August 30, 20263 changes 2 airport 1 fix
- Fix
A VFR aircraft you put in a hold can be released again.
Telling a VFR arrival to hold worked; telling it to resume own navigation did not, and neither did a landing clearance, a straight-in or an approach. The aircraft orbited and every command bounced. Resume own navigation now hands a VFR pilot back their own flying, which is what the instruction means: they were never on a filed procedure to rejoin, and that was exactly why the release was being refused. Reported by a player who sat with one circling for an hour.
Reported by a player
- Airport
John Glenn Columbus International joins the Indianapolis Center build.
Work two east-west parallels through five published arrivals, airline banks, regional jets, business traffic and a small cargo stream. Departures are radar vectors because the current procedure set yields no usable SID.
- Airport
Dayton joins the Indianapolis Center build.
KDAY adds its three surveyed runways, Class C airspace, current airline mix, DANEI arrival and fourteen FAA-cycle approaches.
August 29, 20262 changes 2 airport
- Airport
Indianapolis International opens the Indianapolis Center airport build.
Work Indy Approach across two long parallels and the 14/32 crosswind, with six published arrivals, three departure procedures and eighteen approaches. Passenger banks share the scope with the country's second-largest domestic FedEx hub.
- Airport
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International joins the Indianapolis Center build.
Work three north-south parallels and the long 09/27 crosswind under Cincinnati's Class B. Five published arrivals and nine departure procedures carry passenger banks between DHL and Amazon cargo waves.
August 28, 20262 changes 1 new 1 radio
- Radio
The radio can talk SLOWER now, not only faster.
SPEECH SPEED stepped through 1x, 1.15x, 1.3x and 1.5x, because it was built for a busy frequency where shortening each transmission helps. If your trouble is following the words rather than fitting them in, every one of those settings made it worse, and there was nothing else to reach for. Cycling past 1.5x now reaches 0.9x. It stops at 0.9 rather than going slower because a slower voice fits fewer words into a transmission before the line gets trimmed, and 0.9 is the slowest setting that trims no more than normal speed already does. Reported by a player.
Reported by a player
- New
Every airport on the lobby map now names the facility you would be working.
The card used to read "Towered field", which is true of all forty and so told you nothing. It now names the facility: "FAA Level 10", "FAA contract tower", "U.S. Air Force tower". The level is the real FAA facility level, 4 through 12, the scale that ranks a facility by traffic and complexity. It tells you something the Starter, Busy and Major tags cannot: Seattle and St. Joseph are both tagged Busy, but one is a level 10 and the other is a contract tower. Screen readers get it too, in the blip's own label.
August 27, 20261 change 1 fix
- Fix
Readbacks are no longer spoken long after the clearance they answer.
On a machine where the voices are slow to generate, the radio could fall far enough behind that a readback arrived more than half a minute after you issued the clearance, describing a picture that had already moved on. The radio was supposed to drop audio that had gone stale rather than speak it late, and it checked for that in only one of the two places it mattered. It now checks again at the moment it would speak. The words were always on the strip the instant the clearance was issued, so nothing is lost but a voice that had stopped being true. Reported by a player.
Reported by a player
August 26, 20261 change 1 radio
- Radio
Saint Louis is pronounced Lewis again, not Loo-ee.
The radio has said it the French way since the sixth of August. The respelling that fixes it was written for the airport's name, which is spelled "St. Louis", and the facility's radio name is spelled out as "Saint Louis" -- so the rule quietly stopped matching the words actually being spoken. It covers both spellings now, and a check walks every facility's radio name through the speech layer so the next renamed field cannot slip past it the same way.
August 25, 20264 changes 2 fix 2 new
- Fix
An aircraft now holds the altitude you assigned until it is established.
The approach clearance has always said "maintain three thousand until established" and the aircraft then ignored it, descending to the same height as everything else. That made parallel approaches nearly impossible to separate, because every arrival ended up at one altitude no matter what you told it. Now it holds what the clearance named, so two approaches can be stacked, and the glidepath takes over once the aircraft is established. Reported by a player working the St. Louis parallels.
Reported by a player
- New
The approach panel shows where the glidepath is.
Selecting an arrival now tells you the glidepath altitude at its current range and whether it is above, below, or on it. Requested alongside the report above, and it is the other half of the same problem: being able to hold an altitude only helps if you can see which one to hold.
Reported by a player
- Fix
Working approach only, you can no longer clear an aircraft to land.
That is tower's job, and the approach position exists to separate the two. The game let you do it anyway and the menu told you to, which meant the one seat built to draw that line did not draw it. Now the landing clearance is not offered on that seat and the aircraft goes to tower with F, which is the ending that already existed. Nothing changes on the normal seat, where you work the runway and the radar together.
- New
The first-shift page explains which seat you are working.
Most fields give you the runway and the radar at once, which is one person doing what a busy facility gives to several. Thirteen of them let you take the radar half on its own instead. That choice was on the briefing screen with nothing anywhere explaining it, and at fields without approach control the option simply vanished with no reason given. Both now say what they are.
August 23, 20266 changes 4 fix 2 new
- New
There is a page for people who have never controlled traffic before.
The first session has always walked you through one arrival end to end, waiting on what you actually do rather than on a clock, with a skip button on screen the whole time. Nothing outside the game said so, which meant somebody deciding whether this was for them had no way to find out except by starting a shift. /learn/ now says what the first session teaches, what you need to bring, which is a browser and nothing else, and what it is not: this is not controller training and it does not qualify anyone for anything.
- Fix
Working approach, departures no longer call you holding short of a runway you do not control.
Tower launches the departures; on the approach-only seat they should reach you already airborne, and most did. Light aircraft did not. They appeared on the runway calling holding short, waiting on a takeoff clearance from a controller who does not own the ground, and the only way to move them was to issue one. Reported from the field, and it happened at eight of the thirteen approach fields but at neither of the two the tests were checking, which is why it took a player to find it.
Reported by a player
- Fix
The command panel is shorter, and it leads with what the aircraft needs next.
Selecting an airborne arrival put 61 buttons on screen. It is 36 now, and nothing was taken away. Hold at a fix hid its nineteen buttons behind an expander, the way direct to fix already did, and the two are one Hold section instead of two headings for the same decision. Speed offers four common values with a note that any speed can be typed, the same way the heading grid already worked. And for an arrival the approach and landing clearances now come first rather than sitting under three grids of vectoring controls, which is the order the phone layout already used.
- Fix
The fix lists are in alphabetical order.
Hold at fix and direct to fix both listed the field's fixes in the order the data happened to carry them, which reads as no order at all: with forty buttons you were scanning the whole grid for a name you already knew. Both are A to Z now. Both, not just the hold list that was reported, because two grids of the same fixes disagreeing about where a name lives would be worse than neither being sorted.
- Fix
Working approach, you can now actually send an arrival to the tower.
On the approach seat an arrival that established on the ILS went ready for the tower, flashed its badge and asked for the frequency change on the radio, and there was no way to give it: the menu offered no button and typing F was refused. The handoff only happened because a timer eventually did it for you. The badge now reads TWR F rather than RDY F, the command menu offers Contact Tower, and F works. The shift header also says which seat you are working, so a remembered APPROACH ONLY that does not apply to a Ranked shift is visible rather than a surprise.
- New
Choose which parallel an arrival lands on.
Assigning arrivals between parallel runways is the approach controller's job, and the menu did not treat it that way: it offered one runway, the one the aircraft happened to expect, and hid the other behind an expander. Since the expected runway differs per aircraft, the offer appeared to flip between 28L and 28R for no reason. Both runways in the landing flow are now offered side by side with the expected one marked, so you can put an aircraft on either without typing. A field landing a single runway looks exactly as it did.
August 19, 20261 change 1 new
- New
Charted fixes name themselves while you are choosing where to send someone.
Selecting an IFR aircraft now labels every charted fix on the scope, including the ones that are not published navaids. Those fixes have always been valid direct-to targets, but they were anonymous triangles unless you turned the names on in the display menu, so a fix you could read on the plate and send an aircraft to had no name at the moment you were deciding to send it. The names appear while an aircraft is selected and go quiet when it is not, so the resting scope is unchanged; the setting still forces them on permanently.
August 16, 20264 changes 3 new 1 fix
- New
Work approach only, and let the tower have the runway.
Until now a single player worked the radar and the runway at once, which happens on a quiet midnight shift at a small field and never at a busy one. Sandbox now offers the approach seat at the thirteen fields that have an approach control. On it, departures reach you already airborne three to five miles off the departure end, handed up by the tower, and you sequence and climb them out to Center as before. Arrivals are unchanged until the approach clearance; instead of a landing clearance you send them to the tower on final. They leave your control there but keep flying their own approach and land, because the aircraft behind them is still being spaced against them. It is Sandbox only: the approach seat never touches runway occupancy or takeoff sequencing, and a leaderboard mixing the two would be comparing different jobs.
- New
Choose which way the field is landing.
The wind picks the flow, which means the direction you get is the direction the seed drew, and half of a field's published arrivals only suit one configuration. Sandbox now lets you ask for a flow directly. It works by choosing a wind that lands the field that way rather than overriding the runways, so the briefing still tells you the truth about why the configuration is what it is, and the aircraft still land into wind. Picking one rebuilds the shift at the same field and seed. Ranked still takes the weather it is given.
- New
The charted fixes can show their names.
A published procedure fix that is not also a navaid was drawn on the scope as a small dim triangle and accepted a click as a direct-to target, but carried no name anywhere. So a fix you can read on the plate and hear in a clearance was an anonymous dot, and Portland alone draws eighty-two of them. There is a Proc fix names switch in the display menu now. It is off by default, because labeling all eighty-two would bury the scope, and on for anyone working from the charts.
- Fix
US spelling throughout, and a check that keeps it that way.
The changelog, the command reference, the in-game help and the per-airport pages had drifted into a mix of US and British spelling, in a few places carrying both spellings of the same word on the same page. Fifty-three of them are corrected. A check now runs on every build over everything a player reads. It leaves published names alone, which matters more than it sounds: one of the charted fixes at Hutchinson is called SPELT, and correcting it would invent a waypoint that does not exist.
August 13, 20261 change 1 fix
- Fix
An approach clearance can no longer capture the parallel runway.
Clearing an arrival for one runway of a parallel pair could put it on the localizer for its twin. The aircraft flew a correct-looking approach to the wrong strip of pavement, which cost at least one player a separation loss and a scored session: the game punished somebody for its own mistake. The clearance now holds the runway it names, and a check runs the old failing scenarios on every build so it cannot come back quietly.
August 12, 20265 changes 3 new 2 fix
- New
End the shift after a set number of movements.
A controller thinks about a session as a defined block of work with an end, not as playing until something goes wrong. Sandbox can now be capped at fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five or fifty movements, and the shift ends when you have worked that many. It also makes practice repeatable: the same field and the same thirty-five movements, twice, is a comparison. A movement is a completed operation, an arrival landed or a departure shipped to Center, so it counts work done rather than aircraft appearing.
- New
Pick the shift mode in the lobby, and start on Sandbox your first time.
The mode was buried in the pre-shift briefing, one screen after the decision it belongs to. It is in the lobby now, next to the field you are choosing. A first-ever visitor also opens on Sandbox rather than Ranked, so a first shift is not quietly setting a record while you are still learning which key turns an aircraft.
- New
Badges for cleared to land, and for who needs re-queueing.
Two things the strip bay could not tell you at a glance: which arrivals already have a landing clearance, and which ones went around and are back in the pattern needing a new sequence. Both carry a badge now. The lobby cards also say which seat a field is, tower or approach, rather than only how busy it is.
- Fix
Traffic calls named the aircraft ahead as UNDEFINED.
A follow instruction could go out on frequency describing the traffic ahead as undefined when the aircraft type was not one the phrase knew how to say. It falls back to naming it as traffic now. The command menu also stopped scrolling sideways on narrow windows, and the WHY? explanation now appears whenever there is a note to read rather than only when something has gone wrong.
- Fix
The briefing's first line was spoken as a single word.
A change to how transmissions are trimmed for length made the first line of the turnover briefing come out as one word, which sounded like the audio had failed to start. It reads in full again. Installing the game to a home screen also works now, which lets the browser keep the voice model between visits instead of discarding it, and the copy no longer promises a download that was never going to happen.
August 10, 20261 change 1 new
- New
The wind now decides which way the field is landing.
Every airport here publishes two configurations, and until now only one of them had ever run: half of each field, and half of its published arrivals, were content nobody could reach. Each session now gets its own surface wind, and the field lands into it, so the same airport plays differently from one shift to the next. The briefing tells you the wind, so the direction has a reason you can read rather than being a coin toss. A calm session lands the way it always did. Arrivals are also chosen to suit the direction in use, instead of occasionally routing an aircraft to the far side of the airport and leaving it to turn around.
August 9, 20265 changes 2 fix 2 radio 1 new
- Fix
The data-block keys are in the help panel now, and stop stacking messages.
Walking a data block around its target left one message on screen per press, five of them piling up over the scope. It is one running confirmation now, replacing itself as the block moves. The keys were also missing from the in-game help: that list only showed keys that stage a command into the bar, and these act on the scope instead, so they appeared on the website and nowhere in the game. There is a scope keys line under ? now.
- Fix
Moving a data block did not work if you selected the aircraft by clicking.
Clicking an aircraft puts its callsign in the command bar and moves the cursor there, ready for you to type. The comma and period keys were being ignored whenever the cursor was in that bar, so the two things you had to do were in each other's way: you could not move a block without selecting an aircraft, and selecting one stopped the keys working. The period went into the command bar instead. They now move the block wherever the cursor is, and never end up typed into a command. Reported by a player within hours of it shipping.
Reported by a player
- Radio
You can make the radio talk faster.
A new SPEECH SPEED control in the radio panel steps through 1x, 1.15x, 1.3x and 1.5x. It scales each voice rather than replacing it, so the pilots still sound like different people at every setting, and it applies to the turnover briefing as well as live traffic. Together with pilot voices only it answers the same problem from both ends: one shortens every transmission, the other halves how many there are. Requested by a player.
Reported by a player
- New
Move a data block yourself, in the 45-degree steps a scope uses.
With an aircraft selected, the comma and period keys walk its data block around the target one 45-degree point at a time, and one more press past the last point hands it back to automatic placement. The scope has always kept blocks from covering each other, but it cannot know which two aircraft you are working right now; this is how you tell it. Requested by a player.
Reported by a player
- Radio
If the radio falls behind, the game now tells you how to fix it.
There has always been a setting that stops your own transmissions being spoken, leaving every pilot call audible. Because most exchanges are your instruction followed by the readback, turning it off removes about half of what the radio has to get through, which is exactly what helps when a busy session leaves the voices trailing the picture. It was in the radio panel, labeled as a playback mode, and there was nothing to connect it to the problem it solves. The game already knows when your radio is running late, so at that point it now says so once and points at the switch. It stays quiet if you have already turned your own voice off, or if the radio is off entirely. Reported by a player.
Reported by a player
August 8, 20263 changes 1 fix 1 new 1 honesty
- Fix
Nine fields never told you which departures were in use.
Departure procedures that serve every runway at a field are published with a marker meaning exactly that. The briefing understood a procedure tied to one specific runway and did not understand that marker, so it read those procedures as serving no runway at all and left them out. Kansas City lost all six of its departures that way, Scott all four, nine fields in total: the briefing named the arrivals and went quiet, as though the field published no departures. The aircraft were flying them the whole time, which is why it went unnoticed for so long. All nine now name their departures, and Saint Louis picked up four it had also been dropping.
- Honesty
O'Hare never told you that every departure is yours to vector.
The briefing lists the arrival and departure procedures in use. At a field that publishes no departure procedures the departures half was simply left out, so you were told about arrivals and left to work out the rest at seventeen aircraft. O'Hare is exactly that field: eleven published arrivals and, per the current FAA cycle, not one published departure, which means every IFR departure leaves on a heading you assign and then own. That is the single biggest thing about working the field and the briefing was silent on it. It now says so, in the text and on the radio: radar vectors for all departures. Stated only where the cycle genuinely carries no departure procedure, which today is O'Hare and Tulsa, and never at a field that publishes them.
- New
The button that starts your shift now names the position you are taking.
It read I HAVE THE POSITION at all forty fields. True, but not how it is done: you are relieving somebody on a specific position, and you name it. It now reads I HAVE CHICAGO APPROACH, I HAVE SCOTT TOWER, I HAVE SAINT LOUIS APPROACH, matching the facility named in the briefing above it.
August 7, 20262 changes 2 radio
- Radio
Safari was asked a graphics question it never had to answer.
Before loading the voices the game asks the graphics card whether it can help, and waits for the reply. Safari is already excluded from that path for an unrelated reason, so on Safari the reply was thrown away the moment it arrived, and nothing put a limit on how long the game would wait for an answer it had no use for. That wait sits in the one stretch of loading where nothing else reports progress, which is exactly where Safari sessions were losing their voices. The question is no longer asked on browsers whose answer cannot matter, and where it is asked it now gives up quickly. If the radio does get stuck there anyway, the game falls back to the older loading path instead of going silent for the rest of the session.
- Radio
Safari could lose the radio for a whole session with no way back.
The voices are loaded off the main thread so the download and compile never stutter the scope. When that background load failed during startup, the game went straight to text-only for the rest of the session, even though the older main-thread path was still there and still worked. Safari was hitting exactly that failure and losing voices every time. It now retries on the main thread before giving up, which is slower to start but audible instead of silent. A failure after the download has begun still degrades to text-only immediately, because retrying it would only add silence before the same outcome. Being straight about it: this is a fallback, not a cure. We do not yet know why the background load fails on Safari in the first place, and the game now reports enough about the failure to find out.
August 6, 20268 changes 5 fix 2 new 1 honesty
- New
Hand off separation for converging traffic, not just traffic ahead.
Follow that traffic (FO) is an in-trail instruction: it only ever offered aircraft ahead of you, because you cannot follow something crossing your nose. That left the ordinary case with no instruction at all — two arrivals converging on the same runway from different directions, one pilot with the other in sight, and nothing in the menu but a vector. VS is that instruction: maintain visual separation from that traffic, whatever the geometry. He must have reported it in sight, the pair stops counting against the radar minimum, the exemption is lost if he lets it get tight, and wake turbulence is never waived by it.
- Fix
Southwest was flying under the wrong callsign at Wichita and Tulsa.
The scope showed WN3649 at Wichita and SWA3649 at St. Louis for the same airline: WN is Southwest's ticketing code, SWA is the one used on the radio. Corrected at both fields, and Flexjet's name is now spelled the same way everywhere.
- Fix
Flying above a departing heavy is no longer called a wake conflict.
Wake turbulence sinks: the vortices trail behind an aircraft and settle below its flight path, which is why the standard technique is to stay at or above a heavy's track. The check ignored that and measured the altitude gap in either direction, so a light aircraft overflying a heavy that was climbing out beneath it was treated exactly like one following underneath, and that could end a shift on a conflict which cannot physically happen. Wake spacing now applies only when you are at or below the aircraft ahead. Below and behind a heavy it is unchanged, and it starts applying again the moment a climbing departure reaches your altitude.
- Honesty
Ten towers were calling themselves by the wrong name.
The facility name on every pilot check-in was built from the airport's associated city rather than the callsign the tower actually answers to. Scott AFB introduced itself as "Belleville slash Mascoutah Tower" — reading the divider out loud — and Johnson County Executive, Forbes, Forney, Woodring, Spirit, Downtown, Southern, Alton and Bloomington were all wrong in the same way. Every field's callsign has been checked against published communications data and corrected, and a new field can no longer ship without one.
- New
The strip shows who is waiting on you for a descent, and which traffic is military.
An arrival that finishes its arrival procedure levels off with nothing left to fly and needs a descent from you. It said so once on the radio and then went quiet, so a call you missed left no trace anywhere. The strip now reads WANTS LOWER until you answer it. Military movements also carry a MIL marker on the strip and the data block, which matters at a joint-use field where one tower works military and civil traffic together. The marker is our own organizing aid, not a real radar convention.
- Fix
The lobby map: half the airports could not be clicked.
Twenty of the forty fields handed your click to a neighbor when you clicked them directly — St. Louis went to Cahokia, Kansas City to Topeka — because the invisible target and the pin both grew with the map, so zooming in could never separate a cluster. Pins and targets now hold their size on screen, a click resolves to the nearest field rather than to whichever was drawn last, dragging the map pans it again, and the wheel scrolls the page until you deliberately engage the map.
Reported by a player
- Fix
Two pilots stopped refusing instructions they should have accepted.
A departure whose filed cruise altitude sat below a crossing restriction on its own departure procedure announced it was unable to make the crossing before it had even left the ground, with nothing you could do about it. Separately, a VFR arrival that had asked for the pattern was offered runway-entry buttons that the tower then refused as "not a VFR arrival". Both are fixed.
- Fix
The shift briefing fits on screen without scrolling.
Taking the position meant scrolling past a paragraph that read the same at every field. The generic description is gone (it lives in Help), the briefing is tighter, and the busiest opening still fits above the button.
August 3, 20262 changes 1 new 1 airport
- Airport
Portland International joins Seattle Center.
Work Alaska and Horizon banks across the Columbia River on Portland's paired east-west runways, with real arrivals, departures and approaches feeding both flows. The Cascades and Columbia Gorge shape the real operation, but terrain, MVAs and MSAW are not modeled.
- New
Hand a pilot the separation: follow that traffic, maintain visual separation.
Calling traffic never moved the separation. The pilot seeing the aircraft is not the same as the pilot being responsible for staying away from it, so "traffic in sight" left the job exactly where it was: yours. Once he reports it, FO hands it over. FO on its own follows the traffic he already has in sight, FO with a callsign names the one you mean, and the menu grows a Visual separation row with the same buttons the moment he has something to follow. He then paces himself behind that aircraft, which is how you stagger a fast arrival behind a slower one when a speed assignment cannot reach low enough, and the pair stops counting against the radar minimum because the spacing is now his to fly. He has to actually have the traffic first: without the in-sight report you get "negative contact". It is not a free pass either. Let it get genuinely tight and the visual separation has failed, so it is a loss of separation like any other, and wake turbulence is never waived by a visual at any spacing.
August 2, 20261 change 1 radio
- Radio
Radio speech now keeps pace with busy shifts on supported Chromium computers.
The local voice engine used to generate speech more slowly than it could be played, so every transmission pushed the frequency further behind. Compatible computers now use the faster local graphics path, while unsupported browsers and devices keep the existing smaller fallback with the same audio safety check.
August 1, 20261 change 1 fix
- Fix
Established arrivals now accept realistic final-approach speed assignments.
Jets used to reject every assigned speed at or below the speed they were already flying on final. The higher unconfigured speed floor still applies while they are being vectored, then drops to the aircraft's configured approach range once it is established, so controllers can build spacing without asking an airliner to fly faster than it already is.
July 30, 20264 changes 4 fix
- Fix
Approach charts stop at the runway instead of running past it.
Open the charts panel on an approach and the drawn route carried on beyond the runway to a fix miles the other side of the field — Springfield's RNAV 13 ran fourteen miles past the airport. That tail is the missed approach, which the published data includes and which we were drawing as part of the approach itself. Every approach now ends at its runway. What aircraft actually flew never included it, so only the chart was wrong.
- Fix
Springfield's crossing runway is where it actually is.
Runway 13/31 at Abraham Lincoln Capital sat about a thousand feet east of its real position, so both RNAV approaches to it aimed a few hundred feet to the side of the pavement you could see. One threshold had been typed in with a wrong longitude and the other was calculated from it, which made the runway the right length and the right heading while both ends were wrong together. Both ends now come from the published survey.
- Fix
An approach you cannot make from where you are is flown as a join, not a botched cut-in.
Clearing an arrival for the approach from too far beside the final course used to be flown as a direct cut toward the centerline, with far too little course left to reach it, so the aircraft crept toward the runway and arrived beside it instead of on it. The pilot now recognises that the intercept cannot close in the distance remaining and builds the geometry first: it flies out to a join point on the final course at the right energy and joins there, showing JOIN on the data block until it is genuinely established. The clearance is still accepted. Giving the aircraft a workable intercept angle is still the controller's job, and a shorter, cleaner vector is still the better answer.
- Fix
The radio no longer falls a minute behind you.
On a busy board, if your machine could not generate speech as fast as the transmissions arrived, the backlog grew and every line was still eventually spoken — so pilots read back instructions you had given a minute earlier, describing a picture that had already moved on. A transmission that has waited longer than the frequency could plausibly have been busy is now dropped instead of spoken late, and the time that would have gone into generating it goes to catching up. Nothing is lost: the readback text is already on the strip the moment it is issued. An emergency is never dropped, however long it has waited. Reported by a player at Tulsa.
July 29, 202631 changes 22 airport 8 fix 1 honesty
- Airport
Waynesville-St. Robert Regional joins Kansas City Center.
Work Contour regional service and Army traffic together on Forney Field's single precision runway.
- Airport
Branson Airport in the Missouri Ozarks is playable.
One precision runway carries resort-bound corporate and general aviation traffic. All three current instrument approaches and the published Class D are included; the surrounding hills are not yet modeled and the field does not pretend otherwise.
- Airport
Southern Illinois Airport at Carbondale and Murphysboro is playable.
A high-volume student-training pattern and business GA share three intersecting runways. The published Class D, all current approaches, and the canonical Mississippi River layer are included.
- Airport
Veterans Airport of Southern Illinois at Marion is playable.
Contour regional jets to Chicago share two crossing runways with local and business GA. The published Class D, all current approaches, and the canonical Mississippi River layer are included.
- Airport
Rosecrans Memorial at St. Joseph, Missouri, is playable.
Municipal GA and Missouri Air National Guard Hercules training share two crossing runways beside the Missouri River. Three current arrivals, six departure procedures, all six published instrument approaches, and the FAA-published Class D and nearby Kansas City airspace are included.
- Airport
Enid Woodring Regional joins Kansas City Center.
Work Vance military training and civil GA around Woodring's long ILS runway and short crosswind strip.
- Fix
Runway numbers no longer print on top of each other at parallel fields.
On any field with a bank of parallel runways, the numbers at the thresholds fused into one unreadable smear when you zoomed out to the sector view. Seattle's three sixteens came out as "16R16L16C"; St. Louis ran 30L and 30R together; Chicago and Atlanta were worse. The numbers now lie along the pavement the way they do on a chart, and a parallel bank fans out just far enough to separate, in the same left-to-right order as the runways themselves, so the leftmost number belongs to the leftmost strip. Zoomed in close, where they were never crowded, nothing moves. The approach labels on the extended centrelines know where the runway numbers are now too, so the two sets stop crossing when you have an arrival selected.
- Airport
Beech Factory Airport, Kansas, is playable.
One long runway carries Beechcraft factory flying, corporate jets and extensive training traffic beneath Wichita Approach. Both current instrument approaches and the FAA-published Class D boundary are included.
- Airport
Tulsa Riverside Airport, Oklahoma, is playable.
Tulsa's busy GA reliever brings close parallel runways, extensive training traffic and corporate jets beneath Tulsa Approach. Its current arrival, four instrument approaches and FAA-published Class D boundary are included.
- Airport
Stillwater Regional joins Kansas City Center.
Work Oklahoma State training traffic and regional airline service on Stillwater's long ILS runway and crossing strip.
- Fix
Browsing the airport list can no longer cost you a record.
The server counted every page view and every leaderboard you opened against the same small budget it used to accept a new high score. Open enough airport cards from one office or phone network and the next record submitted from that network was rejected, silently, because the archive is sent without waiting for an answer. Reading and submitting now have separate budgets, reading got a much larger one, and the boards are cacheable so a busy day is absorbed before it reaches the server at all.
- Honesty
Every river and lake on every scope is federal survey data now.
The Missouri, the Mississippi, the Illinois, the Arkansas, the Kaw and Hillsdale Lake all came from somebody drawing them by eye off a map. They are now the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, the same survey the government uses, joining the Ohio. Nothing about flying a shift changes, but the water moved, and on the St. Louis fields it moved a long way: the old Mississippi was close near Lambert and up to eighteen miles wrong at the edge of the same scope. Against published landmarks the new traces sit within about a mile where the old ones were off by ten to eighteen. Kansas City's downtown field is genuinely ringed by the river on every side now. The Illinois River also stops being two rivers: the reach at Alton and the reach at Peoria were the same water under two names, and the survey says so.
- Fix
Approach labels on parallel runways are readable again.
Select an arrival and each landing runway names its approach out at ten miles. On a field with parallels those names printed on top of each other: Louisville showed "ILS 17R" and "ILS 17L" as one unreadable smear, and Seattle's three 16s were worse. Each label now runs along its own extended centerline the way a chart prints it, spaced so no two collide, and a true parallel bank reads as one label — "ILS 16L/C/R". Runways that only look like a bank are never folded together: St. Louis still shows 29 as its own approach, because 29 is the crosswind and does not point where 30L and 30R do.
- Airport
Topeka Regional and Forbes Field, Kansas, is playable.
Guard KC-135 tankers and transient military traffic share two crossing runways with civil and general aviation. All six current instrument approaches and the FAA-published Class D and neighboring Kansas City airspace are included.
- Airport
Salina Regional, Kansas, is playable.
Daily United regional jets, military transients, corporate traffic and Kansas State flight training share four crossing runways on the former Schilling Air Force Base. All six current runway approaches and FAA-published Class D airspace are included.
- Airport
Philip Billard Municipal at Topeka, Kansas, is playable.
Corporate arrivals and municipal GA share two short crossing runways beside the Kansas River. All six current instrument approaches and the FAA-published Class D and neighboring Kansas City airspace are included.
- Airport
Manhattan Regional, Kansas, is playable.
Daily American regional jets share the primary runway with a GA-majority operation and two crossing runways beside the Kansas River. The current WILSY Three departure, all four published runway approaches, and FAA-published Class D airspace are included.
- Airport
Hutchinson Regional, Kansas, is playable.
A GA-heavy corporate operation works three crossing runways beside the Arkansas River under Wichita Approach. All eight current runway approaches and FAA-published Class D and neighboring airspace are included.
- Airport
Garden City Regional, Kansas, is playable.
Two crossing runways carry American Eagle's Dallas service alongside western Kansas GA, corporate, cargo, training, air-ambulance and military traffic. Six current instrument approaches and the FAA-published Class D boundary are included; the field has no published arrival or departure procedures.
- Fix
Louisville's Ohio River is drawn from federal survey data now.
The Ohio arrived from a world-scale map dataset and it showed: too wide, too blocky, and folded over itself west of the field. It now comes from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset, the same survey the government uses, so the meanders and the big horseshoe bend upstream are where they actually are. It was the first river to be sourced this way; the rest followed the same day.
- Fix
An IFR go-around can no longer be reversed at the runway threshold.
Once the pilot begins the missed segment, another landing clearance waits until the aircraft has flown clear for a new approach. VFR aircraft retain their visual resequencing behavior.
- Airport
Joplin Regional, Missouri, is playable.
United Express regional jets and corporate traffic cross a GA-majority tower on two equal-length crossing runways. The field includes all eight current published approaches and the FAA-published Class D, while every departure remains on a heading because Joplin publishes no arrival or departure procedures.
- Airport
Louisville Muhammad Ali International, Kentucky, is playable.
UPS Worldport freight banks dominate this Heavy field, mixed with scheduled passenger traffic and Kentucky Air National Guard Hercules movements on two active parallels beside the Ohio River. Four current arrivals, seven departure procedures, all fourteen published instrument approaches, and the FAA-published Class C shelves are included.
- Fix
The Missouri is one river from Kansas City to the Mississippi.
Ten fields draw the Missouri and they used to draw it from three separate traces that disagreed by up to sixteen miles where they met. Jefferson City and Columbia disagreed by twenty-three. There is one river now, and one Arkansas behind Wichita and Tulsa, so the water is in the same place on every scope that shows it. Nothing about a field you work changes; the map is simply telling the truth in more places.
- Fix
Bloomington-Normal now gives you a board you can actually work.
Central Illinois Regional shipped with too many aircraft allowed on frequency at once for a field with crossing runways and no published departure procedures. In testing it saturated and fell over before anything reached the ground. The limit is lower now, and the field runs the way the rest of the Steady tier does.
- Fix
The Missouri River is now the same river on every scope that shows it.
Kansas City International, Downtown, Johnson County and New Century each drew their own Missouri and their own Kansas River, and the four did not line up: fly one field, then another, and the water had moved by up to two and a half miles. Columbia Regional was worse, with the Missouri drawn on the wrong side of the field, more than twenty miles from where Jefferson City drew the same stretch. All six fields now take that water from one shared map, placed through each field's own reference point, so a bend you learn at one airport is in the same place at the next one. Hillsdale Lake, which Johnson County and New Century both show, is shared the same way.
- Airport
St. Louis Regional, Illinois, is playable.
The metro's northeast corporate reliever brings West Star maintenance traffic, fractional jets and local GA to two long crossing runways beside the Mississippi. The field includes both current arrivals, four departure procedures, all six published runway approaches, and FAA-published Class D and surrounding Class B airspace.
- Airport
Scott AFB / MidAmerica St. Louis, Illinois, is playable.
An active Air Force mobility base and a civil passenger terminal on the same airfield, and it sounds like nothing else in the game: Reach and Pat callsigns, tankers and the odd C-17 or C-5 putting real wake separation on a field this size, Allegiant leisure jets going the other way, and two parallels far enough apart to run both without them ever meeting. Five current arrivals, four departure procedures, all twelve published runway approaches, and the FAA-published Class D under the St. Louis Bravo.
- Airport
St. Louis Downtown, Cahokia, Illinois, is playable.
Three strips packed close together on the Illinois bank across from the Arch, and a shift here is a tower shift: fractional and corporate arrivals threaded through a training pattern that never stops. The long 12R/30L is the primary, 12L/30R runs alongside it, and the short 5/23 stays visual only. Four current arrivals and four departure procedures give the IFR traffic real St. Louis structure; everything else is yours to fit around it.
- Airport
Central Illinois Regional at Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, is playable.
Two crossing runways on flat prairie, with American and Delta regional jets, Allegiant leisure flights and a nightly FedEx 757 to fit through a busy local GA operation. The FAA cycle publishes no arrivals and no departures here, so every IFR flight comes in on a real approach feeder and every departure leaves on a heading you assign: the structure is yours to build, and the crossing runways decide the order. All ten current published approaches and the FAA-published Class D.
- Airport
General Downing Peoria International, Illinois, is playable.
The busiest thing in central Illinois and the widest mix on any Class C board here: Allegiant Airbuses, American and United regional jets, a UPS freighter, Air National Guard C-130s off the Guard ramp, corporate arrivals and a flight school, all wanting the same two crossing runways. The cycle publishes no arrivals and no departures, so the whole picture is built by hand from the approach feeders out. All ten current published approaches and the FAA-published Class C shelves.
July 28, 202612 changes 4 fix 3 honesty 2 new 2 airport 1 radio
- Honesty
Seven claims the airport pages made about the real world, sourced or cut.
The pages describe our own data and they also made assertions about the real airports, and those had nothing behind them. Three are now sourced to the FAA's own airport data and say exactly as much as it supports: O'Hare has eight runways, more than any other public-use airport in the United States; Denver 16R/34L at sixteen thousand feet is the longest runway at any public-use airport in the United States; Las Vegas 08L/26R at fourteen thousand eight hundred and thirty-five feet is the second-longest paved one. Four could not be sourced to any FAA document and are gone rather than reworded: Spirit of St. Louis no longer quotes a daily operations count, Atlanta no longer calls itself the busiest airport in the world, Tulsa no longer ranks its maintenance base, and Springfield no longer states its tower's facility level. The fidelity page lists all seven with what was found and what was not.
- Honesty
The airport pages now say what the field data actually says.
Every per-airport page describes real things: which runways, which flow lands which end, who is on the frequency, what the FAA cycle publishes. None of it was checked against the field data, and some of it had drifted. Springfield's page advertised American Eagle and Allegiant while Breeze also flies there. Five fields publish no departure procedures at all, so every IFR departure is radar vectors you assign, and their pages never said so while Springfield-Branson's and O'Hare's said it plainly. Tulsa left SkyWest out of its regional feed, Seattle left out Delta and Horizon, Columbia named nobody, and St. Louis skipped the three mainlines behind Southwest. Atlanta claimed the highest traffic cap in the game, which is O'Hare's. Johnson County claimed localizers and nothing else, when both ends also have RNAV approaches. All corrected, and the lobby's airport count is now derived from the roster instead of typed by hand, so it can never again congratulate you on thirteen fields while seventeen are live.
- New
Every field now has a second board: the LONGEST SHIFT worked there.
Open any field on the lobby map and the record block has a SCORE / DURATION switch. The duration board ranks on time on position, and every ending counts toward it: a four-hour shift that ended in a loss of separation really did happen, so it stands at its true length with a line saying how it ended, rather than being quietly left off. A shift you handed over is marked relieved. It ranks the longest shift WORKED, and the board says so on its face — a shift has to keep working traffic to be on it, at a rate a real session clears several times over, so an open tab with nobody at the scope does not out-rank you. There is still no minimum shift length and no cooldown; stopping while you are ahead is still a legitimate strategy. The two boards pull against each other on purpose — the score board rewards knowing when to stop, and this one rewards staying.
- Fix
Your longest shifts were never being submitted at all.
A shift was only ever sent to the records when it beat that field's SCORE. Your longest shift is very often not your highest-scoring one, so the long ones simply went nowhere — there was no record of them to build a board from. A shift is now submitted when it beats either the field's score or the field's longest shift, and a shift that beats both is still filed once, as one result.
- New
You can now end a shift on purpose: END SHIFT hands the position to the next controller.
Every shift opened with a colleague handing you the sector, and there was no way to hand it back: a shift ended only by losing separation or by walking away. END SHIFT asks for relief, closes the shift out, and shows the after-action review with your result. It is available whenever you want it, including in the middle of something.
- Fix
Your record is now the score you FINISHED a shift on, not the highest number you passed through.
The score moves in both directions, because a deal, a proximity bust, a forced go-around and a failed emergency all take points back. So the highest number a shift ever showed and the number it ended on are different results. The HIGH beside your score was keeping the highest, which is a score nobody ever finished a shift with, and it disagreed with the leaderboard, which has always recorded the final score. Two things went with that: a later run that was genuinely better than the one on the board set no record and earned no personal best, and the last minutes of a shift cost you nothing. Now the score is taken once, when the shift ends, and the same number goes to your HIGH and to the board. A deal at minute fifty is a real deal.
- Airport
Spirit of St. Louis, Missouri, is playable.
The region's business-aviation reliever brings fractional jets, trainers, transient GA and pattern traffic to two close east-west parallels beneath the St. Louis Bravo. The field includes its customs operation, all eight published runway approaches, five current arrivals, four departure procedures, and FAA-published Class D and surrounding Class B airspace.
- Airport
Springfield-Branson National, Missouri, is playable.
Two crossing strips split the work almost evenly, so neither runway is the spare one. Springfield's regional-airline and overnight cargo jets arrive through the same Class C picture as a large GA and training stream, and the active runway pairing changes which traffic has to cross. The field includes its four current passenger brands, FedEx and UPS freight, every published approach in the current FAA procedure cycle, and the FAA-published Class C shelves.
- Radio
Light aircraft no longer call themselves "November zero" on the radio, and a heavy no longer drops the word "Heavy" off its own callsign. Every transmission now speaks the callsign it should.
A callsign has two forms. There is the one printed in the data block, SWA1490 or N936MH, which is what you type; and there is the one that goes out over the air, "Southwest one four niner zero" or "Cherokee nine three six mike hotel". The game builds the spoken one properly in a single place, and most of the radio went through it — but a scattering of calls did not, and those calls were audible on every shift. A light aircraft has no airline and no flight number, so the calls that skipped the spoken form filled the gap with a placeholder and read it out loud: "November zero, we're heading zero six zero, climbing one one thousand". At Jefferson City and Columbia, where nearly every flight is a light aircraft, that was every single departure checking in as an airplane that does not exist and that matches no tag on your scope. The same calls read airline flights out as the raw tag, "SWA1490 holding short 30L", and dropped the wake word off a heavy, so the one transmission that tells you a departure is a heavy did not say so — against a wake separation rule the game scores you on. The affected calls were the departure check-in after takeoff, the go-arounds, touch-and-goes, ready-for-departure and ready-for-frequency-change reports, and every emergency call a light aircraft makes, mayday included. All of them now speak the proper callsign, with the Heavy or Super suffix and the duplicate-flight-number disambiguator that belong to it. What has not changed is the shorthand: once you and a pilot are talking, a light aircraft still shortens to its type and last three, "Cherokee six mike hotel", exactly as a real controller and a real pilot do, and it still goes back to the full registration when another aircraft on frequency ends in the same three. The scope tag, the strip and everything you type are untouched. A test law now listens to every transmission on every field of a full test shift and fails the build if any voiced line speaks a tag instead of a callsign, or lets a heavy call in without its wake word.
- Honesty
Importing a transfer code no longer deletes the shift log already in this browser. It never should have, and the message that said your record was combined was not telling you the truth.
The transfer code exists so a career can move between a phone and a laptop, and the promise attached to it was that importing one only ever adds. That promise was false. The shift log holds a fixed number of shifts, and when the two histories together came to more than it could hold, the ones thrown away were whichever were older, which in the ordinary case is every shift on the device you are importing onto. A full log on this browser plus a full code from another one meant fifty shifts in and fifty shifts of your own gone: your per-airport bests, your ops totals and your time on position with them. The screen then said "Your record is combined", the code that did it carried a comment promising zero data loss, and neither was true. What happens now is simple and is the rule we should have written in the first place: an import never removes a shift this browser already had. The log also holds twice as many shifts as before, one hundred rather than fifty, so two devices' careers fit side by side with nothing left out at all in the normal case. If the two together really do overrun it, the shifts left out are the oldest ones on the incoming code, never yours, and the message says exactly how many were left out instead of claiming a clean combine. Export first if you want to be certain of a shift log you care about. That advice has not changed, but it is no longer load-bearing.
- Fix
A claimed callsign can no longer be lost to a momentary server hiccup. If the name registry cannot be read, claims are refused for a moment rather than answered wrongly.
Callsigns are held on the server: the name is bound to your browser and to a token that proves it is yours, which is what lets your name appear beside a score on the public board. If the file holding those claims could not be read for any reason, even for an instant, the server treated it as though nobody had ever claimed anything, rebuilt what it thought the list should be from the scoreboard, and wrote that guess back over the real one. Everybody's proof of ownership would have been erased in that write, permanently, and anyone whose name had traveled to a new browser on a transfer code would have been locked out of their own name with no way to get it back. Nothing on the server said a word while it happened. No player ever hit this and no live claim was affected: it was found in an audit and fixed before it could fire. A registry that cannot be read is now treated as unknown rather than empty. Nothing is rewritten, nothing is guessed, the failure is logged loudly where we will see it, and name claims and availability checks answer "try again in a moment" until the file reads cleanly, which they do automatically. A score submitted during such a moment is still recorded in full; only the name beside it is held back, because the server will not print a name it cannot prove belongs to you.
- Fix
You can no longer put two aircraft on the same runway pointed at each other. A clearance that would do it is refused: "unable, opposite direction traffic on that runway."
16R and 34L are not two runways. They are one strip of concrete worked from opposite ends, and the game did not know that. Runway occupancy was decided by comparing the runway's name, so a departure rolling 16R and an arrival landing 34L looked like traffic on two completely different runways. Nothing warned you, nothing refused the clearance, and the two aircraft closed head-on down the same pavement at a combined three hundred knots. It came to light at Denver, where one flow was set up to depart 16R while landing 34L, but the flaw was never really about Denver: the same hole was open at every airport in the game, on every runway, to anyone who typed the two clearances by hand. Runway occupancy is now decided by the pavement rather than by the name. An aircraft on either end of a runway occupies that runway, which also closes a quieter version of the same gap: an aircraft holding in position at one end no longer looks invisible to an arrival landing toward it from the other. What has deliberately not changed is ordinary sequencing. Two aircraft using the same end one after another is normal tower work, an arrival clearing the runway ahead of a waiting departure is the everyday picture, and all of that still behaves exactly as it did, including clearing an arrival to land behind a departure that is still on its roll. Only the head-on case is refused, and it is refused in both directions: a takeoff or a line-up into traffic committed to the far end, and a landing clearance into traffic committed to the near one. Real opposite-direction operations do exist at real facilities, but they are a deliberate, coordinated procedure with its own rules, and the game does not model them. Rather than pretend to run one, it declines. A soak-test law now watches for this on every field, every runway, every tick of every test session, and the law is itself tested by staging the Denver case and confirming it is caught.
July 27, 202626 changes 11 new 6 fix 4 radio 3 honesty 2 airport
- New
In Sandbox and Arcade, the shift now opens at your actual local time. Ranked still draws its time of day from the seed.
Sit down at half past nine at night and you are handed an evening shift: the turnover briefing reads your real clock, the pilots greet you accordingly, and the sign-offs follow. That is what the time of day was always meant to do, and until now it did not — every shift opened at a time invented from the session seed, so you could take the position at nine in the evening and be told it was twenty past six in the morning. Ranked is deliberately left alone. It is the mode with a leaderboard on it, and a leaderboard is only worth reading if everyone faced the same spread of shift times; a three-in-the-morning mid is part of the challenge and it has to be dealable to every player, not only to whoever happens to be awake at three. So a ranked shift still draws its clock from the seed, and the briefing now says so on the line rather than leaving you to wonder why it is 0300 on a Tuesday afternoon. Switching modes on the pre-shift screen updates the briefing immediately, so the time you are told is always the time you will work. The clock still runs on sim time once you have the position, and a session you report a bug on still replays to the exact time of day you flew it — the time is recorded with the session rather than guessed at afterwards.
- Honesty
Nine aircraft types were flying as generic widebodies. They are now real aircraft, and the whole type list is built from the FAA's own designator order.
If you worked a Citation CJ2 into Wichita, a TBM into Johnson County or a Dash 8 into Seattle, you were not working what the strip said you were. Nine type codes were named in the airline and general-aviation mixes but never actually defined anywhere — A319, A220, the 737-900, the CJ2, CJ3 and CJ4, the Dash 8 Q400, the Embraer 170 and the TBM 900 — and every one of them quietly fell back to the same default: heavy-jet wake spacing, a refusal to slow below 160 knots, and a five-thousand-foot landing roll. A nine-seat single-engine turboprop was holding a widebody's separation and reporting a hundred and sixty souls on board. That is fixed, and fixed at the root. Every aircraft type in the game is now built from FAA Order JO 7360.1K, Aircraft Type Designators — the order US facilities actually use — so each type carries the manufacturer, the model and the wake category the FAA publishes for it, and the game can no longer contain a type code that is not a real designator. Two codes we had been using for years turned out not to be real ones: the Embraer 175 that regional carriers fly is E75L, not "E175", and the Piper Cherokee family is P28A, not "PA28". Both are corrected. You will feel this most on the light end. The Citations and the TBM now slow down like light aircraft, hold light-aircraft wake spacing, and clear the runway far faster than they used to, which changes how tightly you can sequence them against the jets. The performance numbers behind that — approach speeds, landing distances, climb rates — are ours, not the FAA's: that order publishes designators and wake categories, not speeds, and we say so rather than dressing our tuning up as published data. The type list itself grew from forty aircraft to a hundred and five, all of them real designators, so a future airport picks its fleet from a real catalog instead of someone inventing a plausible-looking code.
- Airport
Harry Reid International, Las Vegas, is playable.
Two pairs of parallel runways at right angles, and they cross: the south ends of both north-south runways run straight over the 14,835-foot 8L/26R. That crossing is the field. In the configuration Las Vegas actually uses most of the year you are landing 19R and 26L while departing 19L and 26R, which means every 19 arrival has to be fitted between the departures rolling underneath it. The alternate configuration lands and departs the 1s with no intersection at all, and you can feel the difference immediately. Southwest owns the place; the international widebodies are rare and worth waiting for. One thing to know before you sit down: Harry Reid sits in a bowl ringed by mountains, and VectorHeavy models no terrain, no minimum vectoring altitudes and no low-altitude alerting anywhere. Nothing on this scope will stop you flying into the Spring Mountains, because they are not there. Do not treat this field as practice for Las Vegas terrain.
- Radio
When it is going wrong, the frequency gets longer instead of shorter — and an emergency now ends in silence.
Two opposite ends of the same idea. While a conflict alert is live, nothing compresses; it expands. The flight is addressed by its full callsign with the weight class on it, a landing clearance you are not touching gets restated rather than assumed, and on a runway clearance where the runway really is empty you hear it said out loud: "there is no one on runway one two right but you". That extra verbosity is the alarm — you should be able to tell something is wrong from the length of the transmissions alone. At the other end, an emergency crew is no longer on the radio the whole way down. They take twenty to thirty-five seconds to make their first call, because they are flying the airplane, and in the last minute or so before touchdown they stop transmitting altogether while you keep broadcasting into a dead channel. The strip and the data block read NO TX while that is happening. It is not a radio failure and it is not a fault: the aircraft is still flying, still turning, still descending, still doing everything you tell it. Keep working it.
- Radio
Pilots now get shorter when the frequency gets hard — and a tower sounds terser than an approach control does.
A readback is no longer one fixed string. It has a full form and a series of progressively stripped ones, and which one you hear depends on how critical the message is, how much time the airplane has, and where you are working. The first thing to go is always the informational part — the wake advisory, the traffic call, the "equipment standing by" — while the instruction itself survives intact. After that a routine vector loses its anchor word and then its magnitude digit, so "left heading zero eight zero" becomes "left zero eight zero" and then "left eight zero"; the airline name falls off the callsign; and eventually you get a bare "roger", or nothing at all on a frequency change. A takeoff clearance, a landing clearance and a hold never take part in any of that: the command, the runway, the heading and the callsign are the four things real crews hold onto hardest, and they are the four things that can never be stripped here. The same field will sound different from a tower cab than from an approach room even with identical traffic, because that difference is real and it is large.
- Airport
Chicago O'Hare added: eight runways, the most complex field in the game and the one players asked for most.
Six parallel east-west runways in two banks, plus the two surviving northeast-southwest diagonals, all built from the FAA's own published threshold coordinates. West flow lands 28C, 27C and 27R and departs 28R, 27L and the 22L diagonal; east flow lands 10C, 9L and 10R and departs 10L and 9R — the FAA's published configurations, which is why the arrival runways are not simply the reciprocals of the departure runways. United and American both run a mega-hub here, with Envoy, SkyWest and Brickyard on the regional feed and a real international bank on top. One thing to know before you sit down: O'Hare has no published departure procedures at all. The current FAA cycle codes eleven arrivals for the field and not one SID, so every departure leaves on a heading you assign and is yours to work from the rotation. Lake Michigan sits off the eastern edge of the scope, drawn from real shoreline data.
- Radio
Every shift now happens at a time of day, and the pilots know what time it is.
The relief briefing opens with the clock — "0614 local, morning shift" — and check-ins carry the greeting that goes with it: good morning early, good afternoon at midday, good evening late. Handoffs sign off the same way, so a shift that runs past the hour hears the frequency change with it. The time is fixed by the shift's seed rather than by your own clock, so a shared seed puts two players on the same shift at the same hour, and a replay of a saved session lands at the same time of day it did the first time.
- Radio
The frequency stops repeating itself: check-ins, position reports, acknowledgments and sign-offs now have far more ways of saying the same thing.
Every non-mandatory line — a pilot checking in, reporting the field, answering a traffic call, asking for the frequency, an own-navigation report after departure, a roger, a good day — now draws from at least eight authored wordings per kind of operation, and it works through all of them before any one comes back around. Standard phraseology is deliberately left alone: a landing clearance, a takeoff clearance, a hold and every required readback still read exactly the same way every time, because that is what phraseology is for.
- Fix
Training no longer holds you on the blip-drag until you perform it.
The turn lesson used to advance on a scope drag and nothing else, so a player on a trackpad, or one who simply typed the clearance the way a controller does, had already done what the card asked and the card would not move. Any heading now counts: the command menu, a typed C 090, or the drag. The card also carries SKIP THIS STEP, which passes the gesture alone and keeps the lessons after it. The drag is still taught, because it is the fastest route to a fine heading and doubles as a protractor.
- New
The airspace boundaries no longer draw themselves on top of your traffic: they are now a map layer you switch on when you want them.
At St. Louis the boundary set is a dozen nested Class B shelves, four neighboring surface areas, and a label on every one of them, all of it circling the field alongside the range rings. It buried the thing the scope is actually for. Both layers now start off, the way a real position runs the video maps it wants and no more; open ⋯ in the top bar, then DISPLAY & MAP LAYERS, and switch Airspace or Neighbor airspace on whenever you want to see where a line runs. Nothing about the rule changed: a VFR is still yours to vector only while it is inside the Class B, and outside it the pilot still answers "unable, VFR", drawn or not. If you had already switched a layer off, it stays off.
- New
VFR traffic now has to be cleared into Class B, and it will hold outside until you do.
A VFR flight nearing the Bravo calls you for a clearance. Answer with CB to clear it in ("cleared to enter Bravo airspace") or RB to refuse ("remain outside Bravo airspace"). Uncleared, the pilot orbits clear of the boundary and calls back every couple of minutes, so an ignored request is an arrival that never reaches your runway. Aircraft already inside, and anything working an emergency, are not asked for one.
- Honesty
The 200-knot limit beneath a Class B shelf is now flown and enforced.
14 CFR 91.117(c) caps indicated airspeed at 200 knots in the airspace underlying Class B, and unlike the 250-below-10,000 rule it gives ATC no authority to lift it. Aircraft flying their own profile slow down under the shelves, and an assignment above 200 there answers "unable, two zero zero beneath the Bravo". Inside the Bravo there is no 200-knot limit at all, and the game does not invent one.
- Fix
Arrivals descending via a STAR no longer show up underneath a crossing restriction they have not reached yet.
At Atlanta, inbounds on the ONDRE ONE and CHPPR ONE were checking in at 11,000 with a charted 13,000 crossing still ahead of them; Kansas City, Denver and Seattle had the same thing on other arrivals. A published minimum now holds the aircraft up until it crosses the fix that carries it. Where the charted minimum sits above the top of the modeled altitude band, the aircraft holds at the top of the band, which is as high as this airspace goes.
- New
The heading section now tells you where the headings between the buttons are.
The grid is a quick pick on the twelve thirties, and a player who never found the blip drag read that as all the game had. A hint under the grid now points at the finer route your input actually has: on a mouse, drag the blip and the heading follows the cursor in fives, which doubles as the protractor; on touch, where the drag does not arm, type it in the command bar, which already holds the callsign. Help says the same thing in full. Requested by a player.
- New
You can now call traffic, and the sim calls it for you when a VFR flight is about to need it.
A VFR pilot is responsible for seeing and avoiding, but you are the one with the picture, and until now there was no way to hand it over. TA calls traffic on any aircraft: "traffic, two o'clock, three miles, northbound, a Skyhawk, altitude two thousand five hundred". TA on its own calls the nearest relevant traffic, TA with a callsign names the one you mean, and when the traffic is an arrival ahead on the same final it becomes the sequencing call, "traffic to follow, a Bonanza on a two mile final". The pilot answers "traffic in sight" or "looking", and whether he finds it depends on where it is: traffic behind the wing is hard to see. Converging VFR traffic also draws an automatic call so nobody is ever flying blind, and it is rate-limited so it never talks over you.
- Fix
The AUDIO button now actually opens the audio panel.
Clicking AUDIO looked like it did nothing: the panel was opening inside the top bar, which crops anything taller than itself, so the volume slider and the voice picker were drawn where nobody could see them. The panel now opens below the bar, under the button, at every window size.
- Fix
Display settings, including the airspace map layers, are now a plain click away in the ⋯ menu.
They used to be behind a right-click on THEME, a button the top bar drops as soon as the window narrows and a gesture phones do not have, so the map-layer switches could be unreachable. ⋯ is now always in the bar and its DISPLAY & MAP LAYERS row opens the same panel with an ordinary tap. Right-clicking THEME still works when THEME is showing.
- Fix
The display panel no longer runs off the edge of the screen.
Long option names pushed the panel wider than the window, so Text size "Large" and the "Neighbor airspace" layer switch were cut off at the right edge and could not be pressed. Options now wrap inside the panel and it is always fully on screen.
- Fix
The airspace boundary now draws in its own violet ink so it no longer muddles the range rings.
Boundary lines and range rings are both dim circles around the field, and in the same color family they read as one confusing set. The airspace layer has its own color on all four themes while staying quieter than the aircraft, runways and data blocks. The class is still carried by the dash pattern, solid B, long-dash C, short-dash D, so nothing depends on color.
- New
New and returning controllers are now taught the airspace boundary and what it decides.
Returning players get one short scope update; first-session training gains a brief airspace beat. Help carries the full reference: the ceiling-over-floor labels, the dash pattern that names the class, both map layers, and the VFR vectoring rule.
- New
Departures are now real work: most airline departures fly a published SID, and the rest are handed to you on a heading to vector yourself.
A vectored departure holds the heading it was given with its takeoff clearance and goes nowhere else until you say so. Resume Own Navigation puts it back on its filed route AND its filed altitude.
- New
A departure now leaves your airspace when it actually leaves your airspace, rather than flying to a fixed point and calling.
Outside the radius or above the ceiling and it is ready for the frequency change. The ceiling is measured above the field, so Denver at 5,434 feet works like everywhere else. VFR traffic leaves on distance alone.
- Honesty
Departures no longer route through fixes that belong to arrival descents.
At St. Louis a westbound departure could be sent to SNYDR while an arrival was descending over it. A departure's route is now drawn only from fixes that are not part of any published arrival or approach at that field.
- New
The drawn airspace boundary now decides who you can vector: a VFR is yours to turn only while it is actually inside the Class B.
At a Class B field, a VFR that is laterally outside the shelves, or under the floor of the one above it, flies its own navigation and answers "unable, VFR" — the same as a VFR at a small tower. Fly it back under a shelf and headings work again. A VFR inside a neighboring field's surface area belongs to that field's class, not yours. The command menu offers exactly what the aircraft's position allows, so the buttons and the pilot always agree.
- New
The neighboring fields' airspace is now its own map layer, separate from your field's.
Around St. Louis that is the four satellite surface areas crowding the Class B shelves. Open ⋯ in the top bar, then DISPLAY & MAP LAYERS, to switch them off on their own, keeping your own boundary drawn. Both layers stay on by default.
- New
The scope now draws the published Class B, C and D airspace boundaries at every field.
Real FAA boundary geometry, with each shelf's published floor and ceiling, plus the neighboring fields' surface areas. It is a selectable map layer, on by default: open ⋯ in the top bar, then DISPLAY & MAP LAYERS, to turn it off.
July 26, 20262 changes 2 new
- New
First-time and returning-player training now explain Ranked, Sandbox, and Arcade shifts.
Help also explains current-season field records, off-record modes, and what makes a Ranked shift unrated.
- New
VFR arrivals now receive a real runway-entry and landing-sequence instruction before landing clearance.
Assign straight-in, left downwind, or right downwind after the airport is in sight. The pilot follows traffic ahead at pattern altitude until separately cleared to land.
July 25, 202622 changes 9 radio 6 fix 5 new 2 honesty
- Fix
A cleared VFR arrival can now be ordered to go around while it is still maneuvering to join final.
Go Around is available before the strip reaches FINAL and for pattern aircraft on base or final. When two self-navigating VFR pilots meet, one now keeps a stable right-of-way while the other yields instead of both maneuvering indefinitely.
- Fix
Repeating a VFR landing clearance now releases a present-position hold.
A hold issued after the original clearance could remain latched until the controller changed runways. Re-clearing the same runway now returns navigation to the pilot without restarting a visual setup already in progress.
Reported by a player
- Fix
Small-field IFR menus no longer offer an instrument approach the runway does not publish.
The menu now says the runway is visual-only and leads directly into the point-out-field and visual-approach sequence. Landing clearance remains separate.
- New
Before a shift you now choose Ranked, Sandbox, or Arcade.
Ranked is the core shift: organic traffic builds toward a realistic peak, and only clean, unmodified Ranked results count toward records, milestones, or field boards. Ranked field highs begin with a clean Season 1 slate; earlier scores remain in private shift history but do not set the competitive HIGH. Sandbox keeps normal living traffic for practice. Arcade keeps raising the pressure and is explicitly unrealistic. The HUD and after-action review always show the active mode; Sandbox and Arcade can never alter the Ranked high score. Your last choice is remembered.
- Radio
Stepped-on calls now show BLOCKED / RETRY instead of an unexplained orange transmission.
After the collision squeal, the pilot repeats the original call. They no longer say “say again” and then immediately repeat their own transmission as one confusing sentence.
- Radio
Small fields now develop familiar local traffic across shifts instead of every GA call sounding like a stranger.
Returning aircraft keep their registration, type, and voice. Brief greetings and light pilot chatter appear only during genuine lulls and disappear whenever the frequency needs attention.
- New
Returning controllers now receive a short, one-time scope update when critical controls or safety features change.
This update requires one successful heading action when the field has an inbound that can accept it, then covers conflict alerts, VFR behavior, Help, and after-action replay without repeating the full first-session tutorial. Small fields can never strand the lesson with only departures or non-vectorable VFR traffic on scope.
- New
Traffic now arrives in unpredictable lulls, ordinary flows, and pushes instead of following the same clock-driven ramp every shift.
Difficulty responds to the work on the frequency, including approach and runway states, mixed operations, unfinished coordination, conflicts, and emergencies, not merely the number of aircraft visible.
- Fix
Repeating a VFR landing clearance no longer makes the pilot abandon and restart an in-progress visual setup.
- Fix
An IFR landing clearance no longer accepts a momentary runway heading while the aircraft is still assigned a diverging vector.
The aircraft must have a workable final instead of turning away and claiming FINAL only at the threshold.
- New
First-session training now demonstrates scope drag vectors and explains conflict alerts, loss-of-separation warnings, views, audio, speed, charts, and help.
Touch players are shown the heading and waypoint controls available on their device instead of being asked to perform a mouse gesture.
- Radio
Multi-crew flights now sound like a cockpit crew instead of one pilot handling every transmission.
First contact keeps a recognizable primary voice while later calls can include the second crewmember. Single-pilot and VFR aircraft remain one consistent pilot.
- New
After-action reviews now identify the decision point and can reconstruct it on the scope.
The review names the first conflict warning, shows the last instruction before it, and lets you continue from that exact geometry as unrated practice with specific coaching.
- Radio
Radio settings now have a visible AUDIO button and a plainly labeled PILOT VOICES ONLY mode.
Use it when you want to speak the controller side yourself while still hearing every pilot transmission.
- Honesty
An aircraft cleared for an instrument approach now flies the assigned intercept heading it reads back.
A converging vector is held until localizer capture instead of being silently replaced by a different approach-guidance heading.
Reported by a player
- Radio
Pilot calls that used to disappear into dead air now receive a realistic facility response.
Requests awaiting a controller decision receive standby, while advisories such as go-arounds, maneuvering reports, emergency updates, and negative visual contact receive roger. A player transmission cancels the automatic response, and routine readbacks do not create acknowledgment loops.
- Radio
Initial calls at tower fields now receive a prompt acknowledgment instead of dead air.
If the controller has not already transmitted, the facility answers promptly. Radar facilities retain radar contact and the current altimeter; towers use standby without making a false radar claim.
- Radio
Say Intentions now draws from a much deeper library of authored, truth-preserving responses.
Wording varies extensively before repeating, while circuit counts, runway outcomes, exit fixes, parking plans, and VFR departure direction remain tied to the aircraft's actual plan.
- Radio
Recurring pilot calls now rotate through distinct GA VFR, GA IFR, passenger, and freight registers.
VFR pilots sound relaxed, private IFR pilots stay casual but procedural, passenger crews remain polished, and freight crews are terse and rough around the edges. Required clearance values remain complete and standardized.
- Fix
Extended VFR pattern traffic no longer turns an avoidance maneuver inward toward the runway.
Pattern aircraft now remain on their assigned rectangular legs instead of accepting generic free-roam avoidance headings. Releasing an extension authorizes the approach, but the pilot continues downwind until its predicted base track is clear of visible traffic.
- Honesty
Reported emergency fuel now decreases with the aircraft's actual airborne simulation time.
The live whole-minute figure burns for medical, fuel, and radio-failure aircraft, advances correctly at accelerated game speeds, pauses with the simulation, and stops after touchdown. Minimum-fuel advisories now account for the fuel burned before escalation while preserving the intended emergency landing window.
- Radio
On-scope controller and pilot speech now uses a brisker radio pace with broader voice variation.
Controller transmissions are more concise in delivery, pilots sound less repetitive, and recurring pattern calls and readbacks begin with less delay.
July 24, 202610 changes 6 fix 2 radio 2 honesty
- Radio
Turnover briefings now speak at a brisker pace, start after a short bounded radio check, and give your callsign response your selected controller voice.
The outgoing controller keeps a distinct briefing voice, your response uses your selected voice, and the spoken handoff covers active arrival and departure procedures while the full list remains visible.
- Honesty
N-number traffic is now labeled GA IFR or GA VFR instead of showing VFR as though it were an origin airport.
The command panel, flight strip, and scope data block identify the flight rules explicitly. GA IFR keeps the normal IFR control set; GA VFR keeps the VFR interaction rules.
- Radio
Incoming aircraft calls now begin closer to their on-screen message, and command readbacks take priority over routine radio traffic.
Scheduled check-ins no longer create avoidable dead air, while an instruction you issue can move ahead of a lower-priority call or reminder.
- Fix
VFR arrivals now wait until the airport is in sight, then build enough room to complete the landing you cleared.
The landing button appears after the pilot reports the airport in sight. Once cleared, a close-in or upwind aircraft flies away or around as needed, uses nearby visible traffic to choose a sensible visual entry, and holds one stable see-and-avoid maneuver when another track is predicted to conflict. Two pilot-owned VFR tracks no longer create a controller loss of separation; a controller vector or hold can put that responsibility back on the player, and wake turbulence still applies. The pilot slows and descends, establishes final, and lands without immediately going around or falsely asking whether it was cleared. A medical or fuel emergency may keep its speed, but no longer freezes that pilot-owned route or descent before touchdown. It may use the published final as an approximate visual reference, but it does not fly the instrument procedure, fixes, markers, or altitude restrictions.
Reported by a player
- Honesty
Outside Class B, VFR pilots now build their own visual path to the assigned runway instead of accepting controller vectors.
Clear the aircraft to land and the pilot chooses the distance, spacing, pattern entry, and heading needed to get there. It may approximate a published final for convenience, but it receives no RNAV, ILS, fix, marker, or procedure-altitude clearance. Class B remains the heading-vector exception; VFR altitude and speed still belong to the pilot everywhere. Once that landing clearance is accepted, a later pilot go-around can cite the visual setup or runway, but never falsely claim the clearance was missing.
- Fix
A visual arrival now shows FINAL only after it is genuinely lined up and converging on the runway.
A shallow diagonal could cross near the extended centerline and be labeled FINAL while it was still offset and drifting away. The visual final now waits for a tighter, closing alignment, drops the label if the aircraft turns away, and keeps steering decisively onto the centerline without hiding a properly aligned arrival in INTC.
- Fix
A landed aircraft now rolls out down the runway and only calls ready for the ground once it has slowed, instead of stopping dead where it touched.
A landing arrival used to freeze on the spot the wheels touched and immediately read as ready to hand to ground, even while its speed was still bleeding off. It now travels down the runway as it decelerates, the way a real rollout does, comes to a stop on the pavement, and only becomes ready for the ground frequency once it has slowed to taxi speed. The time it spends occupying the runway is unchanged, so it still holds the next same-runway departure exactly as before.
- Fix
A visual arrival with no landing clearance yet now holds over the field instead of flying off into the distance.
A VFR arrival that came in past the far side of the runway could get pinned to the runway heading and fly straight off the map. It now tracks to the field and orbits overhead until it receives a runway and landing clearance, then builds its own visual setup.
- Fix
Visual-flight traffic is no longer offered instrument clearances it cannot fly.
The game's VFR traffic does not fly published instrument procedures. Its command panel no longer offers direct-to-a-fix, holding at a fix, RNAV or ILS clearances, or the IFR visual-approach exchange. Holding present position and the runway landing clearance stay.
- Fix
VFR traffic in the pattern flies its own base to final and lands on the runway centerline again.
Closed-traffic aircraft doing touch-and-goes had started touching down off to one side of the runway, on either side, sometimes far enough that the mislaid aircraft read as blocking the runway and sent the next arrival around. Cleared for the option, a pattern aircraft now leads its base turn and rolls out lined up on the extended centerline, flies the visual approach down to the numbers on its own with no vectoring from you, and any approach that does not line up goes around rather than landing beside the pavement.
July 23, 20269 changes 4 fix 4 new 1 radio
- New
The game now marks your milestones: your first clean shift, streaks of them, shift counts, working every field, and landing on a leaderboard.
When a shift ends, a short celebration appears in the lobby for anything real you just reached for the first time: your first full shift, three or five or ten clean shifts in a row, ten or twenty-five or fifty or a hundred shifts worked, a real shift at all thirteen fields, beating your own best, or your score reaching a field's top five. Each one is earned from what actually happened on position and shows once, and if several land at once they play in sequence. A clean shift means five or more operations handled with zero separation losses. They never interrupt or gate anything; they are just the game noticing.
- New
Set a field record and you are prompted to claim a callsign so your name lands on the board.
When a run tops an airport's leaderboard and you have not claimed a callsign yet, the after-action review now says so plainly: the record is yours but shows as an anonymous dash until you put a name on it. Claim one right there and the record carries it; skip it and the run still stands, just unnamed. If you already have a callsign the record is already yours, so it simply congratulates you instead.
- Radio
Claim a callsign and the shift turnover greets you by it when you take the position.
The colleague handing off the position now closes the turnover briefing by checking you in by name, spoken in person off the frequency the way a real position relief happens. Nothing changes if you have not claimed a callsign yet.
- New
Each field's card in the lobby now shows its top five scores, with the callsign on each and a badge on the house's own.
Open any airport on the lobby map and you can see the current leaderboard for that field: the five best runs, ranked, with the callsign that set each one, or a dash where the run was left unclaimed. A record set by the studio is marked so you know it is the house and not another player. Your own best still sits above the list exactly as before.
- Fix
Airport labels that sit close together no longer overlap, and reveal themselves cleanly as you zoom in.
Around a busy metro like Kansas City several fields sit within a mile or two of each other, so on the lobby map their code labels used to pile on top of one another. The map now works out which labels have room in the view you are looking at and shows only those, keeping the busier field's label and holding the crowded ones back until you zoom in far enough to give each its own space. Point at any dot and its label always shows.
- New
Callsigns are now yours: claim a unique callsign and it is reserved to you.
A claimed callsign used to be a local label that anyone could also use. Claim it now and the name is checked against everyone else's, held to you, and carried with your records and your transfer code. First visit still plays instantly, and if you are offline the name is simply kept on your browser until it can be reserved.
- Fix
Two departures off parallel runways that turn away from each other are no longer failed for a loss they never had.
The real rules let parallel runways launch almost together when the two departures diverge by fifteen degrees or more. The game was holding every pair to full separation regardless and ending the shift on a correctly flown departure. It now applies the reduced minimum the divergence earns, so a properly separated pair reads as safe.
- Fix
A handful of navigation fixes that sat slightly off their charted position have been moved to where the charts put them.
One fix at Seattle (HELZR) was drawn away from its charted position, so a direct-to steered aircraft to the wrong point. The same check corrected similar errors elsewhere and now stops them from returning.
Reported by fishbait322
- Fix
Arrivals no longer brake early while they are still miles from lining up on final.
Coming into Seattle from the north, an aircraft still flying its arrival route could start slowing for the runway well before it was established, because a distance check ignored how far off the final course it still was. It now holds the published arrival speeds until it is actually turning onto final.
Reported by fishbait322
July 22, 202613 changes 6 fix 4 honesty 2 new 1 mobile
- Fix
An aircraft cleared to one runway of a parallel pair no longer lands on the other one.
It could settle onto the neighboring centerline, fly it toward the ground and swing across at the last moment. Parallel-runway approaches now remain committed to the runway they were cleared to use.
Reported by fishbait322
- Fix
Jets arrive at a realistic descent speed and slow down where the chart asks them to.
Everything used to enter the sector at 250 knots, which is the limit below 10,000 feet, so a published crossing speed above that could not be met at all. Aircraft now work out where to begin slowing, so they are stable at the restriction instead of dumping speed the moment they pass the fix before it. A charted speed also survives an altitude you assign, which is what the orders say.
Reported by fishbait322
- Fix
Aircraft cleared for an approach, and traffic in the pattern, are watched for separation.
An aircraft stopped being watched the moment you cleared it for the approach, and VFR pattern traffic flew whole circuits with nothing checking it. Both now remain real traffic for separation purposes.
- Fix
The strip and the scope name the departure procedure an aircraft is flying, not the fix it leaves the sector on.
A departure on the JHART SEVEN read as a TWILA departure, because TWILA is the exit gate rather than the procedure. The radio and the chart button had it right already.
Reported by fishbait322
- New
Right-click cancels a heading drag while you are still dragging it.
Escape still works, and so does releasing back over the aircraft. With no drag underway, right-click still undoes the last fix on a route.
- Mobile
Add to Home Screen opens the game full screen, which gives back the space the browser header was taking.
The site has real icons now too. Asking for /favicon.ico used to hand back the lobby page.
- Honesty
A radio that is working is no longer reported as unavailable.
A quiet stretch with nothing to transmit was being read as broken speech. Silence only counts against the radio when you asked to hear something.
- Fix
An approach join now flies the fix it was cleared direct to.
Clearing an aircraft direct to a fix and then clearing the approach could send it to a different fix on the procedure. It flies the one you named.
Reported by fishbait322
- Fix
The bug report box pauses the session while you type, and gives the time back when you close it.
Traffic used to keep moving behind the box, so reporting a problem cost you the board.
Reported by a player
- Honesty
The radio armed indicator only lights once speech has actually played.
It used to light when the request went out, which meant it could claim a radio that was still failing to load.
- Honesty
The voice download is stated up front, and a failed load says so instead of going quiet.
The play page also stopped saying no download. There is no install, but the voices are 88.6 MB the first time you arm the radio.
- New
New page at /privacy/ listing what leaves your browser, including the session tape a new high score sends by itself.
- Honesty
Text radio lines state what you have rather than what failed.
July 21, 202616 changes 7 new 5 fix 2 mobile 1 radio 1 honesty
- New
Press an aircraft with the mouse and drag to set a heading.
A dashed band follows the cursor with the heading beside it, rounded to five degrees. Release and it issues the same line you would have typed, so the readback and the tape are identical. Requested by a player.
- New
Crossing restrictions draw beside the fixes on the scope when an aircraft flying a procedure is selected.
Altitude bars use the chart convention, at or above underbarred, at or below overbarred, and the numbers come from the same formatter the chart viewer uses so the two can never disagree. Requested by a player.
- Fix
Departures flying a SID fly the published path from rotation.
They held runway heading too long and then joined the nearest leg, which skipped the runway-aligned first fix on many transitions. Found in the field.
- Fix
A departure that turns away from its route now says so on the radio, and only turns when a parallel departure justifies it.
A lone departure could turn away from its only fix without a word. Found in the field.
- Fix
Browsing the chart viewer no longer fights the automatic focus on the selected aircraft, and the pane can be navigated properly.
Reported by a player
- New
Departures with a filed SID offer a chart button, the same as arrivals with a STAR.
Offered from holding short, which is where you would brief the plate. Requested by a player.
- New
Keys pre-stage a command for the selected aircraft, so you type the number and send.
Keys never transmit on their own.
- New
New page at /commands/ with the whole grammar, the arguments each verb accepts, and what gets rejected.
- Mobile
The view preset column stopped swallowing taps meant for the command sheet.
- Mobile
The command bar no longer grabs focus on a touch device, so the keyboard stays down until you ask for it.
- New
Claim a callsign after a run. It travels with your transfer code and gets named on your records.
- New
The opening overlay names the facility you are taking and states what you are being scored on and how the session ends.
The play page also shows a splash while the game loads, so a slow connection no longer looks like a hang.
- Fix
Requesting an airport gives an unmistakable confirmation and will not send twice.
A phone could submit the same request repeatedly because nothing on screen confirmed that the first one had worked.
- Fix
Scope text and aircraft data blocks now render reliably across supported browsers.
This fixes the blank data blocks that some players were seeing.
- Radio
Voice loading is now consistent across supported browsers.
- Honesty
The fidelity notes and the openScope comparison are linked from the lobby, not just from search results.
July 20, 20267 changes 4 fix 3 radio
- Fix
Data blocks can no longer come up blank.
The game now detects and repairs an empty text render before it reaches the scope.
- Radio
The scope now stays responsive while radio lines are prepared.
Firefox gets voices on by default again as a result.
- Radio
LISTEN is now a deliberate opt-in that powers the radio on and remembers your choice.
- Fix
The briefing button no longer sticks on TUNING.
If audio cannot start, the control now returns to LISTEN instead of waiting forever.
- Radio
Radio output is protected against sudden volume spikes.
- Fix
Fixed garbled voices in Firefox and a crash in Safari, both from field reports.
A bad voice load is now caught before distorted audio can be played.
- Fix
The tutorial's approach step clears whether you click the button or press the key.
July 18, 20262 changes 2 fix
- Fix
Runway flow arrows point down the runway, in the direction of travel.
They were drawing the reciprocal, which is the approach course rather than the direction anything moves.
- Fix
The theme and updates buttons move into an overflow chip when the top bar runs out of room.
July 17, 20266 changes 2 new 2 airport 1 fix 1 honesty
- Airport
Three Kansas City satellites added: Downtown Wheeler, Johnson County Executive and New Century AirCenter.
All three are tower seats under the Kansas City TRACON, with crossing runways at two of them and a single strip at Johnson County.
- Airport
Kansas City International, Wichita Eisenhower and Tulsa International added.
- New
The lobby groups fields by the Center they sit inside, with a zoomable sector map.
- New
Game speed at half, normal, double and quadruple.
Half speed asks first, because slowing the clock down unrates the run.
- Honesty
An arrival only flies a published arrival procedure when it came from a direction that procedure actually serves.
- Fix
The menus and buttons follow the theme, which fixes an unreadable command menu in DAYLIGHT.
July 16, 20262 changes 2 fix
- Fix
Final tracking converges onto the centerline all the way through touchdown.
- Fix
Removed a spurious unable-restriction call at the end of a descend-via path.
July 15, 20263 changes 3 mobile
- Mobile
The portrait command sheet is capped at under half the screen and opens with its categories collapsed.
It used to take over the display.
- Mobile
The top bar now sheds cleanly on very narrow screens without clipping.
- Mobile
The lobby marks the Steady fields as a good fit for a phone, and only says so to touch visitors.
July 14, 202614 changes 5 new 4 fix 2 mobile 2 radio 1 airport
- Mobile
Fixed an iOS crash loop while loading the voices.
On a phone, the voice download now waits until you turn on the radio.
- Mobile
Top bar fit and Safari input fixes.
- New
You can clear an aircraft for any published approach, for a visual, or onto a runway outside the current flow.
- New
High scores are per airport. The lobby card for each field shows your best there.
- New
A recovery section in the command menu gives named buttons to put an aircraft back on plan after a bad vector.
- Radio
Fix names get a pronunciation layer, so MARNR is spoken as Mariner and AARCH as Arch.
Only the speech changes. The scope still shows the real name.
- New
An approach clearance that would cut across the adjacent final now warns you before it goes out.
- Fix
New arrivals never expect a runway that is closed.
- Fix
A missed approach holds runway heading and waits for you instead of routing itself somewhere.
- Fix
No session starts in a loss of separation.
- Fix
An automatic handoff says contact Center, not radar contact lost.
- Airport
KSTL runway 6/24 serves its published approaches, so the crosswind runway is usable.
- New
Retrying from the after-action review starts a fresh seed by default, and honors a pinned one if you ask.
- Radio
Radar contact and standby calls fill the dead air where an aircraft used to just say nothing.
July 13, 202611 changes 5 new 4 fix 2 honesty
- Fix
Aircraft fly with honest inertia: level-offs taper, turns are bank limited so a fast ship arcs wide, and the takeoff roll and landing rollout take real distance.
- Fix
A cleared aircraft no longer dives at the approach. Descent rates are capped per type.
- Fix
Fixed arrivals flying outbound past the field while still tagged FINAL.
- Fix
Two established parallel arrivals no longer false-trip the radar minima against each other.
- New
REPORT A BUG is one button, and it attaches the session tape so the run can be replayed exactly as you saw it.
- New
A runway occupancy guard, with hold-short queue chips showing who is waiting.
- New
You can command a turn direction, left or right, instead of always getting the short way around.
- New
Finals carry the published approach glyph, an ILS feather or an RNAV diamond, and the approach type is labeled when you select an arrival.
- New
An overtake predictor warns when a faster aircraft is closing on the one ahead of it on final.
- Honesty
Catching up behind a Large leader raises a wake caution rather than a conflict. Heavy and Super stay enforced.
- Honesty
VFR arrivals and visual approaches join a final they established themselves, rather than being pointed at the numbers.
July 12, 20268 changes 7 new 1 honesty
- New
Published procedures arrived: RNAV arrivals with descend-via, departures with climb-via, and instrument approaches, all built from the FAA data cycle.
- New
A chart viewer inside the game, so you can read the procedure an aircraft is flying without leaving the scope.
- New
The approach is two clearances, the way it really is: cleared direct a fix, then cleared for the approach.
- New
Procedure fixes draw on the scope and can be commanded by name.
- New
Scope settings: saved views, predicted track length, font scale, keep running in a background tab, and field elevation.
- Honesty
Published the Fidelity Ledger at /fidelity/ and an honest comparison with openScope, which this game owes a debt to.
- New
Flight strips can be dragged into the order you want, and the bay resizes.
- New
International destinations, and the Super wake class above Heavy.
July 11, 20261 change 1 new
- New
A shift log in the lobby that remembers your runs, with a transfer code to move them to another machine.
The id lives in your browser. There is no account and there never will be.
July 6, 20269 changes 5 new 2 honesty 1 fix 1 radio
- New
A predicted conflict alert warns in amber well before two aircraft would lose separation.
- New
A violation ends the session and hands you a review of what happened, with the option to continue unrated or rewind a minute.
- New
Scoring rebalanced onto three pillars: throughput, efficiency and safety.
- New
Six more general aviation types, with per-airport pools so the light traffic fits the field.
- Honesty
VFR pattern entries are honest: closed traffic off the ground, and a forty-five degree join for inbounds.
- Honesty
Published the fidelity ledger, an adversarial read of this game against FAA 7110.65, 91.117 and the AIM, listing where it departs from the rule and why.
- New
Same-runway wake departure intervals, per 7110.65 3-9-7.
- Radio
Voice loading now reports progress, times out cleanly, and has a fallback when the primary download is unavailable.
- Fix
Fixed a parallel-departure deadlock using tower visual separation and a divergent climb.
July 5, 202610 changes 6 new 2 radio 1 airport 1 mobile
- Radio
The radio speaks. Controller transmissions and pilot readbacks are voiced, with a voice pool so aircraft sound like different people, and you pick your own.
It runs in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere to make a voice.
- Radio
A spoken turnover briefing when you take the position, the way a relief controller gets one.
- Airport
Atlanta, Denver and Seattle added, then Jefferson City, Columbia and Springfield.
The first three are hubs. The last three are small towers, and they play nothing like the hubs.
- New
General aviation, VFR traffic and pattern work, so the board is not all airliners.
- New
Pilots declare emergencies, and you deal with them.
- New
Wake turbulence separation by aircraft type.
- New
Route an aircraft through several fixes by clicking them in order, with right-click to undo the last one.
- New
Four themes, a first-session tutorial, view presets, and a seed you can pin to replay the same traffic.
- Mobile
Playable on a phone: pointer input, a drawer layout and a bottom command sheet.
- New
The game got its name. Sector became VectorHeavy, with a lobby to pick a field from and the scope moved to its own page.
July 4, 20262 changes 2 new
- New
First playable: St. Louis approach, built from the real runway thresholds and the real St. Louis area fixes and VORs.
Typed and clicked commands, FAA phraseology, filed flight plans on real airline callsigns, a flight strip bay, and scoring.
- New
A video map underneath the scope: the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the island, and the runways drawn where they really are.
A lot of what is on this page started as somebody's bug report. If something looks wrong on your scope, the REPORT A BUG button in the help panel sends it straight here.