price — the asking price, blank if it is not for sale.
• Rent/h — the hourly rate, blank if renting is not offered.
• Owner — System for a game-generated aircraft, Player for one another company is offering.

Selecting a row opens the actions available for that particular airframe: an aircraft may be for sale, for rent, for lease, or any combination — the columns tell you which before you click.

An airport your simulator does not have

When a used aircraft is parked at an airport your simulator does not have, its Airport cell says so — not in MSFS, for example — and hovering it gives the full sentence. The buy, rent and lease dialogs of that aircraft repeat the warning. Nothing is blocked, but you will not be able to fly to or from that airport in your current simulator. For a rental it matters twice: a rental has to end where it started, and stopping it anywhere else is billed as a trip back — renting fee, fuel and pilot wages for the transfer, plus 10% paperwork. That trip back is not charged when the aircraft is grounded for maintenance.

Buy, rent or lease

• Buy — it becomes yours. From the Fleet page you can later sell it or list it so other companies can buy or rent it.
• Rent — paid by the hour against a bond charged immediately and refunded when you stop the rent. The aircraft must be returned to its base with at least the same fuel level, and the dialog offers to generate a return job so the trip back earns something. When you stop the rent while the aircraft is grounded for maintenance, neither the trip back nor the missing fuel is charged.
• Lease — a fixed weekly rate over a term you choose, cheaper the longer you commit, with maintenance on you. The lease dialog has its own "?" button covering terms, discounts and registration in detail.

Your available cash is shown next to the prices, so you can tell at a glance what is within reach.

Transport your pilot

If this is your first aircraft and your pilot is standing somewhere else, a dialog offers to move them to the aircraft. Answer No, stay here and the aircraft simply waits where it is until someone reaches it.

Economic details

A side panel gives the type's figures — seats, range, cruise speed, fuel burn, fuel capacity, engine count and hours. Read the range against the routes you actually intend to fly before committing to a price.

One thing you cannot change

The seat configuration of an aircraft owned by another player is locked. Only a system aircraft, or one you own, can be reconfigured.

5.4 Leasing an Aircraft

The lease dialog takes an aircraft for a fixed term — 4 to 48 weeks — at a reduced weekly rate, in exchange for an advance payment and full responsibility for maintenance.

Lease, rent or buy

• Rent — hourly billing and a refundable bond. System and player-owned rentals have different maintenance permissions; read the workshop or return quote rather than assuming maintenance is always included.
• Lease — a fixed weekly rate over a term you choose, cheaper the longer you commit, but every repair is yours. Best for an aircraft you will fly for weeks.
• Buy — the aircraft becomes yours, and from the Fleet page you can later sell it back or list it for sale so other companies can buy or rent it. A lease can only be handed back.

Term and discount

• 4 or 8 weeks — base weekly rate, no discount
• 12 weeks — base weekly rent ÷ 1.05, approximately 4.76% lower.
• 24 weeks — base weekly rent ÷ 1.10, approximately 9.09% lower.
• 36 weeks — base weekly rent ÷ 1.15, approximately 13.04% lower.
• 48 weeks — base weekly rent ÷ 1.20, approximately 16.67% lower.

The dialog opens on 4 weeks. Every entry of the duration drop-down carries its own weekly price and discount, straight from the live quotation, so you can compare terms before committing.

Registration

The Registration field is prefilled with the aircraft's current tail number. Edit it to rename the aircraft: a leased aircraft can be renamed whoever owns it, and the new registration is applied the moment the lease is signed. Leave the field alone and nothing changes. An invalid registration blocks the confirm button; putting the original value back never blocks. If the rename itself fails you are told, and the lease still stands.

Cabin

Split the cabin between Economic, Business and First, either by hand or with the presets (Full Eco, Full Business, Full First, Mixed). Occupied cabin surface must stay at or below 100% — the confirm button stays disabled otherwise. Seats you do not fit become extra cargo capacity, shown in kg or lbs according to your unit preference. When the aircraft belongs to another player the cabin is locked to its current layout, and a note in the dialog says so.

Paying

You pay 3 weeks of rent in advance on signature. That exact amount appears on the confirm button and on the "3 weeks advance (due now)" line of the price summary. From then on the weekly rent is debited automatically until the term ends. Your cash sits just under the summary — if it does not cover the advance, the request fails straight away.

Maintenance and return

• Maintenance is yours — repairs, inspections and replacements during the lease are paid separately by you.
• Return condition — if the airframe or the engines come back worse than they started, you pay the missing repairs with a +25% surcharge on top.
• Early termination — 25% of unused contractual weeks, counting a started week as consumed. Unused whole weeks already paid in advance are refunded separately. Read both lines of the live return quote.

5.5 Work Orders

Work Orders run multi-leg flight programs: pick an aircraft and crew, chain the legs, assign cargo or charters to each leg, then activate — the order advances leg by leg while you fly other missions.

A hired pilot flies the order by itself. Assign your own avatar and it becomes a flight planner: it loads the cargo, buys the fuel, parks the aircraft and waits for you. Fly this leg then opens Flight Dispatch with the aircraft, the route and the crew you assigned already filled in. Where AI pilots are banned, this is the only way an order can run.

The list

Rows show status, aircraft, crew, departure, leg progress, distance and ETE, with the next leg highlighted and a YOU / AI badge for who flies it. Scheduled orders show their start date, queued ones the order they are waiting for. Start needs an aircraft and a pilot; Pause works on running and queued orders.

Before you activate

A checklist in the header covers aircraft, departure, pilot, copilot when the type needs one, destinations, distinct alternates, seats and cabin crew. Two blocks below it inform without blocking:

• Overloaded legs — every leg is weighed before you click, and each one over max takeoff weight or max payload is named with the excess in figures; its row also gets an overweight badge. These weights are an estimate: the server decides at activation, and its refusal is now readable in full.
• Payload check — loads that will not be at their leg's departure on the day it runs, split between those that stall the order and those the leg leaves behind.

Aircraft & crew

• The pilot, copilot and crew members menus list the whole roster, never a silent 50-row slice: crew already at the departure airport comes first, and a footer counts what a search would reveal. Type a name or an ICAO in any of them.
• Uncertified pilots are disabled and crew already booked on another order is flagged. Crew Groups load a saved preset in one click. A future Activation Date (UTC) parks the order as Scheduled.

Legs

• Route and Search job: a destination plus a distinct alternate, and a hand-off to Company Jobs filtered on this leg's departure, with the aircraft's size and range limits applied. Taking a job takes all of it, but only the leg leaving this departure lands on this leg: its other legs leave Company Jobs and wait under Payload on the later legs, and the order lists them until you close the reminder or leave the order. If this leg already carries loads to another destination, you are asked before the job is taken.
• ↩ Return and ⌂ Base: one click adds a leg back to the order's departure airport, or to your base — the home airport of your own pilot avatar (not the hired pilot of the order), the one the Fleet page's Fly home job flies to. You still choose the alternate. A button is greyed out, with its reason in the tooltip, when it has nothing to add: no departure airport or no home airport known, the last leg already ends there, or the order already starts at your base.
• ⌂ Base + job: the same leg to your base, carrying the paid Fly home job of the Fleet page (the « Return to base » job) — generated now, from the airport where the order's last leg ends, instead of after landing there. The job is sized for the order's aircraft and paid on delivery, like any job. Save the order first (the job starts from the last leg as saved), then save it again to keep the new leg. One return job per order: to generate another, abandon it in Pending Jobs (an abandon penalty applies, as for any job). If the order's return job already exists but no leg carries it (the order was left without saving), the button loads it on the leg to your base instead of generating another.
• Fuel: a slider in your own units, with a warning when the target is below the fuel already on board (the weight check counts that fuel) and Don't load fuel — a leg flying on what the previous ones left now shows the fuel it will really carry, and is checked like any other. Out of range, a fuel stop splits the leg and keeps the chosen loads on both halves.
• Payload: the company-wide pool ending at this leg's departure, with its own filters. The colour codes are explained by a legend kept open under the table, and Show all / This route say what they filter. Req. decides what happens when the item is not at the departure airport on the day the leg runs: ticked, the order waits there for it; unticked, the leg departs without it, silently.
• Weight & Balance, deadheaders and a per-leg execution history sit in the same tab; the map tab draws the whole order, coloured by leg status.

Notes

• Activate saves first; leaving with unsaved edits offers Save & Leave / Discard / Cancel. Fuel and ETE assume great-circle distance and cruise speed.
• Work Orders Academy §14

List and crew presets. Search by order name, registration or aircraft type; expand legs and sort the list, which initially uses start date. Loading a Crew Group validates the selected aircraft and roster. A persistent warning names omitted or unsuitable members; check every crew slot before saving. Required payload waits only at its stated departure: the warning identifies where the load actually is and does not arrange its transport.

Automatic fuel purchase at departure requires one FBO with enough stock for the whole amount. Your own eligible FBO is preferred, then your VA’s, otherwise the cheapest eligible FBO. Stocks from multiple FBOs are not combined.

If no FBO can supply the full purchase, the leg does not start and reports No FBO with enough fuel available at ... . The Don’t load fuel option (No fuel operation at leg departure) skips the purchase; plan sufficient onboard fuel before using it.

5.6 Aircraft Workshop

The Aircraft Workshop is the maintenance and cabin-configuration screen for one aircraft of your fleet. Open it from the Manage menu on the Fleet page, or from Aircraft Lookup.

Choosing the workshop

Pick a Workshop FBO first — the quotation depends on it. Only FBOs whose workshop covers the aircraft's class (SEP, MEP, TurboProp, Jet, Heavy Jet, Helicopter) are listed, and when several match, your own FBO is preselected. The list fills reliably even if you move straight from one aircraft to the next.

If nothing at the field can take the aircraft, a No Compatible Workshop panel opens. It lists workshops within 50 NM with their distance and whether they are open to you or private, and offers Fly to to dispatch the aircraft straight there. Find FBO opens the search page with the right workshop filter already set.

The i button beside the selector shows the workshop itself: mechanics, capacity, aircraft inside or waiting, and the services on offer (Level 1 covers the 100h, Level 2 also covers the Annual).

Seats configuration

Change the split between Economic, Business and First. The Current column shows the cabin as it stands today, so a mixed cabin is never flattened to all-economy. Three live readings:

• Total Seats — seats requested against the maximum the type allows.
• Occupied Surface — cabin floor used, where a Business or First seat costs more than an Economic one. Above 100% the quotation is blocked.
• Extra Cargo Capacity — freight capacity freed by the seats you did not fit, in your preferred weight unit.

Inspections

• Annual Checkup — resets the annual deadline. Selecting it in Companion also selects the separate periodic inspection, with its own work and cost; neither operation restores condition. Days remaining are shown.
• 100h Inspection — the periodic inspection, despite the historical label: 100 flight hours for most classes, 400 for Jet, 600 for Heavy Jet. The remaining hours use the aircraft’s actual interval.
• Failures Repair — clears active failures (flaps, instruments and the like). Greyed out when there are none; hover to read the list.

Airframe and engines

Condition is shown as the raw percentage the game rules actually check, followed by the best condition the part can still reach. That ceiling drops as the aircraft ages, so a well-used airframe can no longer be brought back to 100%.

• Replace Airframe — a new airframe, condition back to 100%.
• Repair Airframe to X% — the number is the condition you want to end up with, not an amount of repair. It is capped between today's condition and the reachable ceiling. Exclusive with Replace.
• Per engine — the same pair. Repair to X% works like the airframe and defaults to that engine's ceiling; Replace fits a new engine and resets its hours. Engine work is quoted and carried out with the rest of the order.
• Less than a percent of room — when the ceiling is less than a whole percent above today's condition, the target shows the ceiling itself, to a tenth (for example 99.9), and the repair goes straight to it. A part already at its ceiling cannot be ticked.
• Leased aircraft — a Lease return panel shows the airframe and the engines' average at lease start next to today's values. Ending the lease bills any condition below them, with a 25% surcharge. Repair to lease-return condition selects the repairs that bring them back, so the return is not billed. It is not always cheaper: at an FBO that is not yours the workshop adds its own markup to its price (10% to 110% at a system FBO), which can cost more than the 25% surcharge — compare its quotation with the Stop Lease quote before choosing; if a part can no longer reach its lease-start condition, the panel says how many points will still be billed. End the lease only once the maintenance is finished — until then the aircraft still has its old condition, and the return is billed on it.

Quotation and start

Tick what you want, then press Get Quotation: the server returns the total price, the total downtime, and one line per operation. An orange note appears when the FBO applies a markup. Start Maintenance confirms — the aircraft is grounded for the announced duration and you return to the Fleet page.

5.7 Test Flight

The Test Flight puts a new aircraft addon into the OnAir moderation queue. The first time an unknown aircraft is seen in your simulator, OnAir records it as disabled: you cannot use it for ordinary flights until staff have moderated it. This page starts that process.

Before you start

• Load the addon in your simulator and connect Companion to it.
• The Detected from simulator card must show the aircraft, the nearest airport, and the empty and max gross weights (in your preferred unit). If it says no aircraft is loaded, the simulator has not published a position yet.

The form

• Addon URL (required) — the download link, or exactly default for an aircraft that ships with the simulator. Anything else must start with http:// or https://.
• Aircraft Data Sheet URL (optional) — documentation or specification sheet.
• Proposed Seats (optional) — a suggestion; staff can adjust it during moderation.
• Proposed Max Payload (optional) — cargo plus passengers, in lbs whatever unit you use elsewhere.

Not every simulator publishes every performance figure, so the two proposed values are worth filling in — they save the moderator guessing.

Flying it

Start Test Flight creates a temporary aircraft at your position with 50% fuel and opens it in dispatch. Departure, destination and alternate are the same airport, and all three are locked: a test flight is a round trip back to where you started. Nothing is loaded either — a test flight carries no cargo and no passengers.

Then fly it properly:

• At least 20 minutes airborne.
• At least one detected cruise phase — except for gliders. Gliders still need the twenty-minute airborne duration.
• Land back at the departure field and register the flight as usual.

The addon then joins the moderation queue; approval usually takes a few days. Follow it from the Aircraft Moderation page.

An addon already known to the server

The submission carries the version of the simulator you are actually flying, so the server matches your aircraft against the record that already exists rather than creating a duplicate — a duplicate would ask you to test an aircraft you have already tested, and show it with no payload.

When the addon has already been through a test flight on your account, the page tells you which case applies: moderation still pending, already approved (use it normally), or moderated and disabled — with the moderator's comment when there is one.

5.8 Aircraft Lookup

Aircraft Lookup inspects any aircraft in OnAir — yours, another player's, a freelance airframe or a market listing. The page has two modes: instance view for one specific aircraft, and type view, opened from Aircraft Usage.

Search

• Select from fleet — a dropdown of every aircraft in your company (owned, leased, rented, freelance); picking one loads it instantly.
• Identifier search — searches the whole OnAir world by registration, across companies and worlds. A single match loads directly; several open a picker showing owner, location and world. The server caps results at 100, and a notice appears when that limit is hit.
• Ownership badge — Owned, Leased, Rented or Freelance, right next to the picker. A VA chip now sits beside it when the aircraft is operated by your Virtual Airline. It is deliberately kept outside the ownership badge: a VA aircraft is most often rented, and inside that badge the mark would have vanished on exactly the aircraft that carry it most.

Aircraft sheet

• Registration with its status and ownership badges, and View linked mission on a freelance airframe, which jumps to the pending job that spawned it.
• Location — an airport link on the ground, or the route with an ETA in flight, plus heading and coordinates when the aircraft reports them.
• Warp until with its countdown, remaining maintenance work, the For Sale / For Rent price, the raw Aircraft ID with a copy button, and a photo gallery of the type.
• Type specifications: ICAO code, class, engines and fuel type; fuel capacity, cruise fuel flow, range and endurance; empty weight, MTOW, max payload, TBO and airframe hightime; minimum runway, equipment level, luxe factor, copilot requirement, in-flight refuelling and base price — all in your unit preferences.

Type detail tabs

Three toggles open global data for the type without leaving the page: Flight Stats (fuel flow per flight level with the cruise average), Compatible Addons (simulator, name, fuel compatibility factor, flight count) and Economic Details.

Condition, maintenance and costs

For a company aircraft: airframe condition and hours, per-engine condition with SMOH, TBO and remaining hours, fuel on board and the cabin configuration. Condition percentages are the raw values the server's own rules read, shown as the current percent against the repairable maximum — so what you read here is exactly what a dispatch or maintenance refusal is judged on. A purple banner covers a running work order (hours left, FBO, mechanics assigned); a Next Maintenance bar with the last periodic and annual dates turns red or orange when maintenance is required or due soon; and a cost block estimates the annual and periodic checkups, weekly ownership, 1% airframe and engine repairs, engine price and resale value.

Actions and type view

Workshop is active for an idle company aircraft and opens the workshop directly. Change registration renames an owned, leased or system-rented airframe. List for sale and Sell appear on outright-owned aircraft only, through the same dialogs as the Fleet panel. Opened from the Aircraft Usage treemap, the type view shows the same three detail tabs plus a green Display Sell Rent and Lease Offers button that jumps to Aircraft Market Detail for that type.

5.9 Aircraft Usage

The Aircraft Usage page shows how popular each aircraft type is across the whole OnAir world, as a treemap. Every rectangle is an aircraft type and its area is proportional to the number of flights flown with that type. The chart re-flows whenever the window or the sidebar changes size, so the rectangles stay readable.

All Flights / Sim Pilots Only

The two buttons in the header change the metric behind the whole page — sizes, order, legend and table.

• All Flights — Every flight recorded in OnAir, including the ones the economy engine flies.
• Sim Pilots Only — Only the flights a human actually flew in a simulator.

Classes and types with no flight under the active metric are left out entirely, so the map only shows what is really being flown.

Reading the treemap

• Colour — One colour per aircraft class (SEPL, JET, HELO…), from the OnAir class palette. Inside a class the shades darken from the most-flown type down to the least, so neighbours stay distinguishable.
• Class name — Printed at the top left of each block, and dropped when the block is too narrow for it.
• Cell label — The type name appears once the cell is big enough, with a flights and hours line added on the larger ones. A long name is truncated to fit.

Interactions

• Hover — A tooltip gives the type, its class, its flights and hours, plus a Sim pilots line with the share actually flown by a human. That line stays in both metrics, so you can compare them without switching.
• Click a type — Opens Aircraft Lookup on the World tab, on that type: global statistics, fuel flow by flight level, compatible MSFS and X-Plane add-ons, the economic details and a way through to the market offers.
• Refresh — Reloads the page from the server.

Legend and table

Under the treemap, the legend lists every class with its total number of flights. Below it, Top Aircraft Types by Category takes the five most-flown types of each class and puts Flights, Hours, Sim Flights and Sim Hours side by side, with a Share bar for the type's weight inside its own class.

What it is good for

• Spotting the types the community really flies, rather than the ones it merely owns.
• Comparing overall popularity with sim-flown popularity: a wide gap means a type the economy engine flies far more often than pilots do.
• Choosing a type with a large user base — better add-on coverage and more reliable economic data.

5.10 Aircraft Moderation

The Aircraft Moderation page shows the community-wide moderation queue for aircraft addons submitted through a Test Flight. Every player sees the same list: addons currently pending review plus those moderated in the last two months. When a verdict lands on one of your own addons, a badge appears on the side-nav entry until you open this page.

Statuses

• Waiting for moderation — Your test flight has been submitted and is awaiting staff review. The addon is not yet usable for regular flights.
• Accepted — Ready to use — Staff has validated the addon. It can now be used normally (flights, purchase, rent).
• Banned — Staff rejected the addon (e.g. pirated addon, inconsistent specs). See the moderation comment for details.
• Redo Test Flight — The data collected during the test was inconsistent. Redo a test flight with a properly configured aircraft.

Addon card

Each card shows the addon name, its URL if provided, and two blocks:

• Specs — simulator, aircraft class, ICAO code, vanilla flag, engine type and count, empty and max gross weight, fuel capacity and type, range in NM and hours, proposed seats and payload. Weights and fuel volumes follow your kg/lbs and L/gal preferences from Settings.
• Timeline — test flight date and moderation date.

Any moderation comment from staff is shown below the specs. An Open Discussion button appears whenever a staff discussion thread has been opened on the addon.

Moderation delay

Moderation is a manual process performed by OnAir staff. Expect a few days between submission and decision. There is no auto-refresh — click Refresh to update the queue.

Submit a new addon

Click Import New Aircraft at the top of the page to open the Test Flight page and start a new test.

6.1 Employees

Your own staff and your Virtual Airline's appear in the same list. The server returns them merged, so this is expected rather than a defect: a cyan VA badge marks the ones belonging to the other company (its code sits in the tooltip), and the VA filter switches between own only, VA only, or both.

Header

• Sort (strips) and the Strips / Table toggle share the same column sort.
• Management opens the dedicated screen (training, transports, history). Export CSV writes the current list, assigned routes and crew groups included; Refresh reloads the roster.
• Three cards with a recent-history sparkline: Total, Avg Hours, Total Hours.

Filters & selection

• Text matches employee and company name. Category / Status / Base / Location are faceted selects, shown only when several values exist. Contract: Employee / Freelance / Owner.
• Skill keeps everyone at or below 2/5, 3/5 or 4/5 on Punctuality or Comfort — the training shortlist. Not trained keeps those still at zero on either skill.
• Conflicts (with Flight Duty on) keeps only crew whose day is exhausted or clashes with their route assignments, and counts them next to the label.
• Clear filters resets every facet. Select all adds the filtered rows to the bulk selection, additively across filter changes.

A row

• A fixed accent strip gives the role — blue PILOT, cyan CREW, orange MECH. A gold star marks your own avatar, and its row is tinted blue.
• Contract: Owner, Employee (green) or Freelance (orange) with its expiry date, in red under 6 h.
• Location: in flight, an aircraft icon and FROM → TO with clickable ICAOs; on the ground, the current airport.
• Status: the status badge, an ETA in flight, a rest / duty timer on the ground, and a red mark when the crew day cannot cover the assigned routes.
• Assigned and Groups: regular routes and crew-group memberships as clickable chips. The dispatch crew picker mirrors them, so an employee already taken shows up as such.

Drawer & bulk actions

The drawer holds identity, skills, dates and routes with rename, train, transport, relocate, rest and fire; Open full management jumps to that employee's own screen. Select at least one row and the bottom bar offers the batch operations (rename pattern, training sign-up, transport scheduling); Clear empties the selection.

6.2 Employee Management

Per-employee operations hub. The left sidebar lists your staff; the right panel shows the selected employee's identity, contract, skills, certifications, assigned routes, crew groups and actions.

Header & sidebar

• Strips / Table toggle, Back to ... for the calling page, List view for the Employees list, Refresh.
• Hire opens the Crew Market. Both hiring flows there — the bulk dialog and the one-click evaluation panel — now name the company that will be billed, with its code: when you work as a Virtual Airline, the bill goes to the company you are operating as, not necessarily the one you founded.
• Search, category tabs (All / Pilots / Crew / Mech.) and a sort dropdown with direction — name, status, total hours or home base; the two skills join in when a single category is selected.
• Each row carries the role accent, the contract badge (Freelance turns red within 6 h of expiry), status, busy-until ETA, current ICAO, home base and total hours. Staff hired by your Virtual Airline rather than by your own company are marked as such, on the identity card and in both list layouts.

Identity, skills and links

• Identity card: avatar, birthdate and age, flight hours (total and in company), location, home base, status with busy-until and duty-day detail, hire or freelance-since date. The contract block details Owner (no salary), Freelance (since / until plus pay per flight hour) or Employee (per hour plus weekly guaranteed).
• Skills: two bars out of 5, colour-graded. Pilot — Punctuality / Stress Resistance; Crew — Pax Care / Effectiveness; Mechanic — Precision / Effectiveness. For your own avatar, landings, level and XP replace them.
• Certifications: aircraft-class badges with the last exam date on hover. Assigned routes and Crew Groups are clickable; the group dropdown adds the employee to a free seat in another group, and the × removes the current role.

Actions

Most are disabled while the employee is busy — flying, resting, in transport or in training.

• Rename, Change base, and Transport to another ICAO. Change base asks you to confirm: the home base changes at once and nobody is moved; for your own avatar the dialog adds that level missions you already have keep starting from the previous base — regenerate them from Pending Jobs to start from the new one. The Transport dialog quotes distance, duration, ETA and cost before starting (your own avatar travels three times faster).
• Class training and Skills training — both hidden for the player, and for freelancers outside Tycoon mode — quote price and duration first; a green note replaces the button once both skills are maxed.
• Rest now forces the configured rest and shows the wake-up time. Fire (permanent staff only) shows remaining salary and severance first; freelancers cannot be fired, so wait for the contract to end or renew it on the Crew Market.
• Checkride (your avatar only) points to Fleet → Manage → Checkride, and is open to everyone.

6.3 Crew Groups

The Crew Groups page saves reusable crew presets — a named bundle of one pilot, an optional copilot, any number of cabin crew, and optionally a preferred aircraft. At dispatch, loading a group fills every crew slot in a single click.

This data lives only on your device. Nothing is sent to the OnAir server, and groups are scoped per company — separate companies and Virtual Airlines keep separate lists.

Manage Crew Groups (left)

• Group — the name you chose; Pilots — pilot + copilot (0, 1 or 2); Cabin Crew — how many members; Aircraft — the preferred aircraft, or a dash if none.
• An amber missing badge appears when a member has been fired or no longer exists.
• A filter box above the list narrows it by group name; the × in it clears the box.

New Crew Group (right, top)

Type a name and click Create. Left blank, the group is created as New Crew Group and can be renamed from the Manage panel. It starts empty and is selected straight away so you can fill it in below.

Manage Selected Group (right, bottom)

• Rename the group (saved when the field loses focus).
• Pick the pilot and copilot from your pilot pool, and add any number of cabin crew.
• Set a preferred aircraft — it filters the groups proposed at dispatch and on Custom Routes.
• Transport this group… sends every available member to one airport in one go, with an estimated total. Each member is billed for their own trip; anyone who cannot travel — not available, already there, no longer on the roster — is listed and left out, and anyone the server refuses is named in the result.
• Delete the group, with a confirmation dialog.

Loading a group at dispatch

A group is only useful if the crew is where the aircraft is. Members who are not at the departure airport are now left out of the load, and a notice names them instead of letting them slip in silently — previously they were written into the form, stayed invisible in the crew selects, and the flight was refused by the server. The picker rows flag off-airport members before you pick, and Manage groups… in the dropdown opens this page.

Saving under a name that already exists offers to replace that group rather than stacking a duplicate.

Warnings (non-blocking)

The panel shows validation chips when something looks off — pilot not at the aircraft's airport, missing copilot for an aircraft that requires one, class certification mismatch, orphan members. These are warnings only: dispatch still works, and the OnAir server is the final validator.

Work Orders also load these presets. Loading a group does not certify or transport its members. Read the persistent warning naming any omitted members, then check pilot, copilot and cabin crew on the target order.

6.4 Crew Market

The Crew Market is OnAir's virtual labour market: every candidate available for hire in your world — pilots, cabin crew and mechanics. Each has their own skills, certifications and salary, and the weekly salary is a fixed cost even when the employee is idle. The list reloads whenever you switch to another company or virtual airline.

Category tabs

• Pilots (blue) — Commanders and co-pilots. Skills: Punctuality and Stress Resistance.
• Attendants (green) — Cabin crew. Skills: Pax Care and Effectiveness.
• Mechanics (orange) — Maintenance technicians. Skills: Precision and Effectiveness.

Each tab carries a badge with the number of candidates in that category.

Strips and list views

Strips gives one row per candidate with a large avatar; List is a compact table whose headers sort, a second click reversing the order. Both draw the same certification grid — one column per aircraft class in canonical order, a missing certification leaving its slot blank — so a class always sits under the same class from one row to the next.

Filters

• Aircraft Class — Keep only candidates certified on one class (SEPL, MEPL, SETL, Helicopter, Jet, Heavy Jet…).
• Min skill — Keep only those whose two skills both reach 3/5 or 4/5.
• Max weekly — Cap the guaranteed weekly salary.
• Name search, plus the sort controls in strips view — two selectors marked 1 and 2: the first orders the list, the second breaks its ties, each with its own ▲/▼ button (hover any of them for the exact wording). In the table, a click on a header sorts, and a Shift+click on a second one adds it — the headers then carry the rank, ▲1 and ▼2. A live counter shows how many candidates match.

Columns

Currency columns show Cr. Flight Hours records pre-hire hours; skill bars show a score out of 5. Per Week is the guaranteed minimum, prorated for the payment period. Per Hour is the permanent employee’s hourly rate: pay is the higher of that minimum and unpaid flight hours × hourly rate, not their sum. Wages is the freelance hourly rate, with a three-hour minimum per payment, not a share of mission revenue. C counts certified classes.

Evaluate and hiring

Click Evaluate (or the row itself in strips view) for the detail panel: avatar, age, full certification list with per-class hours and landings, skill breakdown, weekly cost and the Hire button. The panel names the company that will pay — the virtual airline, in the VA colour, while you are working as it — so you can still change your mind. Hiring takes you straight to the new employee's management page.

Bulk hire

Tick the checkbox on each row (or Select all in the filter bar) to build a selection. A sticky bar at the bottom shows the count and a Hire button; the dialog names the paying company, asks for a common home base (ICAO), then hires everyone in one pass with a progress bar. Failures come back in a toast listing the server's reasons.

6.5 Skills Tree

The Skills Tree holds the 22 company skills you can unlock, spread over four branches. Each one improves a part of the game or opens a feature outright. Points are earned as your company gains levels.

Reading the tree

• While you have points to spend, a large banner at the top of the page shows how many.
• The number in a node's corner is its cost in points; the dots underneath show the levels already bought out of the maximum.
• Nodes are chained. A skill stays dimmed and cannot be bought until the one it branches from is acquired, and the connecting line lights up once that happens.

Finance branch

• Bank Loans — opens the Loans page. Everything else in this branch grows from it.
• Better Interest Rates (3 levels) — lowers loan interest step by step.
• Parking Fees (2 levels) and Landing Fees (2 levels) — cut airport charges.
• Ownership Costs (3 levels) — cuts the weekly cost of owning aircraft.

FBO branch

• FBOs Agreement (5 levels) — unlocks FBO construction and provides 1, 3, 5, 8, then 10 logistic query slots per FBO; it does not set a company-wide FBO count.
• Workshops (2 levels) — unlocks and upgrades maintenance workshops.
• Mechanics (3 levels, requires Workshops) — the advertised speed improvement is not applied by the current server calculation. Do not budget a maintenance-time saving from this skill.
• Fuel Seller — lets your FBOs sell fuel.
• Workshop Selling — lets you sell workshop services to other companies (needs Workshops).
• Enhanced Queries (3 levels) — better results from the FBO Query Assistant.

Jobs branch

• Passengers Licence — unlocks paid passenger transport, and gates the three below it.
• Last Minute Jobs, Medical Flights, Dangerous Goods — each unlocks that kind of mission.

Until a licence is unlocked, jobs that need it show a padlock in the job lists and cannot be accepted, so a locked mission can never be taken by mistake.

AI and hiring branch

• Hiring — unlocks hiring AI pilots; the rest of the branch depends on it.
• Training Facilities and Better Instructors (3 levels each) — better and faster training.
• Aircraft Condition, Fuel Efficiency, Better Transport, Better Processes (3 levels each) — AI fuel efficiency, faster employee transport and company flight XP. The advertised Aircraft Condition wear reduction is not applied by the current server calculation, but the skill remains a prerequisite for Better Processes. The XP multiplier depends on the server’s XP-impact list; Realistic Sim Procedures are not required for every XP bonus.

Saving

Click + on a node to raise its level. The banner is replaced by a bar with Save and Cancel, and nothing reaches the server until you save. Cancel restores the last saved state, and leaving the page with unsaved changes asks for confirmation first.

Reset Skill Tree

Reset Skill Tree, at the top right, gives every point back so you can spend them differently. A dialog explains the conditions, then the app sends you to the Aviation Quiz: you need at least 75%, and the result only counts if the quiz was taken in the last 10 minutes. The reset exam can be started once every 7 days per company, pass or fail. Your company level is untouched, and the number of resets you have used is listed in Company Details on the Dashboard.

6.6 Pilot Ranks

Pilot Ranks is one of the two tabs of the Ranks page, and the one it opens on. It tracks your rank for every aircraft class you have flown. The other tab, Routes Ranks, is a different idea entirely: progression per airline. Here progression is by technical aircraft family — SEPL, JET, HELO and so on. Refresh in the page header reloads the tab you are on.

The totals follow your account, not the company you are in. Ranks are kept per player, so the hours and landings add up the flights of all your companies, on every world — a brand-new company opens with the ranks you already earned. Reset ranks clears them for all of those companies at once; your flights stay in the Flight Logs.

Class cards

• Class badge — the short code, in that class's colour.
• Rank — Trainee, Junior Officer, Flight Officer, First Officer, Captain.
• Hours — flight hours accumulated in this class.
• Landings — flights completed in this class.
• Progress bar — how far you are inside the current rank, with the hours still needed for the next one.

Cards are ordered by aircraft class, then by hours flown.

Rank thresholds

The thresholds depend on the class family:

• Light aircraft (SEPS, SEPL, MEPL, MEPS, ULM, GLD, HELO): 0 / 20 / 50 / 100 / 300 hours.
• Turboprops (SETS, SETL, METS, METL): 0 / 50 / 100 / 200 / 500 hours.
• Jets (JET, HEAVYJET): 0 / 50 / 100 / 500 / 1000 hours.

A class that matches none of these uses the light-aircraft table.

Distribution

The doughnut on the right shows how your hours split across classes. The centre carries the cumulative total, the legend lists each class with its hours and share, and the total number of landings sits underneath.

Drill-down by class

Click a class card to open the list of the flights that count toward that rank. Filter it by period — 30 days, 90 days, 1 year (the default) or all time — and the footer repeats the thresholds that apply to that class.

Looking at someone else's ranks

If you run a Virtual Airline, the member list has a shortcut that opens the ranks of the member you picked. A banner then names whose progression you are reading, with a button back to the Virtual Airline console. In that view the page stays on the Pilot tab and the per-class drill-down is switched off — the flight list can only be queried for your own company, so showing it there would list your flights under their name.

Tip

Hours count every flight the pilot made in a class — freelance charters, Company Jobs, routes, personal flights — not only charters. That is the universal notion of pilot experience, and it is why the number here can be larger than what any single part of the game shows.

7.1 My FBOs

Header

• View toggle (Strips / Table) — Switch between the flight-strip layout and a compact sortable table.
• Sort control — In Strips view a dropdown lets you pick the sort column and direction (the Table view sorts by clicking a header directly).
• Refresh — Reloads the FBO list.

Create FBO bar

The top bar lets you start a new FBO immediately:

• Type or paste an ICAO in the input (autocomplete suggests airports).
• Click Create FBO. The app validates that the airport exists, is not closed, and doesn't already host one of your FBOs.
• If your company owns the FBOs Agreement skill, a confirmation modal previews the airport name and reminds you that workshop skills must be purchased separately. Confirming opens the FBO configuration screen where you set capacity, fuel tanks, selling prices, workshops and cargo.
• If you don't own the FBOs Agreement skill yet, the modal is swapped for a Skill required gate — building an FBO is blocked at level 0. A shortcut button jumps you to the Skills page so you can purchase it.

Refuel All My FBOs

Bulk-refuel card that tops up every FBO in a single call:

• Two independent thresholds — 100LL target and Jet target (percent, default 100). Set what fraction of each tank's capacity should be filled.
• Preview — Returns a quote (total cost, gallons/liters of 100LL and Jet ordered, optional server message) without committing anything.
• Confirm — Places the actual refuel order; the FBO list reloads afterward. Cancel dismisses the quote without charging you.

Stats cards

Four cards summarize your FBO network (each with a rolling sparkline):

• Total FBOs — Number of FBOs you own.
• 100LL — Total 100LL fuel stock across all FBOs.
• Jet-A1 — Total Jet-A1 stock across all FBOs.
• Hangars — Total aircraft hangar capacity.

FBO list

The table toolbar includes a quick filter by airport ICAO or FBO name — useful when managing a large network.

• Status accent — A vertical color bar (shown in both strips and table view): BUILDING (under construction), OPEN (workshop selling enabled) or CLOSED.
• Name, Airport (ICAO link opens Airport Lookup), Cargo Cap.
• 100LL / Jet — Current quantity over tank capacity, rendered as a horizontal gauge. Turns orange below 50 % and red below 25 %. A dash means the tank doesn't exist.
• 100LL Price / Jet Price — Sell price, or a dash when selling is disabled.
• Hgrs — Hangar capacity.
• Workshop — Open / Closed badge, or a ready in X chip when the workshop is still being built (hover for the exact completion time).
• Configure button — Opens the FBO configuration screen (prices, stock, selling toggles, workshops, cargo).
• In Table view, every column header is sortable: click once for ascending, twice for descending, three times to return to the original order.

Workshop Capabilities card

Lists every FBO and the aircraft classes it is certified to service:

• SEP, MEP, TurboProp, Jet, Heavy Jet, Helicopter — Each active class appears as a colored badge.
• An FBO with no workshop shows No workshop. Extra workshop skills must be purchased from the FBO configuration page.

Workshop coverage card

A network-level view that cross-references every FBO workshop against the aircraft classes you actually own, so gaps stand out at a glance:

• One tile per class (SEP, MEP, Helicopter, TurboProp, Jet, Heavy Jet) showing whether any of your FBOs offers it at Basic (routine 100 h inspection / repairs) and/or Annual (annual checkup + engine swap), plus how many of your aircraft fall in that class.
• A class you own aircraft for but can't service anywhere in your network is highlighted in red — every check for those aircraft has to be outsourced to another company's FBO.
• Hover a tile to see which FBO(s) cover it; the header summarises how many of your aircraft have no in-network workshop.
• The class-to-workshop mapping mirrors the game exactly: piston size variants fold into their base class, single- and multi-engine turboprops both map to TurboProp, and gliders are serviced by the SEP workshop.

Fuel Levels chart

Stacked bar chart showing the current 100LL (green) and Jet (blue) stock for each FBO — useful to spot tanks that need a resupply run.

Click an FBO name as well as its Configure button to open its configuration. The adjacent ICAO opens the airport instead.

7.2 FBO Configuration

Manages one FBO across three tabs: Assets, Fuel and Logistic Queries (the last two stay disabled until the FBO exists).

Header and construction

An orange BUILDING pill marks work in progress, and a collapsible banner lists every asset being built with its remaining time; settings stay editable. The info strip carries the weekly ownership cost, split into Now and After construction while building, the airport's FBO Boost and a red No Access warning without FBO rights. Dismantle destroys stored fuel, deletes the queries and stops upgrades and maintenance; refused while an aircraft is in maintenance.

Assets tab

• Assets — Name plus the table of Cargo, 100LL, Jet, Crew Rooms, TieDowns and Hangars, with an orange pill where an upgrade is queued.
• Hangars — A hangar place shelters one aircraft. When this FBO's hangars can hold all of your aircraft parked at the airport, a departure from here needs no de-icing; when they hold only some of them, the de-icing warning lets you tick In a hangar before take-off. Hangars count once built. De-icing is an option, off by default: Settings → Flight Sim, Enable de-icing penalty. For parking fees, a hangar place counts like a tie-down. Hangars will also serve other purposes in the near future.
• Selling — 100LL and Jet A prices per gallon (floor is the local dealer, cap is 20), plus workshop selling with a markup from 1 to 20. Each kind of sale needs its skill — Fuel Seller for fuel, Workshop Selling for workshop services; without it the box is greyed out and a line points to the Skills page.
• Workshop Agreements — Six types (SEP, MEP, Helo, TurboProp, Jet, Heavy Jet) in two tiers: Basic opens the workshop, Annual adds annual maintenance and engine swap. Basic needs Workshops skill 1, Annual skill 2, and Annual switches Basic on with it. Acquired agreements are locked, as is the whole panel while workshop assets are being built.

Save selling options is free; agreements and capacities go through Get a Quotation, disabled until one changes; a brand-new FBO also needs the FBOs Agreement skill. The right panel itemises the quote, its duration and the new weekly cost, and Accept keeps you on the same FBO. With a workshop, a Workshop Activity panel shows mechanics, slots in maintenance, ETA and queue.

Fuel tab

Dealer fuel is paid immediately. The first order sets delivery to 24 hours later. Further purchases join the same pending batch and postpone its existing delivery date by two hours each, for the whole batch; they do not start a fresh 24-hour timer. The periodic server pass delivers the batch once due.

• Each row gives tank level and capacity, quantity ordered, maximum, your quantity, unit price and total, and flags a missing tank, a tank still being built or an enlargement under way. A pending delivery gets its own panel with the arrival time.
• Restock advisor — Set a target level and press Fill to pre-fill the order up to it, capped by capacity minus the pending delivery; you confirm the total. Levels sit next to each tank, red below 25 %, orange below 50 %. Refuel All My FBOs does the same across every FBO under a threshold, with a preview.

Logistic Queries tab

The FBOs Agreement skill sets the number of query slots: 1, 3, 5, 8, then 10. Generation is unavailable while a new FBO's licence is under construction; the orange banner explains the block. A workshop added to an FBO already in service does not block generation. Enhanced Queries is a separate improvement skill.

• Editor — Direction, distance, cargo, PAX, airport size, return leg, exclude military, preferred PAX seats and target FBOs, each slot with its own Validate and Cancel and an orange dot on unsaved tabs. Query Preview dry-runs it live underneath: candidate destinations, expected jobs and misconfiguration warnings, no cooldown consumed.
• Query Assistant — A background watcher that notifies you when a query comes off cooldown and can regenerate ready ones itself while the Companion is open. A regeneration replaces the query's leftover jobs, except those you marked to keep. The Auto-regenerate queries when ready box governs every automatic generation: unchecked (the default), neither the watcher nor Company Jobs → FBO Jobs generates anything — that list only shows jobs already generated, and its Generate ready queries button runs them on your command.
• Toolbar — Open in Company Jobs (the badge counts waiting FBO jobs), see accepted jobs, generate every ready query across your FBOs, clone a configuration, export or import queries by ICAO.
• Generate — One per slot: saved query, cargo or PAX asked for, expired cooldown. Generated jobs land in Company Jobs under the FBO Jobs source — accept them there before they reach Pending Jobs.

System FBO fuel is checked on Monday and Friday at about 04:45 UTC, with the same rule on both days. Stock below 50 % of capacity is refilled to a random level between 50 % and 100 %; at or above 50 %, nothing is added. Player FBOs are supplied by their owners and are not included. The next pass is whichever comes first; a busy FBO can run dry between passes. Check actual stock before relying on it.

7.3 Find FBO

The Find FBO page searches for available Fixed Base Operations around a reference airport. Use it to locate fuel, workshop services or hangar space near your position or one of your aircraft.

Search criteria

• Reference ICAO — type an ICAO code, with autocomplete. The search can be pre-filled from an aircraft's maintenance screen, which brings both the ICAO and the required workshop type.
• Max range — from 10 to 3000 NM. The search widens in bands (50, 100, 200, then +100 NM) and stops once two consecutive bands return nothing; if the chosen range finds no FBO at all, it extends automatically to 3000 NM. The box can be cleared and retyped in place — left empty, it falls back to 100 NM when you leave it — and the radius you last searched with comes back on your next visit at the value you set, anywhere up to 3000 NM.
• Workshop — a toggle for FBOs offering workshop services, plus a type dropdown: All, SEP, MEP, HELO, Turbo Prop, Jet, Heavy Jet.
• The 100LL / JET toggles filter by fuel on sale, and a text filter searches the FBO name and the ICAO.

Results table

The table scrolls horizontally and every column sorts on its header. FBOs owned by your company are highlighted.

• ICAO + size, Services (fuel badges 100LL and JET, plus a wrench when a workshop is open for sale) and the FBO name.
• Distance in nautical miles from the reference airport, and Heading, the magnetic bearing to that FBO.
• 100LL / Jet price per gallon, or a dash when the fuel is not sold, and the quantity in gallons (hover for quantity against capacity).
• Workshop markup — the percentage added to maintenance work.
• Workshop capabilities — one coloured dot per type (SEP, MEP, HELO, Turbo Prop, Jet, Heavy). A filled centre dot means annual maintenance is certified; a padlock means the workshop is private and not open for sale.

Create your own FBO

If the selected airport is eligible (not closed, and with no FBO of yours already there), a Create my FBO button appears next to the search; clicking it opens a confirmation, then the FBO configuration page. Creation is gated behind the FBOs Agreement company skill: without it the dialog switches to a "skill required" view and the Proceed button becomes a shortcut to the skill tree.

System FBO fuel is checked on Monday and Friday at about 04:45 UTC, with the same rule on both days. Stock below 50 % of capacity is refilled to a random level between 50 % and 100 %; at or above 50 %, nothing is added. Player FBOs are supplied by their owners and are not included. The next pass is whichever comes first; a busy FBO can run dry between passes. Check actual stock before relying on it.

7.4 Basecamps

The Basecamps page lists every basecamp you own plus (optionally) every basecamp in the world. A basecamp is a private airport you deploy anywhere by landing with a Construction Kit in the cargo hold. Basecamps are always airport size 0 (Small) — this is the key limitation to understand.

Header

• Mine / All filter — Show only basecamps owned by your company (default) or every basecamp in the world.
• Install Basecamp button — Opens the deployment wizard. Disabled when you have reached your quota (see below).
• Refresh — Reloads the basecamp list from the server.

Stats row

• Owned — Number of basecamps your company owns.
• World — Total basecamps in the current world.
• Aircraft — Aircraft from your fleet currently parked at one of your basecamps.
• Quota — Gauge showing owned / max. The cap is Company Level × 2.

Table columns

• ICAO — Clickable ICAO link (opens Airport Lookup).
• Name — Basecamp name (chosen at creation).
• Owner — Green Mine badge for your own basecamps, otherwise the owner's airline code + name, or System if unclaimed.
• Location — City and country code.
• Elevation — Elevation in feet.
• Aircraft — Number of your fleet aircraft currently at this basecamp.
• Created — Creation date (YYYY-MM-DD).
• Actions — Opens the basecamp detail page (click a row anywhere to open it).

How to deploy a basecamp

• Buy a Construction Kit merchandise (Trading Hall, system-spawn at EGLL / PAUN / SBPL / SAWG / UOOO, or roughly 20% of size-5 airports).
• Load the kit into an aircraft's cargo hold.
• Fly at least 3 NM away from any existing airport (heliports excluded).
• Land with engines off. The Deploy Basecamp tip appears on the Dashboard, or click Install Basecamp on this page.
• Fill in the ICAO (6 characters), Name, Elevation. The basecamp is created immediately.

Why size 0 matters

Since a basecamp is always size 0, it inherits the smallest airport class limits:

• A basecamp has 2,299 ft of unpaved runway — the longest a size 0 airfield can have — and no paved runway at all. Any aircraft that needs 2,299 ft or less AND accepts unpaved runways can use it; a helicopter always can, and a seaplane always can when the camp sits on water. An aircraft that needs a paved runway cannot. Check the aircraft’s current requirements.
• No workshop when you build an FBO at a basecamp — all workshop capabilities must be added manually.
• An aircraft that needs more than 2,299 ft, or a paved runway, can still go to a basecamp on a flight you fly yourself: choose the basecamp as destination on the dispatch screen, which warns you that an AI flight there would be refused. Launching that flight as an AI flight, or moving the aircraft there by transport, is refused.
• These figures are the game’s access rule, not scenery: a basecamp has no runway modelled in any simulator, so landing there means landing on open terrain unless scenery has been built for the spot.

What basecamps can do

• No landing fees, no parking fees, no weekly ownership kit cost (free forever).
• Host an FBO (build all workshops manually).
• Receive all 6 airport boosts (XP, Industry, FBO, Regular Route, Freelance Route, Company Jobs) at 1 kit/week per boost level.
• Serve as a base for your fleet, employees, missions, cargo and charters.
• Hold factories like any owned airport.

What basecamps cannot do

• Receive an aircraft that needs more than 2,299 ft, or a paved runway, by AI flight or by transport — only a flight you fly yourself can take it there (a seaplane excepted, at a camp on water).
• Appear as a destination in freelance routes or regular routes generation — basecamps are excluded from those queries.

Quota

Each company can own at most Level × 2 basecamps (e.g. level 5 = 10 basecamps max). This cap is independent from the regular owned-airport cap (3 + Level). When you hit the cap, the Quota gauge turns red and the Install button is disabled — sell or delete an existing basecamp to install a new one.

Deleting a basecamp

All aircraft, employees, cargo, charters, FBOs and factories are migrated automatically to the nearest airport large enough for your biggest parked aircraft. Open the basecamp detail page, use the Delete tab — a quotation previews the migration target before you confirm.

7.5 Basecamp — Detail

This page gathers everything about one basecamp. If it is yours, it is also where you place its 3D scenery, edit it and delete it. It opens from a row of the Basecamps list.

Left column

Code, name, description, city, country, coordinates, elevation, orientation, surface type (Land, Water, Forest, combined), creation date and owner; below them the basecamp panel — owner, opening date, traffic since it opened (passengers and cargo weight, in your unit) and flight counts, AI against player — and live weather. An Add-on button appears when a download link is set, a tag says whether the camp is yours, another player's or the system's, and the identifier at the bottom can be clicked to copy it.

Tabs

Scenery, Manage and Delete only appear to the owner.

• Map — Centred on the basecamp, with a tent marker.
• Aircraft — Your aircraft parked here, with status, condition and hours before the next 100-hour inspection. Click a row to open one in your fleet.
• Manage — Name, description, elevation, orientation and add-on link. Save and Reset wake up as soon as a value changes; saving leaves the scenery placement untouched.

Scenery — where the objects stand in the simulator

A basecamp is drawn in the simulator only during an OnAir flight the Companion is tracking: within about 10 nautical miles it is spawned, and it is taken away once you are well past. Nothing is drawn in free flight, or on the ground before the tracking starts — to look at the camp then, use Preview in sim below. Every object is set on the ground, so the elevation saved under Manage does not move it. It has to be switched on under Settings → In-sim 3D scenery, and an object whose model is missing from your installed scenery pack is skipped rather than risked.

• Drag the pins on the map. Everything must stay inside the 2 NM ring: the server refuses the whole save while one object is outside, and the editor says how many are.
• The list on the right groups the camp and its parkings, your decorations, the terrain markers, and one group per factory built here with its machines and containers. Anything that can be turned has a heading value and a slider; the visibility box stops an object being drawn without deleting it.
• Add decoration (up to 40) and Add terrain marker (up to 3) drop a new object on the camp itself. A terrain marker takes its look from the ground under it, and Re-read surface here refreshes that after a move.
• A padlock marks a machine you cannot move: its output depends on where it stands, and it belongs to another company.
• Preview in sim spawns the current placement live, Clear preview removes it, and leaving the tab cleans up for you. Position aircraft in sim puts your aircraft at the camp. Both need a connected simulator.
• Save scenery writes the placement, and the simulator picks it up without a restart. If the factories here could not be loaded, the page says so: they are not shown, and a save leaves them untouched.

Deleting a basecamp

Load Quotation returns a message and the airport everything will move to, as a link. Delete basecamp then asks you to type the code in capitals before the final button unlocks. Once confirmed, aircraft, employees, cargo, charters, FBOs and factories all move to that airport and the camp disappears — so check the Aircraft tab first.

Good to know

Basecamps are still being built: saving or deleting asks you to confirm first, and advises trying it on a test company rather than the one you fly for real. Setting an add-on link helps other players install the matching scenery.

Add-on download URL. This is a link to scenery players can install, not an upload of scenery to OnAir. The scenery-building shortcut helps prepare the matching terrain; saving a URL alone does not create or install that package. That package is separate from the camp: OnAir's own buildings are not part of it, and the Companion still places them as described above.

7.6 Install a Basecamp

This page walks you through founding a new basecamp from an aircraft carrying a Construction Kit in its hold. You reach it from the Basecamps list, or from the tip on the Dashboard once you have landed with a kit on board.

Choosing the aircraft

The page scans your fleet for aircraft that are on the ground with a Construction Kit aboard. If several qualify, a drop-down lets you pick one; if only one does, it is chosen for you. Its identifier and current airport are shown at the top of the form.

The form

• ICAO — The code of the new basecamp: exactly 6 characters, forced to capitals.
• Name — Visible to every player.
• Description — Free text about the site.
• Elevation — In feet. Filled in from the simulator when it is connected, otherwise from the airport the aircraft is standing at. You can correct it. A Tycoon company's elevation is read from terrain data at the chosen spot and cannot be changed.
• Orientation — The heading of the strip, 0 to 360 degrees.
• Add-on download URL — Optional, for the matching scenery package.

The rules

• With a simulator, the basecamp is founded at the aircraft's own position, which has to be within 1 NM.
• Tycoon companies — With no simulator, your aircraft always stands on an airport (or a heliport). You choose the spot by clicking the map instead: inside the green circle of 100 NM around the aircraft, outside the red circles drawn around every airport and basecamp nearby. The elevation is read from terrain data at that spot, and you do not type it. Your aircraft and its crew stay where they are, and the page warns you when that aircraft could not fly to a camp. If the server still accepts a shorter distance, the page tells you that distance and redraws the circle.
• It must be at least 3 NM from the nearest existing airport. Heliports do not count.
• You may hold twice your company level in basecamps, plus 3 for a Tycoon company. The panel shows how many you already have and the ceiling.

The map

The map follows the aircraft live:

• The green aircraft marker — Where the selected aircraft is right now.
• The green circle — The placement area: 1 NM, or 100 NM for a Tycoon company.
• The red dashed circle — The 3 NM exclusion around the nearest airport. A Tycoon company sees one around every airport and basecamp in view, once zoomed in.

The coordinates in the strip above the map refresh as the aircraft moves. Your own zoom and panning are left alone as long as the aircraft stays in view.

Installing

Install Basecamp only wakes up once every rule is met: a 6-character code, a name, and a usable position. Because these pages are still being built, a confirmation asks you to acknowledge that before the install runs — the advice there is to try it on a test company rather than the one you fly for real. When it succeeds you land on the new basecamp's page.

Good to know

• Check where you are in the simulator before opening the page — elevation and position follow it while it is connected.
• The Construction Kit is consumed by the install. Make sure you are standing where you want the camp before confirming.
• The camp is created with its 3D scenery switched on, so it will be drawn in the simulator the next time a tracked OnAir flight takes you close to it. Where each object stands can be adjusted afterwards from the Scenery tab of the basecamp page.
• Pick a code you will recognise — it is visible to every player in the airport lists.
• At the ceiling, delete an existing basecamp to free a slot.

Optional scenery link. The add-on URL points to a downloadable simulator scenery package. It does not upload or generate that package; use the scenery-building shortcut if you need to prepare the terrain.

7.7 Owned Airports

Owned Airports lists every airport your company holds, and what each one costs and earns you every week. The counter next to the title is used / maximum: you may own 3 + your company Level airports. Basecamps are listed here too but do not count against that cap.

What an airport costs

Rent is paid weekly in Airport Ownership Kits, and the amount depends only on the airport size:

• Size 0 → 1 kit, size 1 → 2, size 2 → 3, size 3 → 5, size 4 → 25, size 5 → 50 per week.
• A basecamp costs nothing, which is why a basecamp can never lapse.

The kits must be sitting at that airport on the due date — kits stored elsewhere do not count. The row shows the next payment date, and warns you before it arrives.

Falling behind

One missed week is tolerated: the row turns to At risk and the arrears are added to the next bill. Miss it a second time and the airport is taken back. Fly the kits in before the second deadline and nothing is lost.

Kits are not sold by the system. They come from another player, or from your own Airport Ownership Kit Facility in a factory.

What an airport earns

Each row counts the traffic that has transited since the last payout — simulator flights, AI flights, passengers and cargo — and shows the subsidy it will pay next. Only the flights pay: transited passengers and cargo are shown for information and are worth nothing. Every counter resets at each payout.

• A real flight pays 2,000 Cr minus 200 per size below 5, so a size-5 field pays 2,000 and a size-0 field 1,000.
• On a human-only world that figure is doubled.
• An AI flight pays a twentieth of a real one, and never gets the human-only double.

Other things on this page

• Photo — a JPEG advertisement other players see on your airport. It belongs to the current ownership: release the airport and take it back, and the slot is empty again.
• Landing and parking fees — what your airport charges everyone else, shown on the row. Owning a field does not let you charge more than the system rate: the server keeps the lower of the two, silently. Undercutting is the only move an owner has.
• Release — hands the airport back. You stop paying, and you stop earning.
• Owning at least one airport is what opens the Boosts tab.

7.8 Airport Lookup

Per-airport dashboard: search any airport, inspect its infrastructure, ground layout, traffic and weather, and jump to the related actions.

Search and favourites

ICAO, IATA or free text, with live suggestions after two characters; Enter on a 2 to 4 letter code does an exact ICAO lookup, otherwise it takes the top suggestion. Other pages open this one with the code pre-filled, and arriving from a tour map adds a Back to Tour Map button. The star in the action bar adds the airport to a chip row under the search, kept on this device: a click reopens it, the x drops one, Clear all empties the list. The gold star in the panel title feeds a different list — the one on the Favorite Airports page, which the MSFS scenery import fills and Route Set Generation flies over.

Actions and data

Find Jobs Here opens Company Jobs filtered on this airport (hidden in Freelance mode). Create FBO appears when you do not already own one here and requires the root FBOs Agreement skill; without it the button routes you to the skill tree. SimBrief, SkyVector and Navigraph are external links, the last only when the field is in the SimBrief database. Below sit the identity fields and the Airport ID, which you can click to copy, then a boost panel with the active levels and, on private fields, the owner. Basecamps replace the opening hours with a panel of their own; otherwise you get local and UTC hours, the simulators that carry the field, runway-type icons and the SimBrief badge.

Weather, ATIS and forecast

The METAR block decodes the observation — flight category, wind, visibility, clouds, temperature, QNH, density altitude — and Play ATIS reads it aloud in the Cockpit Dispatch voice. Below it, Show TAF now opens the aerodrome forecast: every period decoded above the raw bulletin, a dashed edge on the conditional groups (TEMPO / PROB), and an EXPIRED flag once the validity window has passed with no newer bulletin. Speak reads that forecast aloud in plain words rather than raw code — a long bulletin is cut back to the period in force plus the coming changes, and the reading says out loud that it left some out instead of simply stopping. Both voice controls are hidden when speech is off in Settings, and the forecast is absent at the many airports that issue no TAF.

Right panel tabs

• Map — full-height map centred on the airport, with a background picker for Topo, Street, Satellite and Plain. A captured ground layout is drawn on top; without one, an empty state offers to read it from a running simulator. The background choice is remembered.
• Runways, Cargo & Pax (greyed rows are human-only), Assets, Events and Aircraft — what is here and what happened here, in your weight unit; click a registration for Aircraft Lookup.
• FBOs — all of them here, yours with a Configure button; where the airport has none, a Nearest FBO with fuel fallback lists the closest that really sell 100LL or Jet.
• Activity — recent departures and arrivals, now sorted newest first. The table shows the 50 most recent, labelled "50 / total", and says so when the server returns more than it can display.
• Services — landing fees per class, and above them the owner's own fees when another company owns the field.

Full-width panels

A runway summary, the frequencies in MHz, and Fleet Locations grouped by airport — airborne aircraft sit in their own In flight group with their live route rather than in an unresolved one. Every date is shown in UTC to match server time.

7.9 Favorite Airports

Favorite Airports is your personal shortlist of airports — typically the ones you own scenery for, or simply the places you like to fly to.

Scope

• The list is saved per installation, not per company. Switching company keeps the same favorites, because your sceneries belong to your simulator, not to an airline.

Adding airports

• Type an ICAO and click Add.
• Star icon — available on the Airport Lookup page, to add or remove the airport you are viewing.
• Import from MSFS 2020 / 2024 — scans your simulator's Community and Official folders and adds every third-party scenery it finds. For MSFS 2024, streamed Marketplace add-ons are detected too, from their package names; packages you disabled in the sim's content manager are left out. Stock Asobo / Microsoft content is skipped, so you only get the sceneries you actually added. Tick Include Microsoft airports to also import the streamed Microsoft/Asobo handcrafted airports — base game and World Updates together (about 180 airports). Only airports known to OnAir are kept; unknown tokens in a package name are silently dropped.

The checkbox

• The tick in the first column decides which favorites are used as the airport pool by Route Set Generation. Untick an airport to keep it in the list while leaving it out of your next route network.
• On the map, gold markers are ticked, grey markers are unticked. Click a marker or an ICAO in the table to open Airport Lookup on that field.

8.1 Industries Dashboard

Summary strip

The top strip shows the Industry Points you have available out of your total, the number of critical and warning alerts, and shortcuts to the other Industry pages: My Factories, Trading Hall, My Goods, My Contracts, My Demands and the Encyclopedia. My Contracts sits next to the Trading Hall on purpose — the Hall is where a contract is signed, and My Contracts is where you see it again afterwards. My Demands lists what your own factories are asking the world to deliver.

Alerts

The alert list is computed from the current state of your factories:

• Production halted — a machine cannot start its cycle (the exact reason is shown).
• Low materials — the source container feeding a producing machine drops below 2× the machine's input capacity.
• Workers tired — a workgroup falls below 60% efficiency (red below 20%). The Relief button opens the replacement dialog directly; the alert is suppressed when a relief is already on its way.
• Container full — the END of a chain (production feeds it, it feeds no machine) goes past 80% fill, red at 100%: the goods are not leaving. Silent everywhere else on purpose — a supply warehouse is meant to sit full, a mid-chain buffer is full whenever upstream outruns downstream, and a stockpile wired to nothing says nothing about production. A container you keep full on purpose — an FBO refuelling tank, say — is silenced by unticking Enable alerts in its settings. If a machine has genuinely stopped, Production halted says so by name.
• Container empty — a supply container feeding production has run dry. Read the affected chain: an alert is orange when a downstream issue already explains the stoppage, or stock farther along the chain can still feed production. Empty supply does not always mean production has stopped. The row names the goods to replenish; container alert settings control whether it appears.
• Food rations — the rations at an airport cover less than 3 days of your active workforce's needs.
• Inactivity — the factory will be deconstructed in less than 15 days due to inactivity.

Every row offers a Manage button to the factory's management screen.

Filtering and sorting

Above the list: a search box (alert text, factory name, airport), an issue type filter, a factory filter (offered from two affected factories on) and a sort control (severity, type, factory). The critical and warning counters at the top of the page are clickable too: they filter by severity, and a second click clears them. Whenever a filter hides rows, an "x of y" counter and a Clear button appear — a filtered list must never read as "all clear". The summary strip, the tabs and this filter row stay put while the list scrolls — on a company with several hundred alerts, that is the only way to keep the filters within reach.

Notifications & leaderboards

Two tabs next to Alerts: Industry notifications shows the notification feed filtered to Industry events (blocked cycles, weekly fees, contracts…), and Leaderboards shows the world's two rankings — Industry Points and Contract credits (top 15, your company highlighted).

Data freshness

Factory state advances with the server tick (~3 minutes): refreshing faster than that will not show anything newer.

8.2 My Factories

The My Factories page lists every factory of your company on a single screen, with a synchronized map. It is the entry point of the Industries pages: the Manage button opens Factory Manage for each of your own factories.

Layout

• Show all factories — swaps between your own factories and every factory in the world. Yours load by default; the world-wide list is fetched the first time you tick the box, then cached separately.
• Filter — matches factory name, airport identifier, and owner airline code.
• Table — airport, boosts, average efficiency, estimated IP/day, owner, name, tier, status.
• Map — one marker per factory. Blue = yours, grey = other companies, amber = currently selected.

Columns

• Airport — identifier of the host airport; click it to open Airport Lookup.
• Boosts — the boosts running at the factory's airport, one badge per boost with its level. Hover a badge for its name, end of period (renewal on or cancelled) and the company that owns the airport; the Industry badge also gives its effect. A boost belongs to the airport, not to the factory. Only the Industry boost acts on factories: +10 points of efficiency per level for every machine there whose staff is fed, whoever owns the factory. A dash means none at that airport; a question mark means the boost list could not be loaded — if a later refresh fails, the last known badges stay and the page warns that they may be out of date. Click the header to sort by number of boosts, and click it again to put the most boosted first.
• Eff. — average efficiency across the machines that are idle or producing. Hover the cell for the efficiency of each machine; the figure already includes the airport's Industry boost.
• IP/day — estimated Industry Points produced per 24 h, summed over the machines currently producing.
• Owner — airline code of the owning company. Your own factories carry a green badge.
• Name — display name. Tier — factory level, 1 to 4.
• Status — activity pill. Active = producing normally. Removal in N days = automatic deconstruction approaching. Inactive = past the deconstruction date. Frozen = the weekly fee could not be paid. Archived = archived by the server, after a long inactivity or a paused subscription. The tooltip states the inactivity rule, the last production date and the scheduled removal date.
• Manage — on your own factories only: opens the canvas of machines, containers and connectors.

Sorting and selection

Every column header is sortable: click it to sort on that column, click again to reverse the order. Until you pick one, the list rests in name order. Clicking a row or a map marker selects the factory — the row is highlighted, the map pans to its airport, and the selected marker turns amber.

8.3 Factory Manage

The Factory Manage screen is one factory seen from above: machines, containers and the connectors between them. Construction, recipes, staffing and output modes all happen here.

Toolbar and sidebar

• Airport and Food Rations — stock on site (red below 10); the cart button opens the Trading Hall pre-filtered on rations here. Each worker eats one a day, or production stops. Next to the airport, a badge shows the Industry boost running there, if any — it adds efficiency points to every machine of the factory whose staff is fed; hover it for its level, end date and owner.
• IP — your Industry Points balance; it outlines in red when it is what blocks a build. Activity — Active, Removal in N days, Inactive, Frozen or Archived, with the rule and dates in the tooltip.
• Pencil / Trash — rename inline, or delete the factory (IP refunded, irreversible). Minimize connectors draws short stubs instead of full lines, and is remembered.
• Workers relief relieves everyone past a fatigue threshold you choose; Factory Tier upgrades the factory with Extension Kits; Layout (dispatch hubs) sets 1 to 6 input and output columns; the Containers / Machines palette adds entities.
• Downgrade takes the factory down one tier (from tier 2): the grid shrinks, the weekly fee drops, the Extension Kits spent are not returned. If a machine or container would no longer fit, nothing changes and the refusal names it. A frozen factory brought back to tier 1 is active again. Move the factory sends it to another airport with its machines, containers and their stock: the quote gives the IP cost (100 + 25 % of what is built), the travel time (three times a goods transport) and, for mines and oil wells, the deposit at the destination next to today's. Until it arrives the factory shows Moving to …: no production, no weekly fee, and nothing in it can be modified until it arrives. A mine or a well loses its placement on the deposit: after the arrival, place it again within 2 NM of the airport with Set location in its settings. Your company's own stock at the old airport stays there.

Reading the canvas

• Three zones — INPUT (green, left), PRODUCTION (dark, middle), OUTPUT (blue, right).
• Machines — the border shows efficiency (green from 80%, orange from 50%, red below). A red Idle banner means no staff; otherwise recipe and progress bar, construction bar, or Needed resources. Staff avatars ring red when a worker is not fed.
• Containers — merchandise icon and a current/max badge that now sits clear of the corner buttons (red when full, orange when nearly empty).
• Ports and buttons — squares = inputs (left), circles = outputs (right), bright cyan = wired; the gear opens settings, the arrows start move mode, then click a valid cell. Wheel zooms, drag pans.

Building a machine

An unbuilt machine shows Needed resources, and every requirement is visible: the tiles shrink and wrap instead of being cut off, with a "+N" chip if any still overflow. Build unlocks once all materials are at the airport and you hold enough Industry Points; hovering the disabled button lists what is missing, line by line.

Click a material you are short of: after a confirmation, the Trading Hall opens pre-filtered on it, to buy it or take a contract. You can also publish a request on My Demands and have it flown to you; contracts you sign are listed on My Contracts.

Connectors

Click an output port (it turns purple) and compatible input ports light up in yellow: click one to wire them, re-click a wired output port to remove it. Compatibility depends on the merchandise type of both containers.

Settings

Machine — one staff slot per workgroup with fatigue and fed state; the relief button quotes the cost, then offers three routes: fly the tired staff back yourself, transfer them by bus or boat, or switch on auto-relieve. Also the recipe, inputs and outputs, production times, IP per cycle, the log, and for oil wells and mines a map to place the machine (efficiency depends on the terrain).

Container — merchandise type and, for outputs, the mode: Storage, truck/boat transport (destination + threshold), Trading Hall (auto-sell at system or custom price), inter-factory transport, and for fuel FBO refuel (yours, by distance) or local dealer. Full/empty alerts also feed the Industries Dashboard.

Deleting a machine does not refund its construction IP; deleting a container or the factory does.

Industry Points during production. Read the sign of IP per cycle. A negative recipe spends those points when the cycle starts and cannot start with an insufficient balance; positive points are credited when the cycle finishes. For example, Travel Token consumes 250 IP, Factory Extensions Parts 100 IP and Airport Ownership Kit 3 IP per cycle. Keep this recurring budget separate from construction IP.

Local Dealer fuel output sells whole 5,500-gal tanks to the server when an FBO orders fuel or a system restock runs. Only eligible player factories within 250 NM are used, nearest first, at the local dealer price. The purchase quantity is limited by the FBO order or restock amount; for system stock already at or above half capacity, the limit is 10 % of capacity without adding fuel to that FBO. This does not change the FBO order or its price. FBO Refueling is a separate output mode: beyond 250 NM, the factory owner pays 10 Cr per tank for each additional NM.

8.4 Industries Encyclopedia

The Industries Encyclopedia is a read-only reference for every merchandise type and every production machine in the OnAir world. Use it to plan factory chains, estimate weekly throughput, and see which machines consume or produce a given good.

Layout

Two tabs — Production Lines (browse by merchandise) and Production Zones (browse by machine type). The left pane is a filterable list showing icon, name and a secondary line: weight and price for merchandise, build cost and time for machines. The filter resets when you switch tab or follow a cross-link. The right pane details the selected item.

Production Lines

Pick a merchandise on the left. The header card gives the icon, name, description, weight (kg or lb, following your preference), base price and, when known, the Supplies / Demands counts with the average supply price. Below it, Production Chain shows one card per recipe that produces or consumes the item:

• Machine name — click it to jump to its Production Zones detail.
• Recipe name, cycle duration in hours, cycles per day, and a green Produces or red Consumes badge.
• IP/cycle and IP/week are signed production values: positive recipes earn points on completion; negative recipes consume points when a cycle starts and need sufficient available IP. Zero means no production IP change. Construction costs are separate.
• Inputs → Outputs — icons and quantities per cycle, every name clickable. The Per Week column gives the rounded weekly throughput of each output and the consumption of each input, and a By-product badge marks side outputs.

Production Zones

• Header card — icon, name, description, build cost in IP, build time in hours and footprint (width × height).
• Construction Materials — what the machine needs to be built, with quantities; the same list the Build panel checks in Factory Manage.
• Staff Requirements — the worker groups needed to run it, by type and quantity.
• Recipes — one card per recipe: name, cycle duration, cycles per day, IP/cycle, and the Inputs → Outputs flow with clickable merchandise names.
• Back to [merchandise] appears at the top when you arrived from Production Lines.

Clicking a machine name switches to Production Zones and remembers where you came from; clicking a merchandise name switches to Production Lines.

8.5 Trading Hall

The Trading Hall is the OnAir merchandise marketplace. For any product it shows every Supply (selling) and Demand (buying) point in the world, on a map and in a detailed list. You can buy stock and sign delivery contracts straight from this page — no other client is needed.

Merchandise types

The left column lists every type with its icon and unit weight (kg or lb, following your preference); the search field narrows it. Click a type to load its board — fuels, construction kits, raw materials, food, electronics and personnel all trade here.

Supply and Demand boards

The header shows the product, its description and a Trading Assistant button that opens the purchasing assistant on this type. Two tabs switch boards:

• Supply — Airport, Dist, Seller, Qty, Total Wt, Price/Unit, Total Value
• Demand — Airport, Dist, Buyer, Req, Dlvd, Remaining, Price/Unit, Total Value, Status

Remaining subtracts both what has been delivered and the contracts other airlines already signed. Nothing is selected for you: the board opens where you are, no longer on the first row the server happens to send. The top-right toggle swaps strip cards for a compact table.

Distances and radius filter

Distances are measured from your own industries — the closest one to each row — falling back to your base, and the caption above the board always names the reference.

• Anchor — type an identifier into "Near which airport?" to measure from there instead; one chip returns you to your industries.
• Radius — Any distance / 100 / 250 / 500 / 1000 NM, filtering the list and the map together. Tab counters read "11 / 795" and a ring is drawn around each anchor.
• If nothing is in range the board says so, names the nearest entry and offers one click to drop the filter. Your radius is remembered between sessions.

Sort chips reorder either board; nearest first is the default.

Buying and contracts

• Buy — pick a supply lot and enter a quantity; cost and weight update live, a dialog confirms.
• Buy from unlimited supply — always offered for products the system sells without limit: enter an eligible airport identifier and a quantity. A minimum airport size is stated when one applies.
• Take Contract — commits your airline to deliver the quantity entered. A 10% penalty applies if it is not delivered within 7 days.

Contracts signed here are listed again on My Contracts, and the demands your own factories publish on My Demands. The server checks cash, Manager rights and available quantity; any refusal is shown verbatim.

Map

Markers carry the icon of the selected type — violet supply, goldenrod demand — and print quantity and unit price on the pin once you are zoomed in far enough; further out they fall back to plain dots so the map stays readable. Clicking a pin opens its price popup and selects the row without moving the map; clicking a row recenters on it.

Layers: Supply, Demand, My Industries, My Basecamps (yours only), Topographic and My Aircraft (fleet positions with their freelance status).

Compare prices. Price filters narrow the displayed Supply and Demand boards. The vs base figure compares the unit price with the merchandise base price; it is not your net transport profit. Include delivery cost and contract exposure when comparing offers.

8.6 Purchasing Assistant

The Purchasing Assistant compares every buy point (Supply) with every sell point (Demand) for one merchandise type and lists the pairs that make money, ranked by how much profit each pound of cargo earns per nautical mile flown.

Choosing a merchandise

Pick a type in the dropdown at the top — its weight per unit is shown next to the name, and supply and demand reload straight away. The line beside the selector counts the supply points, demand points and viable routes found. The refresh control in the header re-reads both for the type currently selected, and Back to Trading Hall returns to the map.

What counts as a route

A pair only appears when all of these hold:

• the sell price is higher than the buy price;
• the demand still has room — what has already been delivered, and what open contracts have reserved, is deducted;
• buy and sell are two different airports.

Qty is therefore the smaller of the supply available and that remaining demand, and Total Wt is that quantity at the type's unit weight, shown in kg or lbs according to your setting.

The score

The last column, Profit/NM/lb, divides the profit per unit by the unit weight, then by the distance. It is the column to trust: a fat margin on a heavy good flown across an ocean can be worth less than a modest one next door. Bright cyan marks an excellent score, white a good one, grey a weak one.

Sorting

Three columns can rank the table: Profit/Unit, Total Profit and Profit/NM/lb (the default). Clicking one of those headers changes which column ranks the list; the order is always highest first. Only the top 100 rows for the current ranking are shown.

8.7 My Goods Inventory

The My Goods Inventory page lists every merchandise your company owns — cargo, charter contracts, construction kits, travel tokens — wherever it currently sits: at an airport, loaded in an aircraft, in flight, or in transit by truck/boat. A synchronized map shows every location holding goods.

Filters

• Filter on airport — narrows the list to goods located at (or in an aircraft parked at) the selected airport.
• Filter on material — shows only goods of the selected merchandise type (wood, ore, tokens, etc.).
• The counter on the right shows how many rows match the active filters.

Columns

• Type — merchandise icon and name. Charter contracts are suffixed with "contract".
• Airport — where the goods are; click it to open Airport Lookup.
• Location — extra status: which aircraft holds it, in flight, or the transit route for goods moving by truck/boat.
• Qty / Wt per unit / Total wt.

Actions

• Transport — for goods sitting at an airport, ship them to another airport by truck/boat. The dialog shows the estimated cost and duration. Custom long-identifier airports are accepted as destination.
• Deploy here — a Construction Kit loaded in a parked aircraft can be deployed to build a basecamp there.
• Unload / Deboard — drop goods (or charter staff) from an aircraft at the airport it is parked at.
• Claim — claim travel tokens to credit them to your company balance. A follow-up prompt offers to spend one right away with Use now; otherwise they stay available from the company menu.
• Delete — permanently discard goods. This cannot be undone.

Map

• One marker per location holding goods: teal for an airport, purple for an aircraft (placed at its live position).
• The popup aggregates the quantities per merchandise type sitting there.
• Clicking a table row or a marker keeps both sides in sync; the selected marker turns amber and the map recenters.

Finding stock. Type in the airport and material filters to narrow their choices; Clear removes the active filters. A filtered empty result is not proof that the company owns no goods. The map groups goods at a parked aircraft with that airport, rather than drawing a second location. A link from My Contracts preselects the contract goods and airport after inventory has loaded.

8.8 My Contracts

A contract is a commitment to deliver a given quantity of a merchandise to a given airport. You sign one from the Trading Hall. This page lists every contract your company has signed, with its deadline and its progress — until it existed, a signed contract only resurfaced as a debit a week later.

How a contract is fulfilled

• You never deliver manually. As soon as matching goods are sitting at the contract's airport, the server hands them over on its own, pays you per unit, and moves the progress bar.
• So the whole job is: get the right merchandise to the right airport before the deadline — buy it in the Trading Hall, produce it in a factory, or fly it in from another airport.
• The two small buttons at the end of each row exist for exactly that. One opens My Goods Inventory filtered on that merchandise and that airport, so you can see whether the goods are already in place. The other opens the Trading Hall on that merchandise, to buy what is missing.

The deadline, and what it costs

• A contract runs for 7 days from the moment it is signed.
• If it expires with units still undelivered, you are charged a penalty of 10% of the undelivered value. What you already delivered stays paid.
• The header strip shows how many contracts are running, the Outstanding credits they still owe you, and when the next expiry falls. Outstanding is also the base that 10% is computed from, so it doubles as your exposure.
• The Expires pill follows a colour scale as the clock runs down, ending red in the final hour; gray means it has already expired.

Reading the list

• Columns: Ref, Goods, Airport, Price/unit, Total value, Delivered, Status, Expires, then the two shortcuts. Every heading sorts.
• Ref is the code the Industry notifications quote, so you can match a message to a row.
• Delivered is a bar: green is delivered, gray is still owed. Hover it for the quantities and their weight — the weight is what tells you whether a load fits in your aircraft, and it also names the penalty at risk.
• Above the table: a search box (goods, ICAO or reference), a status filter that carries its own counts, and an airport filter that appears once more than one airport is involved.

Good to know

• A signed contract cannot be cancelled. It can only be fulfilled or expire.
• If you belong to a Virtual Airline, its contracts appear here too, marked with a VA badge.
• The list keeps contracts in progress plus anything that expired in the last 7 days — older ones drop off on their own.
• The map places one marker per airport, showing how many contracts are due there. Click a row or a marker to sync the two.

8.9 My Demands

A demand is you as the buyer. You say what merchandise you want, how much of it, at which airport, and what you pay per unit. Your demand then appears in the Trading Hall, where other players can sign a contract and fly the goods in for you.

Three things that cost money — read these once

• You pay the whole thing up front. Creating the demand charges you quantity × price immediately, not when the goods arrive. The Committed figure at the top is how much of that has not yet turned into goods.
• Cancelling refunds only part of it. You get back the units nobody has contracted for yet — never the units already delivered, and never the units another player has signed for. Refundable now is that exact amount across all your active demands, and the cancel dialog spells it out again for the one you are cancelling.
• Contracts already signed survive the cancel. Those goods will still arrive, and you have already paid for them. Cancelling a demand does not get you out of them.

Placing a demand

• Pick the merchandise, the quantity, the price per unit and the delivery airport. The price is pre-filled from what the market is currently paying in your world; raise it to attract a carrier, or lower it and wait.
• There is a ceiling: the server refuses any price above ten times the merchandise base price. The limit is shown next to the form, so you find out before submitting rather than after.
• The line under the form tells you what is still missing while the button is disabled, then what you are about to be charged and the total weight of the load once it is not.

Reading the table

• Columns: Goods, Airport, Price/unit, Total value, Quantity, Contracts, Status, plus the Cancel button. Every heading sorts.
• The Quantity bar has three parts: green is delivered and yours, lime is under contract — someone has committed to bringing it — and gray is what nobody has taken yet. Only the gray part is refundable. Hover it for the quantities and their weight.
• Contracts counts the players who signed up. A row with a chevron expands into who they are, what their contract is worth, how far along they are, its status and when it expires — and a mail shortcut to write to them. Their contract expiring costs them a penalty, not you, but your goods do not arrive.
• Cancel only appears while a demand is Active.
• The status filter starts on Active. Completed and canceled demands are never deleted, so they pile up over time; switch the filter if you want to look back. Search matches the goods and the ICAO.

Good to know

• You cannot sign a contract against your own demand — the server refuses it.
• Nothing forces another player to take your demand. If it sits untouched, raise the price or cancel and get the gray part back.

9.1 Cash Flow Statement

Toolbar and info bar

• Export CSV — downloads the full transaction list (UTC, description, incomes, expenses, balance).
• Refresh — reloads everything from the server.
• Archives — when older monthly snapshots exist, pick a month and load it: a banner appears, the table shows that month, and the amount carried into it is displayed. Back to current returns to the live view.
• Report date — date and amount of the last OnAir financial report.
• Current Cash — real-time balance, with a sparkline. That trend is kept locally, per company, one sample per hour over a 15-day window, so it survives a restart.

List tab

A description filter narrows the rows. Columns show UTC time, description, income, expense and the balance after each transaction. Starting with Current Cash on the newest row, the calculation subtracts each amount to obtain the next older balance. Filtering hides rows without changing this calculation.

The dot classifies every row:

• Revenue (green) and Expense (red) — ordinary operations.
• Financial (blue) — loans, owner's equity, renting bonds, credit transfers. Capital movements, not operating profit or loss.
• Investment (purple) — aircraft bought or sold, FBO and workshop upgrades. Cash turns into an asset you still own, so these never reach the Income Statement: they appear here and on the Balance Sheet.

Hover a row to read its category and its full description. Weights inside descriptions follow your kg / lbs preference.

Chart tab

• Balance over time — end-of-day balance, grouped by day, oldest on the left.
• Income vs expenses — daily totals, expenses drawn as positive values.

9.2 Income Statement

The Income Statement shows your company's revenues and expenses over a period you choose. Unlike the Balance Sheet, which is frozen at the last report date, this page queries the server for any date range.

Choosing the period

The header shows the current UTC date and time, and two date fields set the interval:

• From — first day of the period, included.
• to — last day of the period; the whole day counts, up to midnight UTC of the next day.

Click Display to load. The last 7 days are pre-selected. The refresh button in the header reloads the same period.

Revenues and Expenses

• Revenues — every revenue account with its amount: charter flights, scheduled routes, FBO services, cargo, interest received. Total in yellow.
• Expenses — every expense account: fuel, landing and parking fees, wages, maintenance, insurance, loan repayments. Total in red.

Net income

The footer bar gives the Net Income for the period: revenues plus expenses, expenses being negative. Green when profitable, red when at a loss.

The investment notice

A notice sits at the top of the page for exactly one question: you bought or sold an aircraft and cannot find it below. That is expected. A purchase is an investment — cash converted into another asset you still own — not an expense, so it never belongs on an income statement. It appears instead on the Cash Flow Statement, on its own investment marker, and on the Balance Sheet, while this page keeps measuring operating performance alone. Close the notice with the cross and it stays closed on future visits.

Real-world accounting works the same way: under IFRS and US GAAP a capital purchase is capitalised, never expensed at the moment of purchase. What does land here is the cost of owning: weekly ownership fees, maintenance, fuel, crew wages, landing fees. Official references: SEC — Beginners' Guide to Financial Statements — sec.gov · IAS 7 — Statement of Cash Flows — ifrs.org · IAS 16 — Property, Plant & Equipment — ifrs.org. See also the OnAir Player Handbook, section 8.6.

9.3 Balance Sheet

The Balance Sheet displays your company's financial position at the date of the last financial report generated by OnAir. Assets and liabilities are fetched directly from the OnAir servers.

Refresh Button

The Refresh button in the top-right corner reloads the balance sheet from the server. Since the balance sheet is not updated in real time, use this button after triggering a new financial report inside OnAir.

Top Stat Cards

Three cards summarize your financial position, each with a rolling sparkline that tracks recent evolution (one data point every 5 minutes, stored locally):

• Total Assets (green) — Sum of all asset accounts returned by the server.
• Total Liabilities (red) — Sum of all liability accounts.
• Company Value (blue when positive, red when negative) — Total Assets minus Total Liabilities, i.e. the net equity of your company.

Sparklines only accumulate data while the dashboard is open. History resets if you close the application.

Assets / Liabilities Tables

Two side-by-side tables detail every accounting line returned by OnAir:

• Cash and Assets — Available cash, fleet value, FBO value, receivables, fuel inventory, ongoing missions, investments, etc.
• Liabilities and Equity — Outstanding bank loans, accounts payable, wages due, pending taxes, accrued charges, etc.

Each table displays a colored total at the bottom matching its corresponding stat card.

Company Value Footer Bar

A highlighted bar at the bottom of the page repeats the company's net value (Assets − Liabilities). It displays in green when positive, red when negative. This is the single most representative figure of your overall financial health in OnAir.

9.4 Financial Health

The Financial Health page reads your company's finances at a glance: summary cards, the composition of your assets, two gauges and rolling trend lines. Every figure comes from one consolidated server call, and both ratios now use the same formula, colours and format here, on the Dashboard finance card, in Company Lookup and on the Leaderboard.

Top cards

• Cash — money available right now.
• Company Value — net worth: assets minus liabilities.
• Total Assets — everything you own.
• Total Loans — outstanding loan balance.

What your assets are made of

A single bar splits your assets into the five accounts the server keeps: cash, aircraft, FBOs, FBO fuel and virtual airline shares. It is the fastest way to see why a ratio moved. Note what is not there: goods, factories and cargo are never capitalised, so industry spending shrinks your asset base instead of moving value inside it.

Debt Ratio

How much of the company is financed by debt: Loans / Assets. The dial no longer stops at 2.00, so a heavily indebted company is no longer drawn like a merely stretched one.

• Below 0.5 — great shape, most of what you own is paid for.
• 0.5 to 1.0 — significant debt, but assets still cover it.
• Above 1.0 — over-leveraged: you owe more than you own.

Return on Assets — a lifetime figure

This is all profit since the company was founded, divided by the assets you own today. It is not a return over a period and is not comparable to a real-world ROA: it grows simply with age, and above 100% it rises when your asset base falls, because spending that is not capitalised (fuel, wages, goods) shrinks the denominator. Read it as a maturity indicator, not a score to chase.

• Above 100% — lifetime earnings exceed everything you own.
• 50% to 100% — good profitability.
• 10% to 50% — modest returns, room to improve.
• Below 10% — assets are not generating much profit yet.

Recent return — the periodic one

Just above the dial, Last 14 days and Last 7 days give the return the lifetime figure is not: income actually earned in that window, divided by your current assets. That is the number to watch session after session. Two caveats stated on the page: the denominator is today's assets rather than an average over the window, and the figure is not annualised, because stretching 14 days out for a pilot who flies in bursts swings wildly. It is coloured on sign only, green above zero and red below.

Bottom cards

• Share Capital — company share capital.
• Income (1 week) and Income (2 weeks) — revenue over the last 7 and 14 days.

9.5 Bank Loans

The Bank Loans page shows your active loans, the offers the bank is willing to make, and lets you repay early. Borrowing is unlocked in the skill tree: until you invest in the Bank Loans skill, the bank has no offers for you.

Current loans

The top-left table lists every active loan:

• Principal — the amount originally borrowed.
• First Payment — date of the first weekly repayment.
• Weeks and Remaining — total duration, and the weeks still to run.
• Weekly Payment — the amount taken from your cash each week.
• Annual Rate — the interest rate applied.
• Due — what is still owed: weekly payment times the remaining weeks.
• Last Payment — date of the most recent instalment.
• Repay — settle the loan early. A quote appears first; nothing is charged until you confirm.

Loan proposals

Below sit the offers currently on the table: Principal, First Payment, Duration (weeks), Weekly Payment, Annual Rate and an Accept button. Two other states can appear in place of the list, and they mean very different things:

• Skill not unlocked — the bank genuinely will not lend to you yet. A button takes you to the Skills page to unlock Bank Loans. Access is re-checked every time you open the page, so no restart is needed after buying the skill.
• Load error — the request to the bank failed. This is not a locked skill, and the page now says so, showing the server's own message and a Retry button. It used to claim no access instead, which sent players who had already unlocked Bank Loans off to the Skills page for nothing.

Attribution criteria

The right-hand panel lists what the bank looks at. A green dot marks a favourable value, an orange one an unfavourable value.

• Bank credit score — the server's overall rating, green above 50%. The most important line: it aggregates everything below.
• Share Capital — your company's share capital.
• Company current value — current net value.
• Remaining Principals to repay — total outstanding across your loans.
• Reputation — company reputation, as a percentage.

Early repayment

Repaying early costs the remaining principal plus a 10% penalty. The exact total is shown in the confirmation box before anything is debited, and the repayment is refused if your cash does not cover it.

9.6 Business Review

The Business Review page is your in-house consultant. He reads the last 30 days of revenue and expenses, checks the books, and leaves a written verdict with a colour-coded list of findings. The engine is deterministic: every finding comes from a fixed rule applied to your own numbers, so the same books always produce the same advice.

The consultant's note

The card at the top holds the summary: a couple of sentences on the last 30 days, the date the report was filed and the date he returns.

• The note is written locally from the findings and appears instantly. When a richer, AI-written version can be reached it replaces the wording and an AI badge appears beside the title. If it cannot be reached, the local note simply stands — the advice never depends on the AI being available, and the findings and severities are identical either way.
• The note is stored with the report, so re-opening the page shows the same text rather than a rewritten one. Switching the interface language regenerates it in the new language.

Headline numbers

• Revenue — operating income over the window.
• Expenses — operating costs, shown as a positive amount.
• Net result — the difference. Green when positive, red when negative.

Findings

Each finding carries an icon, a headline, a short rationale and a severity badge; the card's left border repeats the colour so the list scans at a glance.

• Critical (red) — a loss or a drain that demands attention.
• Watch (orange) — a trend turning the wrong way.
• Opportunity (cyan) — idle capacity or savings within reach.
• Good (green) — something the books confirm you are doing well.
• Note (grey) — context worth knowing, not actionable on its own.

The rules cover fuel bought at other FBOs, maintenance, landing and parking fees, cargo storage, late-delivery penalties, payroll, leverage and the week-on-week trend.

Breakdowns

Cost by aircraft lists the eight aircraft that cost you the most, each with a category split sorted high to low; an aircraft that left your fleet during the window is still named from the ledger rather than shown as unknown. Landing fees by airport lists the eight airports that took the most in fees, with the number of charges — the fastest way to see where an owned FBO would pay for itself.

Cadence, cache and price

• A fresh review is a paid consulting service, priced at 1% of your company value. A quote is shown first; a cancelled or declined payment does nothing.
• The consultant returns once a week. Until then the button is locked and shows the return date.
• Your last report stays free to view. It is cached on your own machine, encrypted and per company, so re-opening the page costs nothing and asks the server nothing.
• With no report yet, the empty state offers Generate my first review, which opens the same paid flow.
• While a review is being prepared, a short consultant-at-work animation runs.

9.7 Company Lookup

Company Lookup finds any OnAir airline from its code and shows what the OnAir servers return about it: owner, key figures, fleet, employees and certifications. Whatever appears here is the same for anyone who looks your own company up.

Search

Type the company code (3 to 5 characters, typed in any case and converted to uppercase) and press Search or Enter. The page also opens from a link in the leaderboards, the flight logs, a notification, or the Reputation card of your own Dashboard.

World picker

When several worlds are available a world selector sits next to the search field, so you can look up a company in any world, not only your own. Your current world is marked, and a hint reminds you when you are searching outside it.

Actions

• Flight Logs — opens that company's flight history with your own date range and filters.
• Send Mail — opens the mailbox pre-filled with the company code (and the target world when it differs from yours).
• Send Credits — a transfer dialog for an amount and an optional note. Same world only, never to your own company, and the server debits you immediately.

Owner card

Avatar when one is set, pseudonym, birth date with the computed age, Total Flight Hours (everything the pilot has logged, before and inside the current company) and Hours in Company. The three action buttons repeat here.

Company card

Account badge image when the owner has chosen one, full name, code and world, Challenge Mode and Paused badges when they apply, the date the owner was last seen, a reputation bar with its percentage and a level bar with the XP earned toward the next level.

Key figures

• Current Cash and Company Value.
• Lifetime income, with the last week and the last two weeks underneath.
• Ratios — the ROA and the Debt ratio. The ROA is a lifetime figure: income since the company was founded divided by today's assets, which is why an old company can sit well above 100%. It is computed and coloured the same way here as on the Financial Health page.
• Jobs — missions in progress and missions completed.
• Fleet & Staff — aircraft (with how many are airborne), FBOs and employees.

Fleet and employees

Two tables side by side. The fleet lists registration (click to open Aircraft Lookup), type, the current airport code (click to open Airport Lookup) and a coloured status badge. The employee table lists pilots, cabin crew and mechanics with their category, status and current location.

Certifications and ranks

One tile per aircraft class the owner is qualified on, with the hours and landings logged in that class and the rank reached — Trainee, Junior Officer, Flight Officer, First Officer or Captain — with its insignia.

9.8 Leaderboards

The Leaderboards rank the companies of your OnAir world across six independent metrics. Only companies active in the last two weeks are included, the data is rebuilt once a week, and the date of that rebuild is shown at the top of the page. Refresh reloads it from the server, but nothing moves until the weekly rebuild has run.

The six boards

Each board is its own table showing the Top 20:

• Reputation — overall reputation, from 0 to 100%. It rises when missions are delivered on time and undamaged, and falls when they are abandoned or arrive in poor condition. It is the single most useful number for attracting better-paying clients.
• Return on Assets — a lifetime figure: everything the company has earned since it was founded, divided by the assets it holds today. That is why long-lived companies sit far above 100%, and why it rewards earning more rather than owning more. It is computed and formatted here exactly as on the Financial Health page.
• Company Value — cash plus fleet, FBOs and other assets. A raw measure of accumulated size.
• Player Cruise Hours (last 4 weeks) — cruise hours flown by human pilots, not by AI.
• Player Flight Hours (last 4 weeks) — total hours from engine start to engine shutdown by human pilots: taxi, climb, cruise and descent included.
• Outsource Expenses — total spent having other companies or AI fly your missions. Only companies that actually spent something appear.

Reading a board

Each row shows a trend marker, the company code, the company name and the value. The My Score figure in the board header is always your own value for that metric, whether or not you are in the Top 20 — and if you are, your row is highlighted.

Trend markers

• A blue star — new to this ranking this week.
• A green up arrow — you moved up compared with last week.
• A red down arrow — you moved down.
• An orange dot — unchanged.

Other leaderboards

These six boards rank companies. Two other rankings live elsewhere: the Routes Leaderboard, which ranks the recurring routes players operate, and the Industry leaderboards (industry points and contract credits) on the Industries dashboard. Custom Routes and Virtual Airlines are now open to every player, so those boards are reachable by anyone.

9.9 Partnerships

Partnerships is your company's network of partner companies: who you are linked with, who has asked to be, and who you have asked. A partnership is a standing agreement between two companies in the same world — each OnAir world keeps its own separate network.

This page is still being finished. Its wording, its options and what a partnership does for you can still change from one update to the next, so treat it as work in progress rather than a settled feature.

Header

The title carries the number of active partners. Next to it: a view toggle between Strips (one visual card per row) and List (a compact table), a sort selector shown in Strips view, and Refresh to reload everything from the servers. Your choice of view is remembered.

The four tabs

Each list tab shows a small counter when it holds something, so one glance tells you whether anything needs an answer:

• Partners — your active partnerships. Each row shows the company, the message the invitation carried, how long the partnership has lasted, and a Remove button that asks for confirmation before dissolving it.
• Received — invitations sent to you, in orange while Pending and in red once Declined. A pending invitation offers Accept and Decline; a declined one only offers Delete, which clears it from your list.
• Sent — invitations you sent that have not been accepted. You can still Cancel them, after a confirmation.
• Propose — the two invitation forms.

Proposing a partnership

• The player is already in OnAir — enter their airline code or their e-mail, add an optional message, and send. The request lands in that company's Received tab.
• Invite a friend who has not joined — enter an e-mail address and an optional message; they receive an invitation to join the game and your network.

After a successful send the page switches to Sent so you can see the new invitation immediately.

Sorting

In List view the column headers are clickable: company and since on Partners, sender or recipient plus status and date on the invitation tabs. One click sorts ascending, a second reverses it. In Strips view the selector in the header offers the same keys with a button to flip the direction. Each tab keeps its own sort.

Statuses

• Accepted, in green — the partnership is active.
• Pending, in orange — the invitation is waiting for an answer.
• Declined, in red — the recipient turned it down.

Loading failure. A request error does not mean that you have no partners. Read the error and retry with Refresh before acting on an apparently empty list.

9.10 Virtual Airline

A Virtual Airline (VA) is a company several players fly for together. VAs are now open to everyone. This page covers the VA console, creating a VA and joining one.

Joining a VA

• Invited — an invitation now lands somewhere: it waits at the top of the Apply page, which renames itself to say you have been invited. Accept and your company becomes a member.
• Apply — the Apply page lists the active VAs of your world with code, name, callsign, description, members, fleet and 30-day flights & hours. Search, sort, then Send Application; the card turns Pending until an admin answers. Only while you belong to no VA.
• Create — name, 5-character airline code and starting equity (100,000 credits minimum, from your cash). You become the founder and land in the console; callsign, website and dividends come later. Career mode only — Freelance companies are pointed to Apply.

Working as the VA

The Work as button, carrying the VA name, is on every page for Dispatcher roles and above: in the title bar of the desktop app, and at the top of the sidebar in the web version. While it is on, a coloured frame surrounds the app so you always know whose money you are spending.

• Aircraft you buy join the VA fleet, jobs you accept belong to the VA, and spending comes out of its account.
• Fuel is billed to the company operating the aircraft, and the hiring screens name the company that pays.
• The lobby shows the VA under a company that belongs to one.
• A contract taken by the VA can only be dropped by the VA — from your own company it is refused, with an explanation: switch, or ask a Dispatcher.

The console

• Stat cards (members, flights, hours, PAX), VA information and a top-10 activity chart.
• Members table — role, base, flights, hours, PAX, cargo, earnings, last VA flight, plus a VATSIM chip you can link to a live callsign (kept on this computer; green dot = online).
• Passes — 24-hour freelance passes are bought on your OnAir account, not with company credits.
• Shareholders — any member can propose an equity increase of at least 50,000 credits; managers answer from the same panel.

Running it

• Properties (founder) — description, website, dividend %, logo, job-assignment rules, and dividend distribution behind a confirmation.
• Roles (founder) — permission level, colour, pay model (share of the job, per hour, weekly) and which jobs the role may load. A share is a percentage: 10 means 10 % of the job.
• Members (manager) — role, colour, the aircraft and the employees that member may use, shortcuts to their ranks and their work orders, and firing.
• The other way round — from an aircraft or an employee, open the VA permissions and tick the members allowed to use it.
• Invitations — answer applications, cancel invitations you sent, invite a company by airline code.

Assigning a job

A Dispatcher can hand a VA job to a member from the job lists; assigning nobody un-assigns it. The member sees it flagged for them, and the others are told they cannot load it.

Good to know

• The employee list mixes your own staff with the VA's — the server returns both, and the VA ones are marked.
• Only flights flown for the VA count in its statistics.
• Crews are hired on the Crew Market.
• Leave VA sits in the red Danger Zone. A member leaves cleanly; the founder only as the last member, which dissolves the VA.

10.1 Training

Experimental. An Experimental badge now sits on the page header, the exercise cards and the runners — grading thresholds and behaviour are still being tuned and may change between builds. Feedback goes to the #training-feedback channel on the OnAir Discord, linked under the intro.

Exercises

• Engine-Out Landing — engine cut 2,000 ft above the field; dead-stick onto the runway or the grass beside it.
• Slow Turn Practice — the checkride slot flown solo: a full 360° at minimum speed.
• Slow Flight & Stalls (new) — 3,000 ft AGL anywhere: slow flight clean then full flaps, with a stall and recovery in each configuration. No airport needed.
• Assigned Headings & Altitudes — three successive instructions to reach and hold.
• Precision Landing — touch down 150-400 m past the threshold and stop on the pavement.
• Engine Failure After Take-Off — failure at about 500 ft; land ahead. Turning back is a fail.
• Stabilized Approach — six criteria below the 500 ft gate; break one and the go-around, flown properly, is the pass.
• Crosswind Landing — real wind only: decrab at touchdown and hold the centerline in the rollout.
• IFR Hold — right-hand racetrack anchored where you start: 1-minute legs, two circuits.
• Traffic Pattern — left-hand circuit, downwind at 1,000 ft AGL, landing in the precision zone.
• Autorotation (helicopters) — coming soon.

Two modes

• Free practice — no OnAir flight, nothing sent to the server, grading fully local. The default, open to everyone.
• A free-practice exercise needs the connection all the same: if the link to the OnAir server drops, the app returns to the Lobby or shows its "Unable to connect to OnAir server" screen, and the exercise ends there. Nothing is lost beyond the attempt itself — no flight, no money, no wear. The simulator is put back as it was — engine restarted, fuel restored — on the next connected mount if it could not be done right away.
• OnAir flight — a dedicated round-trip flight, dispatched, tracked and registered under a neutral training category: no XP, reputation or wear, but fuel is consumed and billed. Engine-Out, Slow Turn, Slow Flight & Stalls and Assigned Headings offer it. If the action is unavailable, read the reason shown on the card.

Flying one

• Load your aircraft at the departure airport, click Open exercise, pick the mode, then From Sim to fill in aircraft and airport, check the preconditions and hit Start the exercise.
• Exercises that anchor their targets on the aircraft's state arm instead: a setup card lists what is missing (airborne, height above ground, wings level) and grading starts by itself once you are in position — no second click.
• Engine-Out spawns a 3D marker over the departure threshold at 2,000 ft AGL — the gate that triggers the cut. It failed to appear in OnAir-flight mode; that is fixed, and the 3D-pack check now looks only in the connected simulator's folder.
• Abort exercise stops cleanly at any moment: engine restored, marker removed, fuel restored.

Instructor and limits

Each exercise speaks an intro and in-flight callouts in the checkride examiner voice, and the transcript panel keeps every line; mute the training audio category in Settings for a silent run. The airport must publish precise runway data (very small fields are refused), and the exercises need the modern X-Plane bridge, not the legacy plugin.

10.2 Maneuvering During Slow Flight

Slow flight means flying just above the stall speed, at an airspeed well below normal cruise. It is a fundamental handling exercise: it shows how power, pitch attitude, airspeed and altitude work together when the wing is close to its limit.

This help opens next to Start Tracking when a Checkride is active — the slow-turn leg is a graded exercise. The Training page drills the same technique in two exercises, both marked Experimental: Slow Turn Practice, the checkride's own graded slot flown solo, and Slow Flight & Stalls, which holds slow flight clean and then with full flaps, each followed by a deliberate stall and recovery. Enter high enough to finish no lower than 1,500 ft AGL — the same floor the Training exercise enforces.

Before you begin — clearing turn

Always start with a clearing turn (about a 180° change of heading, e.g. two 90° turns in opposite directions) to scan for traffic hidden by your blind spots.

Entering slow flight

• Apply carburetor heat if your aircraft normally uses it when power is reduced.
• Reduce power below the cruise setting and let the airspeed bleed off.
• Add back pressure to hold altitude as you slow — too fast and the airplane climbs, too slow and it descends.
• Trim away the control-wheel pressure during the transition.
• Near the target speed, add power back to a setting that holds altitude, then make small power adjustments and retrim.

Holding slow flight

• Power controls altitude; pitch controls airspeed. To climb, add power; to descend, reduce it. Pulling the nose up alone will not climb you — it only brings the stall closer.
• Right rudder keeps you coordinated: high angle of attack, torque and P-factor all pull the nose left. Watch the turn-coordinator ball.
• The controls feel mushy and respond slowly — use larger, smoother inputs than usual.

Turns, climbs and descents

Keep turns shallow: a steeper bank raises the load factor and the stall speed. Add power in the turn to protect your margin. Even at full power you can stall if you exceed the critical angle of attack while trying to hold altitude.

Using flaps

If you practise with flaps, lower them one position at a time. After each step, reset pitch for airspeed, adjust power for altitude and retrim. Fully extended flaps add a lot of drag — full power may give only a very slow climb, if any.

Returning to cruise

Apply full power while holding a constant altitude, then raise the flaps slowly, one position at a time so the speed increases gradually.

10.3 Aviation Quiz

The Aviation Quiz is a timed multiple-choice exam covering nine aviation subjects. The server draws the questions, serves them one at a time and grades each answer, then grants XP and Reputation based on how well you did and how hard the level was. The exam can be taken once every 7 days, and the app spends the attempt the moment it starts — whatever your score, and even if you abandon it. It is worth taking seriously.

Setup screen

• Subjects — all nine are always included: ALW (Air Law), AGK (Aircraft General Knowledge), FPP (Flight Planning & Performance), HPL (Human Performance), MET (Meteorology), NAV (Navigation), OPR (Operational Procedures), POF (Principles of Flight), COM (Communications). Questions are loaded in your help language.
• Difficulty — Level 1 is 1 question per subject with 30 seconds each (9 questions), Level 2 is 2 per subject with 20 seconds (18 questions, the default), Level 3 is 3 per subject with 15 seconds (27 questions).
• Availability — if you already took the quiz within the last 7 days, the start button stays disabled and the date of the next attempt is shown. If the 7 days have passed, a note recalls when you last took the exam and when the next lock would fall if you take it now. Before your very first attempt, a note warns that it will start the 7-day countdown.
• Virtual Airlines — a VA does not take this quiz: the entry leaves the menu while you work as your VA. Switch back to your own company to take it. The skill tree reset exam, which grants no reward, stays available from Skills to the VA's Founder and Managers.

Quiz screen

• A thin progress bar shows the current question out of the total.
• The timer bar under it turns from green to orange below half the allotted time, then red below a quarter, with the remaining seconds on the right. If it runs out, the question counts as wrong and the quiz moves on by itself after three seconds.
• Each question carries the coloured badge of its subject, then four answers labelled A to D.
• Once you answer, the right option turns green, a wrong pick turns red, the others fade, and a short explanation appears under the card. Next moves on; on the last question it reads See Results.
• Trying to leave mid-quiz asks for confirmation, so progress is never lost by accident.

Results screen

• Your percentage with a coloured score bar and a grade: Excellent! from 90%, Good job! from 75%, Keep practicing from 50%, Study more below that.
• The count of correct answers, how many questions timed out, the level used, and the total time in minutes and seconds.
• The reward panel shows the XP earned and the Reputation granted — or, below 75%, says no reward was granted this time and that the next exam is available in 7 days.
• A grid with one card per subject (correct out of total, plus a small bar) shows where you are weak.
• A scrollable review lists every question with a green or red marker, its subject code and an hourglass when it timed out.
• There is no replay button: the exam is over once you finish it. If the server did not record it, the screen says so — the attempt is still spent, so you know why no reward arrived.

Resetting the Skills Tree

When you start a skill-tree reset from the Skills page, the quiz unlocks regardless of the 7-day wait and no XP or Reputation is claimed. You need 75% or more; on success the app takes you back to the Skills page and performs the reset, and on failure you wait for the next attempt: this exam has its own counter, one attempt every 7 days per company, spent the moment it starts.

11.1 Mailbox

Header

• Unread counter — The subtitle shows how many unread messages are in your inbox.
• View toggle — Switches between Strips view (styled rows with a body preview) and compact list view.
• New Message — Opens the compose form.
• Refresh — Reloads messages from the server. The mailbox also auto-refreshes when a Push notification (Mail category) arrives.

Left Panel — Message List

The left panel shows all filterable messages:

• Received tab — Received messages sorted by date descending. Unread messages are indicated by a blue dot and the unread counter.
• Sent tab — Messages sent by your company.
• Search — Filters messages by keywords in subject or body.

Each message shows: sender/recipient airline code, message type badge, subject, body preview, and relative time (e.g. "2h ago").

Message Types

• Message (blue) — Free-text message between companies.
• Hire Offer (green) — Pilot hire proposal.
• Freelance (purple) — Freelance mission offer.
• Aircraft Sale (orange) — Aircraft sale proposal.
• Aircraft Rent (cyan) — Aircraft rental proposal.
• Money Transfer (green) — Money transfer notification.

Right Panel — Detail and Compose

The right panel shows the full content of the selected message: subject, type, sender, recipient, UTC date, and body. A Reply button is available for received messages.

Composing a Message

In compose mode:

• World — If you have access to more than one world, pick the recipient's world. Defaults to your current world. Switching world clears the current recipient.
• To — Type an airline code (4 to 8 characters) or a partner company name. The dropdown blends two sources: your local partners (substring match on code or name) and a server-side exact-code lookup (3 to 5 characters) that lets you reach companies outside your partner list. Those results are tagged NOT PARTNER.
• Subject — Message subject (required).
• Message — Message body (optional).
• Send — Sends the message and switches to the Sent tab.

11.2 Chat

The Chat page lets you talk in real time with other players in your OnAir world. Messages are delivered live and persist on the server so you can read what was said before you joined.

Layout

• Left panel — Channels — Lists the channels you can join: your world channel (named after your world, e.g. #BlueSkies) and the cross-world channel (#Global). The active channel is highlighted. A small green dot at the bottom shows the realtime connection is live.
• Right panel — Conversation — Shows the active channel's history. The header repeats the channel name and the total number of messages loaded.

Reading messages

• Date dividers — Today, Yesterday, or the date — split the conversation by day.
• Avatar — A colored circle with the first two letters of the company code. Your own messages use the accent blue color.
• Sender — Company code (bold) followed by the full company name. The HH:MM timestamp is shown on the right.
• Grouping — Consecutive messages from the same sender are merged under a single avatar to keep the conversation compact. Anonymous messages are never grouped.

Sending a message

Type your message in the input at the bottom and press Enter (or click Send). Your message appears immediately while it is being broadcast. If the live connection has dropped, the app reconnects automatically and retries once.

Channels

• World channel — Only visible to companies in your world. Best for coordinating flights, asking about local weather, or finding nearby players.
• #Global — Visible to every world. Use it for general OnAir conversation.

Status indicator

At the bottom of the channel list, Live with a green dot means the realtime channel is connected. Connecting... means the app is still establishing or restoring the connection.

11.3 Settings

Settings configures your account, your simulator, the look of the app, the audio and the company rules. Tabs: Connection, Flight Sim, Sound & Voice, Controls, Preferences, Discord Webhooks, Company Actions, Recovery, About and Release Notes, plus a Staff Tools dropdown at the end for staff-only tools. Click Save top right — though many switches save instantly, with no Save button.

Connection

• Account and sign-out, read-only identifiers, the local airport database, and optional map overlay keys.
• API quota — under your API key, the server time that key may use. Tools that read the public API (scripts, OnAirTools) spend it: 1 CU (compute unit) is 1 ms of OnAir server time, refilled at 1 CU per second up to 15 000 CU. When it runs out the API refuses the tool with HTTP 429 until it refills, and the row says how long to wait. Refresh reads it again; the detail lists which calls cost the most since the server last restarted. The Companion itself does not use this API, so it never spends your quota.
• Secure DNS — optional. The app resolves OnAir server addresses over an encrypted connection instead of asking the name server your router or provider gave you. Try it if the app cannot reach the server while the rest of the machine browses fine: a broken local resolver is a common cause. Leave it off if you filter DNS on purpose (Pi-hole, AdGuard, NextDNS, parental controls) — encrypted lookups bypass them.
• A subscription that runs out while you play is now caught in session, not only at the lobby: instead of every action failing without explanation, you get the refusal, a Check again button and a renewal link.

Flight Sim

Left — accounts and gameplay: Navigraph, SimBrief (username or Pilot ID plus a 3-letter airline code), VATSIM, Hoppie ACARS, Crew Groups, opt-in in-flight emergencies and de-icing penalty, and the automatic start of tracking above 10 kt ground speed, which can be switched off.

Right — the simulator: which one you fly (MSFS 2020/2024, Prepar3D, FSX, X-Plane plugin or Web API), the X-Plane folder and plugin, remote simulator setup with its own guide behind the question mark, Test Simulator, company behaviour switches (on Cumulus also Don't force time in sim, to fly at the time you set in the simulator, and the checkride difficulty), community packages, in-sim 3D scenery with a self-test, and the airport layout cache.

In-game panel (MSFS). It is installed for you — there is nothing to switch on inside the simulator, and the Old Client's switch for it has no equivalent here. In MSFS, look for the OnAir icon with a small dot in the simulator toolbar; the plain OnAir icon belongs to the Old Client's panel and will not connect to the Companion. Restart MSFS once after the first install. To remove it, untick Install the OnAir Minimap in-game panel under community packages.

ATC on your route. One option, Show online ATC on your route, off by default, shows the online VATSIM controllers on your flight: the airport chips, the controllers ahead in Overview, the next one in the flight header, and the airspace bands (Navigraph data package needed) — see Flight Management. Off, none of it is shown and no request is made for it.

Navigraph-only airports. Some airports exist in MSFS only through the Navigraph data package (navigraph-nav-base, in your Community folder). The Companion looks for it: when it is installed and active, those airports are available in your job lists and pickers; otherwise they are hidden from your job lists, maps and pickers, like any airport MSFS does not have (unless you have unticked Only use Simulator vanilla airports in Preferences). This only concerns MSFS. In Flight Sim, under Navigraph, one sentence says what was found. If the Community folder cannot be found, a linked Navigraph account is used instead.

Sound & Voice

Local text-to-speech with one switch per kind of announcement, so you decide what is spoken.Also here: master volume (0 % mutes the app), per-sound switches, the destination-country radio at touchdown, and an opt-in looping alarm when tracking breaks.

The ATC on your route channel carries the spoken advisories about the online VATSIM controllers ahead of you, off by default; they speak only when Show online ATC on your route is on in Flight Sim too.

Controls

Bind a simulator button to a Companion action: start or resume tracking, register the finished flight, spoken weather and briefings, radio. Press Listen, then the button on the simulator side — every simulator can be captured except the legacy X-Plane plugin.

Preferences

Appearance (day or night, theme, font, 60-150 % zoom), units and help language, the company name and code (a name of 4 to 25 characters and a code of 4 letters or digits, 5 for a Virtual Airline; a code that is not available is refused when you save; in VA mode it renames the Virtual Airline, Manager role or above), and the company job rules: airport sizes, simulator-native airports, SimBrief-known airports, employee rest, level-mission aircraft, pay bonus and, on Cumulus, instant pilot and employee transport, the whole skill tree unlocked and the minimum aircraft renting time. Display & Connection Fixes all need a restart: flashing or overlapping pages, blurry rendering, forced display scale, and forced HTTP/1.1 — on by default, to get past antivirus and proxy software.

Discord Webhooks

Post your flights to a Discord channel: the OnAir server sends a message when a flight starts, is registered or is canceled — AI flights included, their pilot marked “(AI)”. In Discord, create a webhook (Server Settings → Integrations → Webhooks), paste its URL on the card of the event you want, tick Active and click Save webhooks — this tab has its own Save. Test posts the message once, saved or not; its variables come from your latest registered flight flown in the simulator. Each card has a Flights posted list: all flights, human pilots only, or AI flights only; with AI only, Test uses your latest AI flight. The webhooks belong to the company you are working as: a Virtual Airline has its own (Dispatcher role or above to change them), and flights flown for it — on its aircraft or for its jobs — are posted there too.

In-flight events (sent by this Companion) — a second kind of webhook, at the bottom of the tab, that this Companion posts itself while it tracks one of your flights: tracking started, engines, take-off, flight phases, landing and its rating, incidents, mission events, then flight registered or canceled. Every message carries the full Flight ID and Aircraft ID, the Real UTC time and the Sim time, in fields with fixed names that a tool reading the channel can rely on; tick Attach event.json to also get them as a JSON file, one event per message. Procedures and penalties and Aircraft settings are off by default: they post many messages. It saves as you change it, on this computer, for the company you are working as (a Virtual Airline has its own). Only flights this Companion tracks are posted: AI flights, the Old Client and the web version send nothing, and anyone who has the URL can post in the channel.

Company Actions, Recovery, About

• Management mode (Freelance or Advanced, 7-day cooldown either way), Pause Company with its fee and what stops, and the destructive Close Company — 7 days to recover through support.
• World transfer & economy ruleset (Advanced mode) — move the company to an easier world: Thunder to Stratus or Cumulus, Stratus to Cumulus. You cannot transfer to a world where you already have a company. Every aircraft must be idle on the ground, and airport ownerships are released, except basecamps. A company in the Challenging economy can also switch to Classic, which removes the weekly fleet and FBO management fees and raises job pay, freelance jobs and regular routes aside; it erases the company's leaderboard entries. Neither step can be undone. Only the founder can do it for a VA, once all members have accepted on the Virtual Airline page.
• Recovery lists flights tracked but never registered; one still open on the server offers Resume, and an unreachable server says so instead of offering to erase.
• About — version, tier, and a support card: diagnostic log, update check, request statistics.

Partner apps and connection recovery. Connection offers a local flight-data feed for partner apps on this PC. It is on by default; read its description to see what it shares, and turn it off there if you prefer. If the world connection fails, the recovery panel explains the current reconnection attempt and offers the available next action; wait for a successful sign-in before retrying company operations. First-time Advanced unlock uses its own quotation; later mode switches have their normal cooldown.

11.4 Remote SimConnect — setup guide

How to run MSFS, Prepar3D or FSX on one PC and the Companion on another, on the same local network. The same wiring applies to every simulator that uses SimConnect.

Not for X-Plane. X-Plane has its own remote path, set in the simulator picker above the remote switch: a text file holding the address for the classic plugin, or the simulator's HTTP port in Web API mode. No SimConnect file is involved.

Why use it

With a dedicated simulator PC you can run the Companion on a laptop, a second screen, or anywhere on the network. Remote mode polls the simulator at half the local rate to save bandwidth; fuel and payload writes, set position and set time all keep working.

It works with MSFS 2020 and 2024, Prepar3D v4 and v5, and FSX including Steam Edition. On macOS and Linux it is the only way to use a simulator with the Companion: the SimConnect server itself only runs on Windows, so the simulator PC must be a Windows machine reachable on your network. There the checkbox is forced on, with an orange hint saying so.

Step 1 — generate the file

SimConnect only listens on the machine it runs on. To accept connections from the network it needs a SimConnect.xml in the simulator's user config folder. In Settings, Flight Sim, click Generate SimConnect.xml next to Test connection: a window opens with the file ready for your chosen port, and it lists the exact folder for each simulator — Microsoft Store and Steam installs do not use the same one. Copy the file, save it there, and back up any existing one first.

Step 2 — open the port on the simulator PC

The default port is 500. In Windows Defender Firewall add an inbound rule for TCP port 500, allow the connection, and tick the Private profile only. Do not tick Public: SimConnect has no authentication of any kind.

Step 3 — restart the simulator

The file is read at startup and only then. Quit the simulator completely — the process must actually end — and launch it again.

Step 4 — set up the Companion

In Settings, Flight Sim, tick Simulator runs on a remote computer — the question mark beside it reopens this guide. Enter the simulator PC's address on the network, leave the port at 500, and click Test connection: the answer comes back in a second or two. Save, then connect from the title bar.

If it does not work

• Timeout — SimConnect is not listening on the network. Check the folder you put the file in, restart the simulator, check the firewall rule.
• Connection refused — the machine answered but nothing is on that port: the simulator is not running, or the two ports do not match.
• Test passes, connecting fails — another Companion is still connected, and only one client at a time is allowed.
• Updates feel slow — expected: remote polls at half the local rate. Every flight phase is still detected.
• Wi-Fi — prefer a cable. SimConnect tolerates packet loss, but jitter above 200 ms makes the position stutter.

Security

SimConnect has no authentication: anyone on your network who knows the address and the port can read and write simulator data. Use it on a trusted home network only, and keep the firewall rule on the Private profile.