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.