News

Happy to announce another significant rollout. I've been busy with data work and world model expansion, both were important foundations for real-world ops and a variety of mission types I'll introduce incrementally.

Real-world Route Data

Luftrum now works with comprehensive real-world carrier data. This covers all airlines - pax and cargo - a ton of charter companies and even corporate, government and military operators. A custom data pipeline was put in place that decodes raw data into a route network, resolves rotations (more on this later) and classifies operators into airline/charter based on probabilistic rules. The outcome is real world carrier logos showing up across the board in Open Sky, and later in Career Mode.

Real-world Organization Data

Luftrum has now 2,500 real world organizations with locations, and sophisticated tagging so that the job generator can create realistic missions (e.g., you'll move around Siemens engineers in Germany). The job templating still needs a ton of love, but the data foundations are now in place.

"Career Light" in Open Sky Mode

Open Sky mode has now isolated gameplay from Career Mode. You can take quick hops in any category (GA, airliner, charter, VIP) or enter employment for fixed-term contracts or open ended work. This gives a sense of progress without traditional career mechanics. You can change between Career Mode and Open Sky Mode anytime*, but your earnings are independent, and Open Sky hours don't add-up for career thresholds.

Airline Rotations

I believe this is unique to Luftrum: when joining an employer in Open Sky mode (or later in Career mode), you can work on real-world rotations. These are flights in a sequence adding up to a real world shift, ending at the same airport where you started. This gives you a little financial bonus over individual flights, and hopefully, a sense of achievement.

Flight Planning implementation

The existing flight planning placeholders are now properly implemented: when you start a new flight you'll go through a three-step workflow of reviewing your flight, then creating a flight plan, finally having a look at VATSIM / IVAO coverage to see if it's worth filing your flight plan there. I'm particularly proud of a little box of flight planning showing you the en-route elevation. This is super handy for VFR flights in a hilly environment.

Support for the "unowned aircraft" scenario

One painful aspect of add-ons is when they force you to fly a plane you don't own for your sim. Now there's an explicit substitution mechanism in Open Sky mode, where you can change the aircraft from the assigned one to something that you have access to - within the same class that is. So you can't replace an A319 with a C172, but you can fly even a B787 instead of an A350 (since they're both widebody jets). You can access this feature on the Flight Preferences page within the flight plan wizard. For now it is recommended to switch off Konnekt validation on the first page, as the aircraft alias catalog is far from complete.

Complete revamp of the scoring engine

One weakness of the scoring engine was that it inferred flight status from real-time flight data. This is great for instant feedback, but can get shaky with more complex scoring scenarios. So the scoring has now two passes: you see the real-time inferred scores during flight, and get a proper second pass upon flight completion, based on telemtery data. This does not impact the scores themselves, just make certain score families a bit more robust.

And more

Social feed enhancements, gaircraft catalog to support carrier data, tons of bugfixes and UI polish, finally, the first special mission type is now implemented as an Open Sky Contract called Special Missions: Air Ambulance. This picks a real world aircraft of a real world operator and creates a mission that flies the patient from a remote-ish airport to a real world hospital and then back. Let me know how you like it, I'm planning additional mission types based on real world data. There's now (very) experimental support for sims other than MSFS.

Known issues

Government and military VIP ops are not generated currently, because they need some more polish. Job templating will get a revamp in the near future, you'll see some silly / out-of-place missions generated and pax load will not always match the aircraft.

Open Sky Mode

Happy to announce a major new gameplay mechanic in Luftrum: Open Sky. Mandatory checkrides and area licenses might be too restrictive if you just want to find a great new route, but they still function well as the backbone of a proper career mode. So instead of dropping the existing career progression, a new parallel mode was added called Open Sky Mode. This effectively unlocks the entire world and the full fleet, eliminates the need for checkrides and relaxes certain aspects of job flights - no mandatory club membership, insurance deposit or travel fees.

If you feel like "I'm flying a Twin Otter, surprise me today", then go to your Dashboard or Account settings and flip your game mode over to Open Sky Mode. You can switch back to Career Mode the same way. Currently your Career hours and Career wallet are tracked separately to avoid doing a few quick contracts in Open Sky then getting an unfair advantage in your career.

I'm thinking of reconciling the two modes in a Relaxed Career mode, which would be a difficulty setting within Career.

Contract Work

Contracts have been in the system already, and they unlock in career mode after logging 15 hours. In Open Sky Mode they're available right away, so a little howto: they're always a rotation sequence - arrival is the next leg's departure and you end where you started. They're more lucrative than quick jobs. In Open Sky Mode you always have one contract per aircraft class. They're generated based on your flight history (length, aircraft), so they're not available for everyone.

Job Template Engine

The job template engine was an initial placeholder so far, generating very generic flight missions. Now a workable alpha has been rolled out, which creates more credible flight stories. It's very alpha still, and will see continuous improvements. There are striking issues (coastal runs, island runs can be bogus, contract themes don't reflect underlying legs) that will be ironed out soon. Would be great to use AI-based mission generation (like JetCard), but we have 300,000 live jobs in the system - so it'd be comically expensive and has its own problems too.

And More

Now you can configure the rollup mechanism of your overall Luftrum score: click on Settings on the (https://pilothub.luftrum.world/grades)[Grades] page and define exactly what's factored in into your global score or not. You can fly practice flights going forward without polluting your average.

Job cards show departure-arrival country. The rental-payout model has been revamped completely to work better across different aircraft, especially different TUR planes. Landing fees now reflect aircraft weight. The job map component got some cosmetic surgery and performance improvements. It's still a bit sluggish, so further perf improvements are in order. Job Board has been renamed to Quick Jobs to look better with Contracts and Employment (Employment is an unlockable in Career Mode). Mobile layout got improvements too.

NVFR now live

The NVFR checkride is now live. You can start practicing from 3 flight hours, and can attempt the actual checkride at 5 flight hours. For now, you still have unlimited retry attempts.

The checkride itself is the exact same as the SEP checkride, except it happens at night. Because of night conditions, you'll need to take this checkride at an airport that has a runway with edge lights. You'll find an airport selector both for practice sessions and the actual checkride. Note that Luftrum's airport database has no runway light info, so please run a practice session before the checkride to see if the runway has edge lights on your selected airport. If stuck, please let me know on Discord. There'll be a follow-up release in which the related gameplay elements will be introduced (night fly bonus or night fly penealty if you fly night without NFVR). Good luck with the checkride!

Screenshot tool

The screenshot tool was available in Konnekt already, just did some additional polish and bugfixing. Use the camera icon in Konnekt to set it up before your flight, and use whatever shortcut you set to take actual screenshot. At the end of your flight, pick the best ones for upload, use cropping as desired, then click upload and they'll be automatically attached to your flight log. Also, the full-res versions will be kept on your local disk with geo-tagging applied, so you can upload them to Google Photos and see where they were taken. Hit settings and open the Gallery Folder to get to them. Will create a YouTube video on this.

Improved privacy settings

You have now better control over who sees your activity via the new Privacy Settings segment on your Account Settings. Your pilot profile will always show up on Leaderboards and will be discoverable on the Pilots page, but you can set who sees your activity (flight logs and screenshots) exactly. There's also an explicit setting whether you're comfortable with your screenshots featured on luftrum.world.

And More

• Some interface polish was done to improve the social feeds and a new landing page was added where you can see the activity of other pilots by default. Your most important settings are still available in a control bar on top.

• Comfort scoring now uses a composite of relevant subscores throughout the flight rather than just tracking turn quality. There are still score improvements to be made to scoring (landing, economy), but the major categories and the 0-100 normalization will remain, so your history will be continuous.

• Expanded the airport/club coverage to full world, so that outside Europe players can feel home too. There are around 10k airports with clubs across the globe and 27k airports in free flight / adventure mode. Certain areas are not very densely covered, and there's no compensating logic (extend GA ops with C152s just because there's no airport nearby) so stick with clubs that have plenty of airports nearby.

• Opened up normal registrations too, so no need for invites anymore.

Thanks for using Luftrum, and happy flying!

SEP checkrides should complete now normally. Restart your Konnekt client to force a synchronization from local to Pilot Hub, and your previously completed flight should sync now. Apologies for the inconvenience, especially those who just started with the platform.

Today's deployment broke the SEP checkride's completion. The good news is that your flight is not lost, but stored locally. I'll fix the server side right away and you'll be able to submit your flight. Apologies for this inconvenience.

Three enhancements just landed.

Adventures

Seen an amazing Reddit post recently, Kynnys' report on his flight around the whole US Perimeter in a C172. This inspired me to speedup a feature that was in the making already: flight adventures. Adventures are non-commercial flights broken down to segments, quite similar to Bush Trips introduced in MSFS2020. Except that these are subject to quality and time tracking, so you can see where you stand compared to others. Adventures are not part of the job system within Luftrum, you don't need to have a certificate, and the aircraft has no rental fee. Have fun with it, I've started the US loop myself.

Auto-pause and crash prevention

For those that cruise on autopilot here's some quality of life improvement. Some big names (khm. Orbx...) charge for this, but here you have it for free and with a little bonus: you can now set a distance from destination at which the sim will pause. AGL- and fuel-based crash prevention complements it for those that don't have time for proper flight planning. Example: you set 7nm as auto-pause distance and 500ft as crash-prevention threshold. Then any time you get below 500ft outside 7nm the sim will pause, so that your Cherokee won't hit the Alps while you're working from home in the next room. You can also set a fuel threshold at which the flight will pause.

Social features

These are not super important as long as the platform use is low, but I always wanted Luftrum to be strong on community features. I also find that the existing tools lack the social aspect, even Volanta is crippled (where's a clean "friends" feed?). There was a revamp of the main menubar, with a dedicated Community segment which starts with Feed now. It gives you an infinite scroll of recent flights done by your friends, in groups you're member of, in your squad or by folks doing the same adventure you're doing.

The closed beta starts today with limited promotion. If you happen to be part of the first set of users, welcome on board! Please join the Discord server, and post whatever observation you have about the platform. Luftrum is admittedly limited in scope, and for the first slice, stability and usability will be the primary concerns. That said, all ideas are welcome, whatever bugs you, let me know.

Those already onboarded will enjoy priority when it comes to additional invites. If you have a friend or flight-buddy, let me know on Discord and we'll send them an invite in the next round before any external promotion.

This website is now live, marking the date of the first proper stack deployment.