Flight Operations

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.