How a flight works

From booking to score. Everything that happens around your flight in the simulator lives here.

1. Booking

You are cleared for a flight only when everything lines up at once:

• you have been accepted into the airline that owns the flight;
• your rank meets the minimum for that weight class;
• you hold a rating covering that type and it has not lapsed;
• the airframe is available, airworthy and parked at the departure airport.

Booking locks in the commercial payload — how many passengers and how much cargo you carry. It drives both your weight in the sim and the revenue of the flight. The payload belongs to the route and the day, not to the click: cancel a booking and take the same route again the same day, and you get the same payload — even with a different airframe or a different line. Rerolling it by cancelling gains you nothing, while swapping the aircraft costs you nothing. The payload is set by the demand of the direction, not by luck: the number of people willing to fly A to B in a day is finite, and they are shared between every flight on that pair — yours and other airlines'. Get as many as the aircraft has seats and the cabin goes out full; get fewer and you fly with empty seats, and that is neither a bad aircraft nor weak reputation. Where those people sit is shown in the same place: the booking and the next-flight strip on the dashboard break the payload down by cabin class — seats taken out of seats fitted for each. On a less than full flight the empty seats pile up in the premium cabins: economy fills first. Cargo is similar, but it works differently. On a passenger aircraft cargo rides along in whatever hold space the baggage leaves, and that comes to about 60 % of the hold. A dedicated freighter is loaded for the cargo itself, and its load changes from flight to flight — between 65 and 100 % of its payload capacity: identical weight trip after trip does not happen in cargo aviation. But those are ceilings, not promises: a route’s tonnage is finite too, and it is shared between everyone offering hold space on that pair — freighters and passenger bellies alike. Put more capacity on a pair than it has cargo for, and everyone carries less. Cancelling will not reroll it — the same route on the same day gives you the same weight; but fly the trip and take that route again, and you get a fresh load, just as an aircraft is loaded for the next shipment. You cannot set the payload by hand — it is not the pilot's choice but whatever the route had to offer.

A booked aircraft is reserved for you and goes nowhere else — neither on a line nor into maintenance. That is why a booking does not last forever: fly it within a week or it is released automatically, the aircraft goes back to the airline and you get a message. Planning to fly later? Just book it again — there is no limit on that. While the tracker is recording a flight on a booking, that booking cannot be cancelled: file the flight or discard the recording first, and cancel after that. Otherwise the track would stay tied to a booking that no longer exists, and there would be no way to file a report from it. If airline management cancels the booking, the recording stops on its own and the tracker says so.

Flight matcher: “Where to?”

The dashboard block matches a PAIR — an aircraft and a flight — rather than a flight alone: it first looks at which of the airline aircraft are free and where they are parked, then at what can be flown from there. One press gives one offer; “Another option” reshuffles, and “Take the flight” books exactly the way the flight board does. The settings — duration and aircraft class — live in the block itself and are remembered by your browser.

• The matcher only offers flights whose aircraft is ALREADY parked at the departure airport: no ferrying and no waiting.
• The flight of the day and the daily challenge are the exception: the aircraft is positioned for free and returned to its previous stand right after the report.
• Passengers and load are revealed at booking, not in the offer: they are rolled once, at the moment you book.
• VFR missions are enabled by a separate switch and play by their own rules: a different fleet, their own difficulty scale, and no partial completion.

2. Preparation

The “To SimBrief” button on the flight page opens the planner with the route, type and payload already filled in. The ATC callsign goes along with them: by default it is the flight's own, but if your profile has one of yours, that is what we send — we will not ask before every departure. The aircraft type we send is the one SimBrief itself knows the machine by: a corporate version of an airliner has its own profile there, and without it the plan would be built for an ordinary passenger cabin. From there it is a normal briefing: route, fuel, weather, alternate.

Company comms in flight

Your airline's management and dispatcher can write to you directly in the cockpit: the message arrives in the company ACARS mailbox (COMPANY MSG) — the same one real operations telexes use. This is not an ATC instruction: the link is a company one, and you do not have to fly it as a clearance. You can reply from the same MCDU, or from the flight page on the site under the «Comms» tab.

3. Flying with the tracker

The tracker hooks into the simulator and logs telemetry: altitude, speed, heading, fuel remaining, gear and flaps, lights, touchdown quality. It recognises your booked flight by itself and follows it from pushback to the gate — no babysitting required.

4. Scoring

The flight is split into stages: taxi out, takeoff, climb, cruise, approach, landing, taxi in. Each stage runs a handful of checks, and those add up to a score from 0 to 100.

What is actually checked: the right lights on, taxi speed at or below 30 knots, gear retracted after takeoff, transponder on in the air, flaps and gear extended on approach, no overspeeds and no stalls. The landing itself is scored separately and in the most detail. The full list of checks and their limits, the landing grading and answers to the usual complaints live in their own chapter, “Why your score drops”.

5. The report

Reports are accepted automatically — there is no moderation queue. The same moment posts XP to you, revenue to the airline and your bonus, and books wear against the airframe, plus fresh defects on a bad day.

Diverting to an alternate

Landing at an airport other than the one in the assignment still counts as a completed flight — nothing has to be cancelled or flown again. The tracker records where you actually touched down, and the debrief shows both aerodromes, planned and actual. Costs are worked out on the leg you really flew, not the one you planned.

Flight of the day

Every day the platform offers one shared flight: a route across Russia and the former USSR, never longer than two hours, with a name and a short story about the place. It is the same for everyone — your airline and the one next door. A route does not come back for a month, and a city — as departure or arrival — for two weeks. The card sits on your dashboard, and above your airline’s schedule it appears as its own row.

• the reward is double XP and half the flight profit on top. The money goes where it normally would: fly an airline aircraft and the airline gets it, fly your own and you do;
• the cabin goes out full — always, for everyone. That means every seat of your actual layout, not "a hundred per cent on paper": a high-density cabin is filled to the last seat too. A freighter leaves with a full hold. Route demand does not cap the event: the flight of the day is the same for everybody, and splitting one route's passengers between everyone who took it would punish whoever showed up in the evening;
• no aircraft type restriction at all — take whatever you have. Type rating and rank are checked exactly as on any other flight;
• a business aircraft with a VIP cabin flies the daily flight as a charter rather than on tickets: the customer books the whole aircraft, so there is no belly cargo and no ancillary revenue, and payment is per flight hour. Airliners, regional jets and anything with an economy cabin still sell seats;
• the multiplier applies once per day. You may take the flight again, but it will be paid at the usual rate;
• days are counted in UTC, the flight of the day changes at 00:05 UTC, and a booking lives exactly that long. Never got under way — the booking is released at the rollover, the aircraft goes back to its old stand and you get a notification. But once you are under way, midnight leaves your flight alone: finish it and file whenever you like, even in the morning — the reward is still yours.

Daily challenge

The second daily flight is not about a story — it is about difficulty: every day the platform picks one airfield that is hard to reach, and a departure point for it. Madeira, Lukla, Courchevel, Easter Island — short strips in the mountains, a sloped runway, approaches from one direction only, no go-around. The card sits on your dashboard and above your airline’s schedule, and anyone may take it: the challenge is shared across the platform and lives for one day.

• the level runs from 1 (notable) to 4 (extreme). The card shows it as a scale, with tags for what earned it: short runway, high altitude, steep glideslope, wind shear;
• the reward comes with the level: a cash bonus and an experience multiplier. The bonus is a fixed sum rather than a share of the flight — otherwise Lukla in a Twin Otter would pay thirty times less than Madeira in an airliner, though Lukla is the harder landing. A loss on the leg is written off as well: a challenge cannot end in the red, and the bonus reaches you in full. The money goes where flight money usually goes: fly an airline aircraft and it lands in the airline's account, fly your own and it is yours;
• the load is full, exactly as on the flight of the day: the cabin goes out with every seat of your layout taken, a freighter with a full hold. Route demand does not cap a challenge;
• the bonus and the multiplier are paid once per day, and only for a flight that counts. You may take a challenge a second time, but it is then scored by the ordinary rules — and a loss stays a loss;
• the type is not restricted, and nobody checks whether it fits the runway: that is your risk and your call. The card names the actual and the effective runway length and the class of aircraft that normally operates there — the effective length is shorter, because the take-off run grows with altitude. Rank and type rating are checked as on any other flight;
• the time in the air is shown twice: before you pick an aircraft it is a reference figure at the class cruise speed, after you pick it is calculated for your aircraft. The two can differ several times over, and the second one is the one to read;
• the aircraft is positioned to the departure airport free of charge — once per day, for the first challenge you take. You may take a challenge a second time, but then you find the aircraft yourself;
• days are counted in UTC. Fail to depart and the booking is released when the day rolls over: the aircraft returns to its previous stand and you get a notification.

Flying on the VATSIM network

If you fly VATSIM, link your account once in your profile and the platform will see for itself that the flight was flown online. There is deliberately no “I was online” checkbox: while the tracker is recording, we ask the network once a minute whether your CID is among those currently connected, and we decide on the answers we collected rather than on your word. A flight that counts as a network flight earns a percentage of the revenue on top, the same percentage of XP, and badges of its own — for your first such flight, and for ten, fifty and a hundred. The bonus is taken from revenue and enters the account before costs are subtracted, so it is there on a loss-making flight too: there it makes the loss smaller. In the flight debrief it stands as its own line, in roubles.

Flying into bad weather

The second reason to show up today sits next to it in the pilot's dashboard: a pick of aerodromes where the weather will be difficult by the time you arrive. Candidates are chosen not by what is happening now but by the TAF forecast for the arrival window — one and a half to three and a half hours ahead, roughly when you would get there. Beside each suggestion there is a six-hour forecast strip and the current METAR, so you also see what it is doing right this minute. An aerodrome that is calm now and thunderous in three hours is exactly what this pick exists for.

Without a tracker, without a schedule

• Manual report — for a flight flown without the tracker: you enter the time, landing and fuel yourself. The score then rests on the landing alone, with no track and no stage breakdown.
• Free flight — a leg outside any schedule, on any aircraft and any route. It counts towards your personal hours, pays a little XP and leaves the airline's economy untouched.