Flying
One flight is one cycle: book, fly, file. Everything else on this site hangs off that cycle.
Booking
Menu → Operation → Bookings. The list is our schedule: flight number, route, aircraft type, distance, days of the week.
Book reserves the aircraft so nobody else takes it while you fly.
You do not have to book. You can fly anything and file a manual report. Booking exists so two people do not take the same aircraft, and so the site can put the flight plan in front of you.
Your bookings live in Pilot Center → My Bids and in the Active Bids block on the dashboard.
If you cannot book, you probably already have one. Some airlines allow several bookings at once and some do not — that is a setting, not a fault. Drop the old booking first.
Freeflight
Menu → Operation → Freeflight. For flying a route that is not in our schedule. You give departure and arrival, it gives you a flight number to file against.
Use this when you want to fly somewhere we do not serve. Ordinary pay applies.
Flying it
Nothing on this site runs while you fly. There is no timer, no penalty for stopping, no requirement to fly in one sitting.
Fly the aircraft type in the booking if you can. If you swap to another type of similar size, ordinary flights do not mind. Contracts do check that the aircraft can physically carry the freight — see Contract board.
Filing the report
Two ways.
ACARS — a program that watches your simulator and files everything itself: times, fuel, landing rate, route. Menu → Company → Downloads. Reports arrive with a score attached.
By hand — Menu → Pilot Center → My Reports, then new report. You fill in what you flew.
The fields
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Flight number | from the booking, or from Freeflight |
| Departure / Arrival | ICAO codes, four letters |
| Aircraft | which airframe you actually used |
| Flight time | block time: chocks off to chocks on |
| Fuel used | as burned, not as loaded |
| Landing rate | vertical speed at touchdown, negative |
| Route | waypoints, optional |
| Remarks | anything worth telling the administrator |
Block time is not airborne time. It starts when you release the parking brake and ends when you set it again. It is what pays.
After you file
Your report is either accepted automatically or held for review. Which one depends on your rank, not on how well you flew.
Accepted — pay lands, hours count, reputation moves, and if the flight closed a contract leg the contract moves forward.
Pending — nothing has happened yet. An administrator will look at it.
Rejected — nothing counts. The reason is on the report.
A pending report is not a counted report. If you are flying a contract, the deadline keeps running while it waits.
What a report is worth
Money. Rate per hour set by your rank, multiplied by block time. Details in Money.
Hours towards your next rank.
Reputation, up or down, from the score or the landing rate. Details in Reputation.
Contract progress, if the flight matched the leg you owed.
Missions, Tours and Assignments
Three optional things in the Operation and Pilot Center menus.
Missions are one-off jobs with a reward.
Tours are series of flights on a theme — fly them all, get the badge.
Assignments are flights handed to you rather than chosen.
None of them conflict with contracts. You can run a tour and a contract at the same time as long as the flights line up.
Live Map and Live Weather
Live Map shows who is flying right now. Live Weather gives METAR and TAF for any airport. Both are for looking at.
