How the tracker works

The previous chapter tells you what each check is worth. This one tells you where the tracker gets its numbers: the altitude at which a check starts applying, how many seconds you get to act, and exactly how landing firmness is measured. Everything here happens in the app on your computer — nothing is guessed at on the server.

What the tracker records and sends

The tracker attaches to your simulator and reads the aircraft once a second: position, altitude, speeds, attitude, gear, flaps, spoilers, lights, transponder. That is the flight's black box — the thing you later read in the debrief.

Track: one point per second for the whole flight; parked or paused, one per 10 s
Events: phase changes, liftoff, touchdown, gear, flaps, lights, go-around, crash
Touchdowns: time, vertical speed, G, pitch, bank, speed, position, bounce flag
Touchdown frames: a ±10 s window around the touchdown: full sim rate right at the contact, thinned to 10 frames per second further out. Up to four landings are kept per flight, always including the hardest and the last one
Decision trace: when a phase changed, when a check armed and locked in, how the touchdown was resolved

Touchdown frames also carry the flight controls — stick, pedals, control surfaces and trim (tracker 1.29 and newer). If the sim does not report the stick — some add-ons keep it in no variable at all — tracker 1.30 reads it from your joystick, yoke and pedal axes straight from Windows. There is nothing to set up: throughout the flight the tracker compares every device axis with what the aircraft does and remembers which axis does what, on any aircraft. Such a stick is labelled “from your joystick” in the debrief: it is your hand movement before the sim’s curves and dead zones. A keyboard, a mouse yoke, VR controllers or a tracker on a different computer from the sim do not work this way — there the recording simply has no stick.

Losing your connection does not lose the flight. Points queue in the tracker and are re-sent in batches once the link is back. If you close the tracker without filing, the recording is kept on the server for 24 hours: on the next launch the tracker offers to file it, continue it or discard it. Tracker or sim closed mid-flight? After a restart the recording picks up where it left off: the track is not lost, and the fuel burned and the altitude profile on the tracker main screen carry on from the start of the flight rather than from zero. Offline for more than half an hour and the flight dropped off the map? Recording resumes with the first point after the link is back, nothing to press. Your internet works but the server does not answer? A line under the flight number in the tracker says “Server unavailable — the flight is being recorded”: recording and the landing work on your computer as usual. The preview arrives once the server answers, and you can press “File flight” before that — the flight is filed automatically as soon as the connection is back. Keep the tracker and the sim running until then: unsent data lives in the tracker’s memory. As a last resort the tracker keeps backup copies of your last ten flights on your computer — the backup folder next to the tracker logs; if a flight still goes missing, support will ask you to send the file from there.

Want to start the flight from zero instead of continuing it? Say the sim crashed mid-flight and you reloaded it at the departure gate. Press “Start over” next to “End flight” and confirm: the recorded track is deleted, the time, fuel and violations reset, and the booking stays yours. A new recording starts by itself once the aircraft moves at the departure airport; if it does not, press “Start recording” on the booking card in the Flights tab. Skip this step and the tracker carries on with the old recording. On trackers older than 1.23 the same takes two buttons in a row: “End flight”, then “Fly again”.

Flight phases: how the tracker knows where you are

Checks switch on by phase, not by the clock. The phase is worked out from the aircraft's own state — the tracker needs no flight plan for this.

Taxi out: on the ground, ground speed above 1 kt, indicated below 40
Takeoff: on the ground, indicated 40 kt or more
Initial climb: wheels off the ground and faster than 30 knots — for three seconds in a row
Climb: 3000 feet above the ground reached — or the climb ended earlier: over a minute and a half the aircraft gained no more than 200 feet. The second condition is for those who never reach 3000 feet at all: a helicopter hopping between pads, an air ambulance, a patrol. What is measured is the HEIGHT GAINED, not how smooth the flight is: a light helicopter down low always wanders in vertical speed, so “it got calm” never happens for it — and the aircraft stayed in the climb until touchdown
Cruise: the climb ended: over a minute and a half the aircraft gained no more than 200 feet. If it starts climbing again (500 fpm or more, three seconds in a row and at least 400 feet gained), that is a climb once more: a level-off at an intermediate altitude under a procedure restriction and a step climb do not count as cruise. If you have entered a SimBrief username and the plan matches the flight, the tracker will also refuse to call it cruise while the aircraft is more than 3000 feet below the planned level — but for no longer than ten minutes of level flight: fly below your plan and after ten minutes it is cruise anyway
Initial approach: descending faster than 400 fpm, held for half a minute straight: a single turbulence frame does not call top of descent. If the aircraft then levels off again and holds it for three minutes while staying more than 12,000 feet above the arrival aerodrome, that is cruise once more — taking a lower level on an ATC instruction does not count as top of descent
Approach: below 3,000 ft above ground, still airborne, and within 15 nautical miles of the arrival airport. The distance is not nitpicking: without it an aircraft that descended thirty miles out is already "on approach", and the only way out of the approach phase is upwards — so any climb back to a level reads as a go-around. If the airport's coordinates are unknown (no plan, airport missing from the database), the approach is declared on height alone, as before
Rollout: on the ground after touchdown; nothing is checked here
Taxi in: on the ground, ground speed down below 40 kt; taking off again from here (a touch-and-go after heavy braking) is a go-around
Arrived: stopped with engines shut down

The tracker spots a go-around by itself: a steady climb of 500 fpm or more held for 3 seconds that actually gains at least 400 ft. Vertical speed alone is not enough — levelling off out of a descent always overshoots upwards, and without the height requirement that counted as a go-around. A single pitch-up twitch during the flare will not switch the phase either. A climb more than 15 miles out is not a go-around at all: that is still the initial approach — a re-vector or a level-off, not a missed approach. Returning to the approach needs you back below 3,000 ft and descending steadily again. A touch-and-go is recognised the same way, straight off the rollout.

A go-around clears every approach remark already recorded: the approach that counts is the last one, not the first attempt. Otherwise raising the gear and accelerating on the go-around — exactly what you are supposed to do — would stay on your report for good.

Three kinds of check

Checks work differently from one another, and that decides whether a couple of seconds' delay costs you anything.

Gate (a moment): Asked once, at the moment it applies. The tracker watches a 20-second window from that moment and takes the best it saw. Flaps before the takeoff roll and landing lights at liftoff and by 1,500 ft work this way. Stowing flaps and spoilers after landing is a gate too, with a window of its own: from touchdown until the grace runs out, so doing it on the rollout counts. Once they are seen stowed you have the credit, and whatever the variable reports afterwards no longer takes it away.
State (with a grace period): Watched continuously, but only recorded once the problem has persisted for a set number of seconds. A single frame while you flip a switch costs nothing.
Limit (immediate): Triggers on any single frame: G-load, stall, crash, pitch on takeoff. No grace period here — the event is a one-off by nature.

How long you get before a problem becomes a remark:

Ordinary state check5 seconds

Pitch and bank3 seconds — turbulence and gusts do not count

Over the speed limit below 10,000 ft3 seconds: the needle wanders near the limit

Overspeed1 second — a momentary gust does not count

Taxi speed above 30 kt8 seconds

Width of a moment gate20 seconds

Lights off above the transition level30 seconds

Pause before taxi-in checks20 seconds after vacating

Clean up and douse the lights3 minutes after vacating

Every grace period is counted in seconds, not frames. MSFS reports state once a second, X-Plane five times; while they were counted in frames, an X-Plane pilot picked up remarks five times faster for the same flying.

The altitudes and speeds at which checks start applying

Almost every check has an altitude or a speed outside which it simply does not exist. That is deliberate: the approach phase begins at 3,000 ft, and asking for landing configuration there would fail nearly everyone.

Gear upasked above 500 ft above ground, and only on aircraft whose gear retracts

Flaps upasked above 10,000 ft above ground, in the climb and at cruise; 30 seconds to retract

Speed up to 260 ktasked below 10,000 ft on the altimeter: in the climb, at cruise and in the descent; heavies (wake category H and J) up to 290

Landing lights offasked above 10,500 ft on the altimeter, above 18,500 ft when departing the US or Canada

Landing lights onthe gate opens below 1,500 ft above ground

Flaps and gear downasked below 1,000 ft above aerodrome level

Speed below 180 ktasked below 1,000 ft above aerodrome level

G within 2.5ignored below 50 ft — down there the landing check covers it

Absolute altitudes — those 10,500 (18,500 when departing the US or Canada) and 10,000 feet — are taken from the barometric altimeter, so the tracker reads exactly the number on your instrument. It used to take the true altitude above sea level, which differs from the instrument by the pressure correction: on an ordinary day that is 400–500 feet, and the threshold arrived somewhere other than where you flew it. Heights above the ground and above the aerodrome stay geometric — there is no barometer in them and there should not be, otherwise a thousand feet on approach would stop being a thousand feet above the runway. The flight breakdown now shows the altimeter setting next to the altitude, so where a difference comes from is visible at once.

The thousand feet on approach is measured from the elevation of the destination aerodrome — the very height at which your first officer calls "stabilized". Height above the terrain will not do: on an approach across a ridge or over water near a cliff it differs from height above the field by hundreds of feet, and the gate would open somewhere other than where the call is made. When the tracker does not know the aerodrome elevation (a free flight with no plan, an aerodrome missing from the database), it falls back to terrain height as before.

How landing firmness is measured

The instant vertical speed in the frame where the sim first says "on ground" is no good: the gear has already compressed and absorbed the descent, so every landing reads as a greaser. Vertical speed is therefore taken from the first available of four sources:

1The simulator's own figureMSFS reports touchdown vertical speed directly, and that is the most accurate source there is. X-Plane has no equivalent. The figure arrives a second or two after touchdown and then stays until the next landing, so on a second touchdown the tracker uses it only if the simulator refreshed it; otherwise it measures from the frames itself. There is a second condition. The simulator refreshes that figure on ANY contact between wheels and runway — including a brief skip the tracker does not count as a landing. If such a skip happened between the touchdown and the figure's arrival, the figure is about the skip, and the tracker keeps its own frame-based measurement. The flight breakdown shows this on a line of its own.
2The frames just before contactThe tracker fits a straight line through the frames where the aircraft is still AIRBORNE, covering the quarter-second before touchdown, and reads the vertical speed off that line at the moment of contact itself. At least three frames are needed. A line rather than an average: during the flare the rate of descent keeps easing off, so an average over the window is really the value from the middle of it — high by half a window. A line does not depend on the window's width, and shields against frame noise just as well. For X-Plane this is the main source — it does not report touchdown vertical speed itself — and it comes with a catch: X-Plane's vertical speed indicator lags by about a second. During the flare it still shows a sink rate you have already arrested, and on a last-moment drop it shows less than there was. The site removes that delay when it scores the flight, so the report can read softer or harder than the tracker showed, and the flight debrief names both figures.
3Sink rate from radio altitudeHow fast height was falling over the previous half-second. An honest method, but close to the ground radio altitude bottoms out and the figure comes out too high — which is why it is third rather than first.
4Vertical speed of the last frameThe last resort, when there was no history to work with at all.

Which source was used is visible in the flight debrief: the decision trace lists all four candidates and marks the one that was taken.

The G-load is computed from how fast the descent rate is arrested, over a 0.15-second window; the peak is searched around the touchdown — from half a second before it to 0.8 seconds after, while the gear is still compressing. The tracker also records and shows the simulator's own G-load in the trace, but it does not feed the score: MSFS and X-Plane shape the impact differently, so their numbers cannot be compared with each other. It follows that our number is not comparable with other landing counters or with real-world aviation thresholds either: an arrest rate is not a peak G-load — they are different quantities. The only meaningful comparison is against our own thresholds. The arrest rate is measured on the SIMULATOR'S clock, not on when the frames reached the tracker: a momentary freeze, a heavy scenery load or alt-tabbing will not inflate the G-load, and time acceleration will not deflate it.

A touchdown is an "air to ground" transition, but only if the aircraft spent at least 0.4 seconds airborne beforehand. Anything shorter is sensor chatter at liftoff, not a landing. A second contact within 5 seconds is flagged as a bounce. Where there are several touchdowns, the FIRST one is scored — the same one your landing-rate counter shows you. The bounce is not free, though: it is judged by its own check, based on how much harder the next touchdown was than the one that counted. Airframe damage is assessed from the hardest touchdown — the gear does not care which one it was. A pause or a replay never becomes a landing: if the aircraft was on the ground before the pause, nothing that played back inside the replay counts as airborne time, and leaving the replay creates no touchdown. A genuine pause mid-approach, on the other hand, does not reset the airborne stretch — a landing right after unpausing is recorded as usual.

The flare is worked out like this: the tracker takes the frame whose radio altitude is closest to 50 ft before touchdown and compares its vertical speed with the vertical speed at touchdown. The difference, as a percentage, is how much of the descent you arrested. Alongside it you get the pitch change between those same two points.

Why an external landing-rate counter shows a different number

A third-party landing-rate popup often reads softer than the flight debrief, sometimes by half again. The disagreement is not about how strict the scoring is: what differs is WHAT is measured and WHEN. Three differences account for almost every case. For X-Plane there used to be a fourth, and it was ours: the vertical speed indicator lag (see “The frames just before contact” above). The site now removes it.

When it is sampled: The vertical speed at the moment of contact and the vertical speed half a second later are different numbers: the gear leg absorbs the descent within tenths of a second. On the flight we took apart, −290 fpm in the contact frame had become −221 just 0.46 s later. A counter that reads its values "once it notices the touchdown" is measuring the shock absorber at work, not the landing itself.
What is actually measured: On a level runway the aircraft's vertical speed and its rate of closure with the ground are the same thing; on a sloping one they are not. The gear feels CLOSURE WITH THE RUNWAY, and on a downhill runway that is what we score: the ground descends with the aircraft, and less has to be arrested than the horizon-referenced vertical speed suggests. At La Palma that is 240 fpm out of a recorded 486. In MSFS the simulator itself reports closure with the runway; in X-Plane the tracker works it out by subtracting the slope and shows the same number that goes into the report, which is why the touchdown line appears in the tracker log only after 10–15 seconds of rollout. On an uphill runway no correction is applied: in X-Plane the horizon-referenced vertical speed is scored there, which is slightly softer. We measure the slope over the ROLLOUT, where the wheels are demonstrably on the runway, rather than from the frames before touchdown: there the radio altitude and the vertical speed disagree too much to trust such a reading. Before the threshold, though, the terrain is not the runway yet, and counters that derive the whole vertical speed from y_agl still read low there: on the approach to ULMM the ground drops 24 feet over the last 10 seconds.
G-load is a peak, not an average: The gear's impact arrives tenths of a second AFTER the wheels touch. A counter that averages G-load over the second BEFORE contact physically cannot see it, and will report around 1.0 g for any landing — flawless or brutal alike. We take the peak in a ±0.5 s window around the touchdown.

You can audit your own counter without taking anyone's word for it: look at the G-load in its log. A peak below 1.0 g at touchdown means the figure was captured somewhere other than the moment of impact — earlier or later — and the vertical speed on the same line cannot be trusted either. For comparison: across the 303 landings recorded by our tracker, not one came in below 1.0 g; the lowest ever seen is 1.02 g.

Why the tracker's number can be trusted

Not because it is ours, but because it can be re-checked — weeks later, and without asking us.

It keeps the evidence, not just the verdict. Every flight is stored with its full track, the frames around each touchdown at the simulator's own frame rate, and the decision trace. Any figure in the debrief can be recomputed from them — that is exactly how disputed flights get settled.
It shows where the number came from. The trace lists ALL the vertical-speed candidates — the simulator's own value, the frames before contact, the radio-altitude rate, the instantaneous reading — and marks the one that was taken. Findings explain themselves too: when a check was armed, when it was recorded, and at what altitude, speed, g-load, pitch and bank. The worst g-load of the whole flight gets its own line — always, even when there was no finding: seeing the margin matters as much as seeing the exceedance.
When an error is found it gets fixed, and the affected flights are rescored after the fact — score and XP alike. The tracker is not infallible; what sets it apart is that its verdict sits next to the data it was made from, and so can be checked.

Time acceleration and repositioning

Accelerating time is fine — it is how long legs get flown. Your logged time, though, is SIMULATOR time: an hour of real time at 4× is four hours of flight. Otherwise the multiplier would be a discount, because crew, maintenance reserve and airframe wear are charged by the hour while revenue comes from distance — the same flight would earn the same and cost four times less. The tracker counts simulator time itself, and the server checks it against your track: the distance between track points is compared with the aircraft ground speed, and however many times the first outruns the second is how fast the simulator was running. Your logged time is never less than what the track shows (taxi at normal speed, flight at the measured rate), and it is never multiplied twice. That is why the rule works the same in both simulators, even when the simulator does not tell the tracker it is accelerated. Free flights are not affected: there is no crew, no maintenance and no revenue to scale, so your personal log gets the hours you actually sat through.

Moving the aircraft across the map, on the other hand, is not allowed — that is the "No repositioning the aircraft" check, weight 3. This means instant relocation: slew mode in MSFS, or dragging the aircraft on the map in X-Plane. In MSFS the tracker reads the mode directly and allows a second for a hotkey brushed by accident. X-Plane has no such mode at all, so repositioning is caught geometrically — by a jump in position that ground speed cannot account for. A replay does not count as repositioning: while it plays, the tracker keeps the aircraft where it stood before the pause. A move made while paused is caught the moment the pause ends, however long it lasted.

Time accelerationallowed, counts towards flight time in full

Pausingallowed, does not count towards flight time; check hold timers and the flight phase stand still while paused; shown in the timeline from 3 s

Slew mode (MSFS)a remark if held for more than 1 s

Positional jumpfive times the physical maximum, time acceleration included, AND over 3 km

Frame gap over 30 snot repositioning — that is a lost connection

When the tracker considers the runway vacated

This drives the taxi-in checks and the prompt to file your flight. It used to run off ground speed dropping below 40 kt — but that happens while you are still ON the runway, where dousing lights and cleaning up would be wrong. The tracker now builds the runway axis from your actual direction of travel on the rollout and watches you leave it. Leaving is judged by your current direction of travel, so turning off onto a taxiway counts even after a long rollout, once you are about 30 m off the axis. Turning around and back-tracking along the runway does not count as vacating. The five-minute backstop is there in case the aircraft was shut down on the runway, which would otherwise leave the flight hanging forever.

Lateral offset from the axismore than 60 metres

Travel diverging from the axismore than 40°, held for 5 seconds

Axis considered reliableafter 150 metres or 8 seconds of rollout

Backstop5 minutes after touchdown, including a landing with no roll, like a helicopter's

Diverting to an alternate

Being near the planned airport used to be a condition for arrival: land anywhere else and the tracker never offered to file the flight, so the recording was lost. Now the arrival is the stop after landing itself — wherever you put the aircraft down. Where you actually landed is worked out by the server from the last track point: it takes the nearest airport within 30 km. If that is not the planned one, the flight counts as a diversion.

Where you landed: nearest airport to the stop, within 30 km; determined by the server from the track, not by the tracker
Costs: stay actual: fuel as burned, navigation charges over the path the aircraft flew to the alternate
Decision accepted: you landed at the alternate from your SimBrief plan, went around, or the planned airport was below minima
The aircraft: stays where it landed; when you book the next flight the system offers a ferry and shows its price

If the decision is not accepted, part of the ticket revenue goes on getting passengers to their destination. If it is accepted, revenue is not cut — but there is no bonus for diverting either: landing at an alternate must never pay better than arriving as planned. If the airport cannot be determined (no track, nothing nearby), the flight counts as having arrived as planned.

The other numbers on the flight card

The tracker does not score these, but they are what reaches your report and the airline's books.

Flight time: SIMULATOR time, not wall clock: time acceleration counts in full, pausing does not count at all
Distance: credited from the scheduled airport pair; how far you actually flew is shown next to it
Air navigation charge: for the distance actually flown, not the straight line: never less than the straight line, never more than a little over twice it
Fuel: first frame with a non-zero quantity minus the last one; fuel added during the session is not subtracted from what was burned
Night takeoff and landing: from the position and time of liftoff and of the last touchdown
Weather: departure at the start of recording, arrival at the moment of filing
Go-arounds: counted for the flight

"Could not be measured"

Some checks depend on variables a given aircraft may not have: a glider has no spoilers, and complex add-ons often leave the standard transponder untouched and report their own value instead. If a variable stayed silent all flight, the check becomes "not applicable" — it drops out of both the failures and the denominator, so your score does not suffer for it. Lights are read two independent ways: the switch position, and what the simulator actually illuminates. Either one is enough for a light to count as on — payware aircraft often drive their own lighting and never touch the standard switch, and from the switch alone "never turned it on" cannot be told apart from "the aircraft does not report the variable".

Aircraft type: a note, not a penalty

Once per session the tracker asks the simulator which aircraft is loaded, and it asks in two ways. The livery name (“PMDG 737-800 Aeroflot”) comes from MSFS only, and we can merely guess from it. The type code the aircraft author wrote into the aircraft itself (B738, A20N) comes from both simulators — X-Plane always, MSFS not always. If the family turns out not to be the booked one (booked an A320, flew a 737), your debrief and the tracker log get a note. It changes nothing: score, XP, money, passengers and wear are still based on the booked type. When the aircraft named its own type code, the note allows itself a joke — that is the case where we are sure. When the family was only guessed from a livery name, the tone stays neutral. We tell families apart and NOTHING finer, and we stay silent whenever there is any doubt: A320 versus A320neo is not a note, neither is a livery name we cannot read, and if the type code and the livery name disagree with each other we stay silent both times.

Common questions

The tracker closed mid-flight — is everything lost?

No. Start it again: it asks the server and picks the same recording back up, including the elapsed time and the track numbering. There is no need to start the flight over.

I started the tracker when I was already airborne

The recording will start, but not right away: the tracker first watches the aircraft for a minute and requires that it does not sink more than 300 feet during it. That rules out starting on approach — otherwise the last minutes of somebody else's flight became a separate one-minute “flight” with a score and experience. A restart in the climb or in cruise survives that minute and the recording goes ahead. If you also have a booking that matches your SimBrief plan, the tracker asks whether this is that flight, and on your “yes” records it as the booked flight rather than a free one. It never does this silently: flying the same route privately is your right. If you do not answer, after two minutes it becomes a free flight. Stages the recording never saw — taxi, take-off roll, rotation — do not enter the score, neither as a violation nor as a pass.

The tracker pops up on top of the simulator

As of version 1.12.5 the window raises itself exactly once per flight — when you shut the engines down at the gate and the flight is ready to file. The rest of the time the tracker lives in the tray and never comes to the front. If it used to appear while the simulator was loading, the cause was having both autostarts on at once: "start with Windows" and "start with MSFS" are independent switches, so the simulator launched the tracker a second time, and that second launch woke the window. Now both it and the restart after an auto-update are silent — and the update itself no longer installs while the sim is connected and a booking is armed.

How do I update the tracker without waiting?

The tracker asks about updates on launch and every four hours after that, so a version released during the day does not arrive instantly. Settings has an “Update” card with a “Check and update” button: it asks right now and, if a newer version is out, downloads it and restarts. It will not update in the middle of a flight — the tracker says it will install the update once the report is filed.

I forgot to confirm the record and flew the next leg

The tracker files the pending record itself as soon as it sees a new takeoff roll begin — 40 kt on the ground for two seconds running. It watches for the roll rather than the liftoff so that the next leg still has time to latch onto its own booking. A replay of your landing is not taken for a takeoff roll: while the sim is replaying or paused, the tracker files nothing and starts no new flight.

I paused the sim — does that count against me?

No. Pausing costs nothing — stepping away from the computer is normal. Better still, paused time does not count towards the flight duration, so a break adds neither hours to the airframe nor crew costs. Pauses longer than 3 seconds stay in the event timeline, since they explain gaps in the track. Shorter ones are not shown: the sim occasionally raises the pause flag for a single frame without actually stopping, and there is no gap to explain. They do not affect the landing analysis either: it freezes while you are paused, so replaying your landing is not recorded as a second touchdown. A replay itself counts the same way as a pause in both sims: the analysis freezes, the time does not count towards the flight, the rules do not judge it, and the timeline may show it as a pause (MSFS from version 1.17.2, X-Plane from 1.22.1). From version 1.22.1 you can also watch the replay of your landing right after the flight: it will not become a new flight, and the tracker will not file the pending record because of it. From version 1.23.1 you can watch a replay mid-recording too, or after landing before you file: to the tracker the aircraft stays where it was paused, so the replay does not count as repositioning, does not change the flight phase, and stays out of both the track and the distance flown.

I flew with no internet

Points queue up and go out in batches at the first opportunity, 1,800 to a batch, in order. A visible gap in the track means the link was down for too long.

I booked a flight but the tracker does not see it

Look at the booking row in the tracker window. If it says “Waiting for the aircraft”, the booking was made with a ferry: the aircraft is still flying to the departure airport, and the flight cannot start until it lands. The row also names the aircraft, where it is coming from and when it arrives; once it lands the row becomes a normal one on its own — no need to restart the tracker. If there is no row at all, the tracker does not see the booking itself: check that you are signed in with the same account and press Refresh.

The tracker did not pick the flight up itself — how do I start recording by hand

On the “Flights” tab, under the details of every flyable booking, there is a “Start recording” button. It arms the tracker with that exact booking without asking where the aircraft is parked, and recording begins immediately. The button only appears while the tracker is connected to the simulator and is not recording anything. It is a safety net rather than the normal route: normally the flight is found on its own, and pressing the button before you are in the cockpit puts extra parking time into the recording. But if the tracker did not see the flight, press it without hesitation: with no recording the flight is lost entirely, and some extra time on the stand costs incomparably less. You can also start in the air; stages the recording never saw do not enter the score.

The flight was not recorded — what should I send?

Nothing to hunt for. In the tracker open Settings → Diagnostics, describe in a couple of lines what happened and press “Send diagnostics”: the tracker collects the journals of your latest flights and sends them to us itself. It then shows a short reference number — quote it in your forum topic and we will find your files by it. The same button sits on the main screen next to the journal. The journals contain no personal data or passwords, and we keep them for four weeks.

The event timeline and the score used to show different G figures

They did: the timeline showed the instant value at contact, the score the peak over the following half-second. From version 1.11.2 both show one number — the one the touchdown analysis produced. From version 1.13 the tracker computes that number itself, so MSFS and X-Plane are judged alike; the trace shows the simulator's own figure alongside it.

Are free flights measured the same way?

The measurement and analysis are identical, track and touchdown frames included. What differs is the consequences: a free flight brings no economy and no pilot rating, only personal hours and a token amount of experience.

I disagree with a remark

Open the flight debrief: for every check you can see the moment it armed and the conditions under which it locked in. If that does not match what happened in your simulator, write to Feedback with the flight number — the trace shows the tracker's reasoning in full.

Download the tracker My flights Feedback

Next · Chapter 6The airline