Chapter 1 of 16
Your first flight
What to click to get airborne today
Your simulator still does the flying — Air Virtua gives the flight a point: it now has an airline, a specific airframe, passengers, money and a score. Below is the shortest way from an empty account to your first logged flight. Until you fly it, your pilot dashboard shows these very steps as a checklist and ticks them off for you.
- 1Sign upA confirmation email arrives right away. Signing up also credits your personal account with ₽5,000,000 in seed money and opens six ratings for free: the single-engine piston class (all the light aircraft, the C172 among them), the light helicopter class (from the R44 to the H125), the whole A320 and Boeing 737 families, the SSJ-100 and the L-410. You can fly those from day one.
- 2Join an airlineOpen the airline catalogue, pick one and apply — management reviews the request. Don't want to wait? Start your own: a ₽2,000,000 charter fee comes out of your personal account, the airline receives ₽250,000,000 in starting capital, and the airport you pick becomes its founding base — a hub that is free to run for good. The headquarters (where the airline is registered) can later be moved to any base of yours that is up and running, but the free upkeep stays with the founding base. A pilot belongs to exactly one airline, so any applications you have sent are withdrawn automatically once you join somewhere or found your own.
- 3Take a flightThe Lines tab in your airline is its schedule. Pick a line and an available airframe, and the booking is yours. Flight won't book? The reason is always one of six — they are listed in the “Glossary and FAQ” chapter.
- 4Prepare for departureThe “To SimBrief” button on the flight page hands the route, aircraft type, payload and ATC callsign to the planner — your own callsign is set once, in your profile. The same page shows how many passengers and how much cargo you carry. Download the tracker in advance and connect it with “Sign in via browser” — no keys to type.
- 5Fly itStart the sim and the tracker and fly the leg as usual. The tracker works out on its own that your booked flight has begun, records the whole thing from pushback to the gate, and offers to file the report once you are down.
- 6Get the debriefThe report (PIREP) is accepted straight away, with no human review. You get a flight score from A to F and XP, the airline gets the revenue, and a share of the flight's profit lands in your personal account on top.
No tracker, or flew without it? You can file the report by hand from the flight page — though the score will then rest on the landing alone. One more thing: a hand-filed report only counts once the flight's estimated block time has passed since booking (and no less than the time you entered). File it sooner and the flight stays in your history and hours, but brings no money, no costs and no XP — the form is a fallback, not a way to earn. If the tracker did record the flight but was started already airborne and saved it as a free flight, the report form finds that recording and offers to file the flight from it — with the full score and nothing to type.
No airline yet
You can still fly. A “free flight” is any route on any aircraft: it counts towards your personal hours and pays a little XP, but it stays clear of the economy and the rankings. And in “My hangar” you can buy a personal aircraft with your own money and run charters on it — that income is yours alone.