Knowledge Base

A VFR-only career add-on for flight sims, built because the existing career tools are either airliner oriented or feel a bit lifeless. Inspired by FSEconomy with some added quirks that hopefully make it more engaging. It has a persistent universe, challenging checkrides and tens of thousands of NPC pilots to make things alive even around the smallest airfield.

Luftrum's in early access and is currently invite only. You can ask for an invite via the registration form or Discord. During the beta, new invites are handed out weekly in limited quantities.

This is a single-person op, so I'd rather give a checklist.

1. Obvious bugs and usability issues fixed.
2. Worldwide coverage.
3. Server costs behave.

Then registration opens. Likely anywhere between 2-6 months.

Yes, it's a hobby project, not a commercial add-on. The intent is to keep it free forever with the existing scope (checkrides, economy participation). There might be expansions, supporter perks, sponsors, or other ways to generate funding, but I treat it as a hobby and monetizing is not a primary goal.

I know... Thanks to AI-assisted coding, launch is cheap. Support and growth is still hard. So you see these mushroom-addons that come and die in a couple of months. I am a professional - well, at least a paid one - enterprise architect and know that building is 5% of the effort. Luftrum was designed with a reasonably narrow scope. Things you see work for the most part and give you a self-contained experience. At its current feature set it's not expensive to run. Life is life, but I tried my best to create something I can realistically sustain.

MSFS 2024 and MSFS 2020 should be fine, although I only test with the former. The simulator client (Konnekt) is built in a plug-in architecture so X-Plane and P3D aren't ruled out (I am an active P3D user), but they're not part of the early access scope.

Strong yes! On-off players, casuals are all welcome. Grinding hundreds of hours is not the goal here. Finding friends via the club system, enjoying VFR and improving your flight skills are. If you have one hour a week, or flight simming is an on-off hobby for you, you still have a place here. In Luftrum you join virtual flight clubs and they have a monthly fee, but that can be covered by 3-4 short hops, less than 2 hours total. Your account is auto-paused after 30 days of inactivity, so no penalty here for not flying all the time, and no massive minuses upon returning after a hiatus.

Luftrum is a passion project built alongside a 9-to-6 job. This does not mean that it'll cease to exist overnight, but feature development and bugfixing will not be as quick as with a commercial offering. I'll always be upfront about what to expect here and on Discord.

On the technical how, I use AI tools extensively for coding and deployment, but Luftrum is not an AI-generated mess without proper foundations. In fact, it's my personal case study on how to balance scalable architecture, maintainable code and cost control with the productivity boost of AI.

MSFS + Windows only. No Xbox / PS5, as they don't support running telemetry apps alongside the sim.