What has changed

An aircraft cleared to one runway of a parallel pair no longer lands on the other one.

It could settle onto the neighbouring centerline, fly it all the way to the ground and swing across at the last moment. A sweep of 144 converging vectors at St. Louis, Seattle and Atlanta had twelve landings on the wrong runway. It now has none.

Reported by a player

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 a player

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 are real traffic now. This makes the game harder, by roughly one completed operation in six.

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 a player

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.

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.

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.

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 a player

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

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.

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 page at /privacy/ listing what leaves your browser, including the session tape a new high score sends by itself.

Text radio lines state what you have rather than what failed.

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.

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.

Departures flying a SID fly the published path from rotation.

They held runway heading to 400 feet and then joined the nearest leg, which skipped the runway-aligned first fix on a lot of transitions. Found in the field.

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 used to turn thirty degrees off its only fix without a word. Found in the field.

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

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.

Keys pre-stage a command for the selected aircraft, so you type the number and send.

Keys never transmit on their own.

New page at /commands/ with the whole grammar, the arguments each verb accepts, and what gets rejected.

The view preset column stopped swallowing taps meant for the command sheet.

The command bar no longer grabs focus on a touch device, so the keyboard stays down until you ask for it.

Claim a callsign after a run. It travels with your transfer code and gets named on your records.

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.

Requesting an airport gives an unmistakable confirmation and will not send twice.

One field came in three times in twenty-nine seconds on a phone, because nothing on screen said the first one had worked.

Scope text is drawn from a pre-baked font atlas instead of being rendered at runtime.

This is the structural fix for the blank data blocks some browsers were showing.

The radio loads the same way on every browser now, rather than a different model path per platform.

The fidelity notes and the openScope comparison are linked from the lobby, not just from search results.

Data blocks can no longer come up blank.

The font is checked before anything is drawn, the drawn text is verified, and a healer re-bakes anything that came out empty.

Voice generation moved off the main thread, so the scope keeps running while the radio talks.

Firefox gets voices on by default again as a result.

LISTEN is now a deliberate opt-in that powers the radio on and remembers your choice.

The briefing button no longer sticks on TUNING.

Chrome leaves a blocked audio start pending rather than rejecting it, so the button waited forever. It now settles back to the LISTEN state.

A limiter sits on the radio output so nothing can spike in your ears.

Fixed garbled voices in Firefox and a crash in Safari, both from field reports.

The audio is now checked numerically after every model load, so a bad load is caught rather than played.

The tutorial's approach step clears whether you click the button or press the key.

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.

The theme and updates buttons move into an overflow chip when the top bar runs out of room.

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.

Kansas City International, Wichita Eisenhower and Tulsa International added.

The lobby groups fields by the Center they sit inside, with a zoomable sector map.

Game speed at half, normal, double and quadruple.

Half speed asks first, because slowing the clock down unrates the run.

An arrival only flies a published arrival procedure when it came from a direction that procedure actually serves.

The menus and buttons follow the theme, which fixes an unreadable command menu in DAYLIGHT.

Final tracking converges onto the centerline all the way through touchdown.

Removed a spurious unable-restriction call at the end of a descend-via path.

The portrait command sheet is capped at under half the screen and opens with its categories collapsed.

It used to take over the display.

The top bar sheds down to a 320 pixel wide screen without clipping.

The lobby marks the Steady fields as a good fit for a phone, and only says so to touch visitors.

Fixed an iOS crash loop while loading the voices.

The model is only fetched on a phone once you ask for the radio.

Top bar fit and Safari input fixes.

You can clear an aircraft for any published approach, for a visual, or onto a runway outside the current flow.

High scores are per airport. The lobby card for each field shows your best there.

A recovery section in the command menu gives named buttons to put an aircraft back on plan after a bad vector.

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.

An approach clearance that would cut across the adjacent final now warns you before it goes out.

New arrivals never expect a runway that is closed.

A missed approach holds runway heading and waits for you instead of routing itself somewhere.

No session starts in a loss of separation.

An automatic handoff says contact Center, not radar contact lost.

KSTL runway 6/24 serves its published approaches, so the crosswind runway is usable.

Retrying from the after-action review starts a fresh seed by default, and honors a pinned one if you ask.

Radar contact and standby calls fill the dead air where an aircraft used to just say nothing.

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.

A cleared aircraft no longer dives at the approach. Descent rates are capped per type.

Fixed arrivals flying outbound past the field while still tagged FINAL.

Two established parallel arrivals no longer false-trip the radar minima against each other.

REPORT A BUG is one button, and it attaches the session tape so the run can be replayed exactly as you saw it.

A runway occupancy guard, with hold-short queue chips showing who is waiting.

You can command a turn direction, left or right, instead of always getting the short way around.

Finals carry the published approach glyph, an ILS feather or an RNAV diamond, and the approach type is labelled when you select an arrival.

An overtake predictor warns when a faster aircraft is closing on the one ahead of it on final.

Catching up behind a Large leader raises a wake caution rather than a conflict. Heavy and Super stay enforced.

VFR arrivals and visual approaches join a final they established themselves, rather than being pointed at the numbers.

Published procedures arrived: RNAV arrivals with descend-via, departures with climb-via, and instrument approaches, all built from the FAA data cycle.

A chart viewer inside the game, so you can read the procedure an aircraft is flying without leaving the scope.

The approach is two clearances, the way it really is: cleared direct a fix, then cleared for the approach.

Procedure fixes draw on the scope and can be commanded by name.

Scope settings: saved views, predicted track length, font scale, keep running in a background tab, and field elevation.

Published the Fidelity Ledger at /fidelity/ and an honest comparison with openScope, which this game owes a debt to.

Flight strips can be dragged into the order you want, and the bay resizes.

International destinations, and the Super wake class above Heavy.

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.

A predicted conflict alert warns in amber about forty-five seconds before two aircraft would lose separation.

A violation ends the session and hands you a review of what happened, with the option to continue unrated or rewind a minute.

Scoring rebalanced onto three pillars: throughput, efficiency and safety.

Six more general aviation types, with per-airport pools so the light traffic fits the field.

VFR pattern entries are honest: closed traffic off the ground, and a forty-five degree join for inbounds.

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.

Same-runway wake departure intervals, per 7110.65 3-9-7.

The voice load gets a timeout, a progress readout, and a fallback to our own server if the model host is unreachable.

Fixed a parallel-departure deadlock using tower visual separation and a divergent climb.

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.

A spoken turnover briefing when you take the position, the way a relief controller gets one.

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.

General aviation, VFR traffic and pattern work, so the board is not all airliners.

Pilots declare emergencies, and you deal with them.

Wake turbulence separation by aircraft type.

Route an aircraft through several fixes by clicking them in order, with right-click to undo the last one.

Four themes, a first-session tutorial, view presets, and a seed you can pin to replay the same traffic.

Playable on a phone: pointer input, a drawer layout and a bottom command sheet.

The game got its name. Sector became VectorHeavy, with a lobby to pick a field from and the scope moved to its own page.

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.

A video map underneath the scope: the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the island, and the runways drawn where they really are.