Finding Work

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.