The Companion

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.