Awards, seasons and goals

Recognition comes in four kinds, and they are worth keeping apart: pilot awards are badges for personal milestones, airline achievements are honours for what the company has actually flown, seasons are quarterly competitions with prizes, and community goals are one shared monthly task that pays everyone who took part.

Pilot awards

Thirty-three badges. They are granted automatically: normally the moment a flight report is accepted, and for group flights when the platform closes the meet and posts its results. Badges cannot be requested or bought.

• Milestones — first flight, then 10, 50, 100 and 500 flights; 100, 500 and 1,000 hours logged; 1, 5 and 15 group flights. A group flight only counts if at least two pilots completed it: an announcement put up for your own ordinary flight, with nobody invited, earns nothing.
• Landings — a smooth touchdown (between 20 and 150 fpm) and five of them in a row.
• Skill — a perfect flight (grade A with a score of 95 or more) and ten A-grade flights.
• Exploration — a leg beyond 5,000 km, 10, 25 and 50 distinct airports, 5 and 10 distinct types.
• Safety — a hard landing, a written-off aircraft and the way back: 25 and 50 flights in a row without an incident, 50 landings softer than 600 fpm, and a return to service after losing an aircraft. An incident is marked once: there is no ladder of write-offs, and the only way up is a clean streak.

Airline achievements

An airline has a shelf of its own: a hundred honours across ten directions — traffic, route network, fleet, maintenance and safety, hubs, crew, finances, contracts, the skill of its pilots, and legacy. Only flown work counts: a line sitting in the schedule and an aircraft bought but never used earn nothing. Volume — kilometres, hours, passengers, the spread of aerodromes — adds up live flights and NPC legs together, while skill (grades, landings, diversions, night work) counts live flights only. Ferry flights count nowhere. Once earned, an honour stays: the fleet may shrink from fifty aircraft to five and the badge for fifty remains.

Under every honour it says how rare it is, in words and as a share: how many of the living airlines already hold it. The tiers go by share, not by the number of holders — there will be more airlines in time, and «rare» has to keep meaning the same thing. Nothing you hold is devalued: an honour simply moves a tier down as others claim it.

Seasons

A season is a calendar quarter, and it closes itself on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October. Pilots are ranked by hours flown in the quarter, airlines by passengers carried. The top three take the prizes.

Community goals

Once a month the whole platform shares one task: carry so many passengers, fly so many flights, log so many hours or kilometres. The bar is taken from what the community actually did over the last three months, plus 5% — so it competes against itself. If last month came in below that average, the bar follows the weaker month: the goal is never set above what the community has already shown it can do. And if the community grows faster than the bar can recalculate and clears it within the first days of the month, the bar is raised mid-month — otherwise the goal means nothing for the weeks that are left. The contribution threshold does not change: everything you have already flown still counts.

The contribution bar is low — three flights or three hours in the month, for instance. It filters out people who dropped in for a minute, not regular pilots. If the goal is missed, nobody is paid. And if the bar is cleared before the month ends, the goal closes right away: the month's tally stops there, rewards arrive within the hour, and the next task opens on the first.