FsHub Blog

Wow! Three blog post updates in one month – Things are moving really fast, now!

So, we’ve continued to be extremely busy this month, and I wanted to share several new updates with you and bring you up to speed on the plans for the upcoming week (hey, I made some promises this month, after all!)

Pilots’ For Hire App v1.2.0 was released!

Now out of beta and ready for “prime time”,… we released the Pilots for Hire app (v1.2.0) this week, which included a ton of updates and “some polish” ahead of our 1st of September release to all users!

Whilst you would have already received the “Update available” notification if you were previously running v1.1.1 of the app and had a link to download the latest version, for those who want to grab the release directly, this can be downloaded from here.

The list of changes (based on your feedback) can be seen in the Changelog that appears when you open the app for the first time, so I’ll spare you a couple of extra minutes (now) whilst reading this update post and let you look at those at a more convenient time!

Aeroconomy Domestic Properties and Interest Payments (still) going live next week!

I mentioned in the August take-two platform updates post that I was working hard to release both the “Domestic Properties” and “Bank account interest payments” for the 1st of September – I wanted to inform you that this is still very much the plan!

Both of these features will be going live next week and again, will be early-access for premium users, but hey, “standard users” will have a new toy to play with too (the PFH app), so it’ll be fine!

I discussed more about the Domestic Properties features in my last blog post, too, why they’re important and how they directly affect the economy, stock markets and other such “game” mechanics, so be sure to read that article too, if this sounds interesting! – I genuinely cannot wait to see where (in the world) people “start building” and how creative they get 😉

We have a new (and super-awesome) community forum!

I opened a can of worms this past week – data cleansing 11 years’ worth of user account data (~26,000 user accounts) to make it “compatible” with our new forum platform, but hey, it was worth it! – I learned a few lessons, and additional validation of the new user account (data) has been deployed this week, too! – Read more on this below!

As some of you may recall, we “had a stab” at hosting a community forum before – we used a free product called “MyBB” and I set about making heavy backend customisations to it, to integrate it with our Fshub platform. Unfortunately that product wasn’t well-suited to mobile devices.

I have spent far too long this week, migrating user accounts, “automating all the things” and integrating it with FsHub (and Aeroconomy) to provide an as-seemless-experenice for everyone as possible without modifying the core of the product itself (which means easier to maintain and upgrade over time).

Why have I used recent donations to pay for this software?
I know that with the upcoming features being released for Aeroconomy that a more suitable place (than Discord) is urgently needed – things in Discord easily get lost (IMO), and being able to search and reference previous posts that I have already responded to, for the 10th time, probably will be a huge time-saver for the team and me. I’d really appreciate it if Aeroconomy users would take this into account (be mindful of) and use the new forums, in the first instance.

Updates are coming thick and fast again now too (now that I have finished what has felt like a huge feat of strength the last 18 months, building out Aeroconomy) and me banging updates to Discord every week(?) might get annoying and so, you’ll find me posting smaller feature releases and information about those specifically, more frequently to the The Briefing Room (Official Annoucements) forum… it’ll also save me a ton of time not having to write these long blog posts too (as yes, they really do take a ton of time!)

You may have already noticed a new icon on the FsHub website (the bell). This will now inform you of any updates to either:-

1. Replies to your forum posts that you have created.
2. Notifications of new posts in any of your “watched” forums.

This should make the experience feel a lot more seamless/integrated. The mailbox icon has also been re-coded to “watch for unread mails” too…

If, once you have a look around, you feel that you’d like to be notified of new (community) content/forum posts, you can use the “watch” feature at the top-right of the desired forum to be automatically notified (the bell icon) of new posts as shown here:-

The new forums also make it easier for me to further integrate FsHub – such as the ability for virtual airlines to provision their own private forums and permissions (set throught the FsHub RBAC system) can automatically propogate to the new community forums to providing virtual airlines with their own private forums, should they wish – this will be (an optional feature) that will be coming soon!

Side note: The new Direct Messages feature in the new forum software can be used for group conversions too (you can add multiple people into a conversation), and the conversation then appears as a private thread – perfect, maybe for smaller airlines or flying groups that want to communicate privately and ahead of the “airline forums” feature that I mentioned above!

In summary, the new community forums (features and future plans) are, well, just awesome! – We even have Giphy support over there, too 😆!

I would highly encourage you all to check out the new community/forums when you get a chance! – Don’t be shy either, maybe post a photo of your simulator setup or advertise your VA… I’m really hoping that we can make these new forums a huge success!

Still need access to the older forums? No problem, they’ll hang about for a good while yet (as we plan to, eventually migrate some of the older posts too), you can access them (assuming you previously had access) using this SSO link or using the “Login to legacy forums” link that has been added to your FsHub settings this week. – Ideally, though, this should only be used to access older DMs!

OrdinalPoet32 (Alex) officially joins the FsHub support team!

In my last blog post, you may recall that I offered or “put the feelers out” to see if anyone from the community would have liked to join the FsHub team (on a voluntary basis) to assist with what we expect to be an increase in support workload with the upcoming Aeroconomy feature releases!

Whilst I’ve been pulled from pillar-to-post this past week (working on the technical stuff), Alex has officially joined the team and, over the next few days, will receive all of his “staff” accesses!

Welcome to the team, Alex!

Our Community Content Creators have been working hard to add more PFH job templates…

I’d like to mention that I’ve been building out our PFH Content Creators portal this week (was released/deployed yesterday) and have made it possible for our “Community Content Creator” team to add and modify NPC businesses and job templates for the “Pilots for Hire” app.

You’ve probably noticed a ton of new jobs in various other parts of the globe now, too.

More jobs will continue to be added over the next week and into the future too – keeping you “busy” and able to earn that all-important money that you might need for the much anticipated “Commercial virtual airline” features, smaller “FBO operations”, and of course, the “GA Personal flights”.

I know I’ve mentioned it a ton of times, in various places, but the PFH system is just “the tip of the iceberg”, and you’ll be amazed, with all the other features available, very soon!

The Aeroconomy World Event: Spain and Portugal Wildfires weekend!

Another raging success (pun intended) – It seemed that you all really enjoyed our second “World Event” and had a bucket load of fun (pun intended, again!)

The World Relief Fund managed to sustain for approximately 38 hours before the 7.5 million was depleted (paid out to those brave pilots!)

Those who participated in the event managed to evacuate 84,593 citizens and delivered (or staged) 13,855 tonnes of cargo/supplies. A total of 364 awesomely flown flights were completed before the fund ran dry!

The testing went flawlessly, again, and despite a minor code change to the WRF website, I now know that this feature is ready for future use.

Remember that the Aeroconomy “World Events” are based on real-world humanitarian efforts, and whilst the team and I may not know what’s always happening around the world, you’re always free to give us a nudge if there is something of significance happening where you are… Only one caveat – I don’t do political, and some things need to be treated with a little more delicacy and so, if we “turn down” your suggestion, please don’t take it personally!

A big shout-out to Sean Galbraith of Southern Charter (VA) for live-streaming the tower (JoinFS traffic) at both Athens and Lisbon for these past events, too – Thank you, kind sir!

New Personal Achievements

You may have noticed a few other personal achievements recently, too – Helicopter and Aeroconomy related ones have been released..

We have a handful of other FsHub-specific (flying) ones coming soon, too, including (but not limited to) flying advanced helicopters and obscure/complex aircraft.

Several new “Personal Achievements” for participating in community discussions (on the new forums) in addition to other Aeroconomy-specific ones (including badges for having taken part in both of the recent “World Events” will be released next month too – so keep your eyes peeled for those!

A new Flight Achievement

Some of the eagle-eyed among you have probably already seen and completed the new Tribute to James Lovell flight achievement, but for those of you who haven’t seen it… Now you know, and possibly something that will provide you with an hour or so of flying, possibly this weekend? – Check it out! Thanks to JimG for putting that one together!

Have you noticed your FsHub username change (gained a number at the end of it?)

If so, this was a result of the data cleanse activities this week.

The TL;DR on this is simply that either you registered two accounts in the past (with the same “name” – yes, originally, FsHub didn’t care about your “name” as it was only your PilotID that was unique, but times changed and “name” has effectively become your “username”).

In order to “fix” this, simply open up a support ticket with us, and we’ll rename your previous account (freeing up your desired username) to ensure that you can then “Edit” your FsHub profile and correct your original name.

Thank you for the recent donations!

I just wanted to take a second to thank our recent and newly boarded Premium members or for those heroes that gifted premium donations for others – this goes a long way to helping with the hosting costs and was making a lot of what I do (and develop) possible and so a quick “thank you” from me, personally and the rest of the community for making and keeping all of this possible!

…

A big shout-out to Clorix for his continued work on the PFH desktop app this past week, too – he’s been the guy who has delivered these updates directly to your desktop!

Whilst I’ve probably forgotten a ton of other updates/changes that have gone live in the past week too (it’s been “a blur” for me 😝)… I’m gonna get outta here and let you all enjoy your weekend, and hopefully, you’re getting excited for the new features that are going live next week!

See you over in the new community forums soon, I hope 😉

Have a wonderful weekend!

Bobby and the FsHub team!

Good evening, pilots!

Unfortunately, wildfires are still raging across Europe, and a quick survey (poll) on the FsHub Discord today showed that many of you would really enjoy another weekend of high-adrenaline flying 😉

The event will go live at 00:00 (ZULU) on Saturday, 23rd August. The event will run for 48 hours, concluding at 00:00 (ZULU) on Monday, 25th August or until the world relief fund of $7.5 million has depleted (whichever comes first)!

Fictional/Storyline: Although the wildfires have been burning for several weeks already and mainland care packages and firefighting supplies are running low, international aid is being delivered to and has been stockpiled and being flown in from the island of Ibiza (LEIB), this cargo is being flown to Lisboa airport (LPPT), from there, cargo aircraft are splitting and distrubuting three quaters of it, north, to Porto (LPPR) where the majority of missions are being flown into the affected disaster areas (Rozas [LERO] and Burgos [LPBG]). Citizen evacuations are also taking place from those areas most affected back to Porto. An additional mission is being flown from Lisbon [LPPT] to Viseu [LPVZ] to alleviate rescue efforts in the north, closer to Porto!

The valid routes are as follows (yes, an additional four compared to our last “Greek Islands” event):-

LEIB Ibiza > LPPT Lisbon (491nm) – Off-shore supply transport (Cargo mission)
LPPT Lisbon > LEIB Ibiza (491nm) – Off-shore re-supply transport (Cargo mission)
LPPT Lisbon > LPPR Porto (177 nm) – Supply staging (Cargo mission)
LPPR Porto > LPPT Lisbon (177 nm) – Re-Supply staging (Cargo mission)
LPPR Porto > LERO Rozas (135 nm) – Delivery of care packages and fire-fighting supplies to the affected area (Cargo mission)
LERO Rozas > LPPR Porto (135 nm) – Citizen EVAC (Passenger mission)
LPPR Porto > LPBG Burgos (99 nm) – Delivery of care packages and fire-fighting supplies to the affected area (Cargo mission)
LPBG Burgos > LPPR Porto (99 nm) – Citizen EVAC (Passenger mission)
LPPT Lisbon > LPVZ Viseu (134 nm) – Delivery of care packages and fire-fighting supplies to the affected area (Cargo mission)
LPVZ Viseu > LPPT Lisbon (134 nm) – Citizen EVAC (Passenger mission)

** I had considered enabling the “restricted aircraft” feature for this event (so that some routes would restrict aircraft sizes – require smaller), but for this test, we’ll keep the settings the same as our last event!

As expected, you will be able to “follow along” on our World Relief Fund website to see how the rescue efforts are going!

More information and links to each airport can be found on the official event wiki page.

Please note: This event is open for all premium members at this time, as this event is really a disguise for some additional testing of the stock trading features hidden behind the scenes, too. There is still time to donate and join in the fun if you are unable to wait until the 1st of September (only a week away, though) at which time, as you might recall from my previous blog post, the “Pilots for Hire” feature will be released to all “standard” (free) members too!

I wish you all a ton of fun this weekend!

Bobby and the FsHub Team

To say that it has been busy over the last two weeks would be an understatement, finally the past 18 months is starting to pay-off and Aeroconomy is now starting to rollout (which finally feels great!)

New flight achievement: Tribute to James Lovell: Navigator of the Impossible

For all you pilots that love our FsHub achievements, JimG has added another (single-leg) flight achievement earlier today and is now available for all pilots to fly and obtain the bage. Feel free to head over to FsHub and check out the achievement details and requirements.

We welcome JimG to the official FsHub Support team!

Some of you may already have seen JimG responding to and helping our users in our Discord or community forums, and, in the past, Jim has been involved with curating many of the Flight Achievements that you all enjoy flying.

Jim has officially accepted a role within the official FsHub support team today and will join the rest of the team in continuing to support FsHub and the amazing communtity that we have here, but in a more official way.

Welcome to the team Jim!

The Aeroconomy World Event (Greek Islands Wildfires 2025) synopsis

For 48 hours, as mentioned in my previous blog post, we rolled out another Aeroconomy feature – The “World Event” feature, and we’re pleased to say that it was a raging success.

The event (the World Relief Fund) paid out a grand total of $9,256,094 to all of the pilots that took part in the two-day event.

You awesome pilots competed a total of 514 flights, evacuating 138,242 citizens and delivering 12,951 tonnes of critical care packages (cargo).

I think we can all agree that the event was a ton of fun, and I wanted to congratulate all those pilots who took part in the event.

A few FsHub members have asked for a few stats to be published and so, I’ll be publishing these shortly on the “World Relief Fund” website – so keep ya eyes peeled!

Unfortunately, there appeared to be some issues with MSFS2024 pilots experiencing CTD’s when using JoinFS – We’re hoping that a support ticket or bug report (reported via GitHub) can be fixed really soon, but we’ll keep an eye on things!

Would you like to join the FsHub Support team?

We have been feeling the pressure a tad more recently with the recent rollout of Aeroconomy, and with many of the new features we’ll be rolling out soon, we suspect that we could do with an extra pair of hands (in addition to Jim joining the team).

Ideally, we’re looking for a member of the FsHub community who has been active for more than 2 years, flies regularly and is confident in how FsHub and other tools and services (such as LRM) work.

Some of the roles and responsibilities that this voluntary (unpaid) role consists of is as follows:-

• Actively seek to respond to and assist users on our Discord server and community forums with issues they may be having with FsHub, the LRM client and going forward, Aeroconomy too!
• Assist with data entry (such as Aircraft technical data – All data can be found on Google 😉), curating global achievements, reviewing ICAO change requests and soon, approving Aeroconomy-related requests such as “Property planning permission” requests.
• Regularly Monitor our official support ticket system and triage (assign tickets to Bobby) or respond back to assist users where possible.
• Action other requests utilising our backend admin panel (for FsHub-related requests such as airport data corrections, account deletion requests and virtual airline archival requests.

If this sounds interesting to you, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop me (ballen) a DM on Discord if you would like to put forward your interest.

What are we working on next?

Personally, I’m pushing hard on preparing the “Property portfolio” feature that I promised would be released on the 1st of September (and will be).

We will also be ramping up on finalising and configuring the “technical data” for the many other aircraft that are not yet “Aeroconomy-compatible” – We have 542 aircraft still to work through, research on, and submit the missing “technical data” that will then make these aircraft available in the Aeroconmy world and to date, we have completed 111 so far!

In addition to the above, you can expect many more jobs, aircraft types, and customers to be added to Aeroconomy between now and September 1st, too!

I’m also looking at replacing the current forums with a more modern, mobile-responsive forum solution – something that will, no doubt, be very useful with all of the Aeroconomy-related discussions that will likely start “cropping up” very soon, with the upcoming and additional features in Aeroconomy! Discord is great but a modern forum is probably more useful for deeper discussions and advertising sale items, etc!

I’m also desperate to make further improvements to the main FsHub website too, such as developing an improved Radar maps (for the global radar and virtual-airline-specific radar pages). I realise that we have several more, experienced software engineers using the platform and so, if you have the skills and would like to contribute to FsHub, to save me some time (develop replacement radar pages) please drop me (ballen) a DM on Discord.

Well, for now, I’m going to head to bed and feel sorry for myself (that I’m starting the first of seven nightshifts tomorrow!

Bobby and the FsHub Team!

Our initial testing with the Aeroconomy features has been going great so far, and I have decided that on Friday, 15th August, we will debut another one of Aeroconomy’s features – the “World Event” feature. – We already have a real-world event setup and “ready to go” on the platform.

What is a World Event?
A “World Event” in Aeroconomy is a real-world event that we simulate within the Aeroconomy world and generally will run for a period of time (eg. 24, 48 or 72 hours) that pays pilots from a “central fund” (such as a “relief fund”) and aims to be a great way for group flights and the whole community to come together and work towards a common goal and making handome amounts of cash along the way (much higher than the PFH jobs, for exmaple)! – Examples of “World Events” are as follows:-

• Humanitarian aid drops (severe weather, flooding, wildfires, etc.) – Delivering care packages and evacuating citizens, etc.
• Repatriation flights (from war-torn zones or other politically high-tension zones) – Bring passengers “home”.
• Search and rescue (severe weather, flooding, wildfires, etc.) – Providing aerial surveillance or delivering supplies and SAR equipment.

How does it work?
The “World Events” are open to all players regardless of whether they own an aircraft or are part of a virtual airline that owns their own aircraft – they just have to “turn up” and fly an aircraft of their choice (assuming it’s Aerconomy-compatible, but more on that below…)

World Events are published (with back story/information) normally in the form of a blog post and system notification to invite you, your friends and/or your virtual airlines to participate for the duration of the simulation!

If you would like to participate all you need to do is choose an Aeroconomy-compatible aircraft (see the dropdown list in the PFH app if you are unaware as to which aircraft are “Aeroconomy-compatible” [just a heads up – we’re adding more aircraft very soon too!]) and then depart from and land at the airports that we detail in the annoucement blog post (some “World Events” will have multiple possible legs and associated return legs) – No need to “take a job”, “unlock an aircraft” of anything else like that… It’s basically exactly the same as completing an FsHub achievement, with the added benefit of it paying you Aeroconomy Dollars ($ AED) for taking part!

You are also welcome and encouraged to fly as many legs/flights as possible (you can fly them multiple times, too, until the “world event” period elapses or the “central fund” is depleted, whichever one comes first).

These “world events” are generally either humanitarian, search and rescue or repatrisation-centric and the payment scales based on the amount of cargo (for Cargo specific missions) or passengers (for passenger specific missions) you manage to transport and so, larger aircraft will pay out more money and ofcourse, deplete the “central fund” much faster!

As with the PFH jobs, if you fly these “missions” for a virtual airline (having an enrolled virtual airline set as your “Duty Airline” in the LRM client), the airline will get a 10% cut of your profit, too.

Premium users will also be paid an additional bonus of 10% – again, we like to show our appreciation to our premium users for supporting the ongoing hosting costs of these platforms!

…and, for “World Events” specifically, if you fly with and use JoinFS (our cross-platform Live Traffic integreation) you can also benefit from an addition 20% bonus as we love the idea of, and think it would be amazing to all be able to see the other particpating pilot’s aircraft, across all platforms participating in these “World Events” – You’ll see FSX, P3D, MSFS2020, MSFS2024, and XPlane users regardless of the simulator you fly on! You can see more information regarding our JoinFS integration over at our Wiki.

A dedicated “World Event Fund” webpage will be published too, during the “World event” window and details the current available fund (remaining) amount and updates as it depletes (pilots are paid), it also, for extra “geekiness”, shows how much cargo and passengers have been transported collectively (by all you amazing pilots!)

We cannot wait to release our first world event, as we think it will be a ton of fun and will most certainly provide a huge cash injection for your virtual airline or your personal plans (such as property construction, investment, aircraft purchasing, etc).

Friday’s World Event is paying out very hansomely and we highly encourage all premium users (as this first event is being released as “early access”) to fly as much as they can during the “World Event” as we doubt there will ever be another time to make so much money again in such a short amount of time (the pay-per-flight on this event is very generous) -but hey, we need to boost the economy initally. Flying just a handful of these routes will easily provide you with enough cash to build a property or two or buy a small GA aircraft. Grinding these jobs over the 48-hour period would not only make for GREAT stream and group-flight content but could be very lucrative indeed and really kick-start your Aeroconomy career/virtual pilot’s life!

Please note that, as mentioned above, this first “World Event” is open to Premium Users only. If you want to participate and benefit from the extra bonus cash during this first test/debut, there is still time to donate and become a premium user ahead of the Friday event.

A link to the official announcement and further details (for this Friday’s planned “World Event” – which will run into Saturday too) will be posted below, tomorrow. Friday’s World Event will run for 48 hours with a “central relief fund” of $5,000,000 – the money (and fun) is yours for the taking!

As always, we welcome your feedback on our Discord Server or on our official Forums.

The “World Event” is now live. Please view the “mission briefing” here: https://wiki.fshub.io/en/aeroconomy/world-events/2025-08-greek-islands-wildfires-2025

Thanks,
Bobby and the FsHub team!

Just a few quick updates from us and sharing some of our next plans for Aeroconomy!

FsHub User Survey 2025

Firstly, we just wanted to thank those of you who completed and submitted the recent FsHub User Survey that we published in our last blog post update. Whilst we’ve not yet had the time to look at the responses, we will be doing this very soon.

Aeroconomy “Pilots For Hire” test phase updates (and a new client build)

We’ve been in the “early access” (BETA) phase for our first official Aeroconomy feature – the “Pilots For Hire” job board and aside from a few hiccups this past week (job processing and incompatible airports for specific aircraft) it would seem that it has been a huge success and everyone has been having immense fun flying these jobs and ofcouse, earning money!

…we’ve been listening to all the feedback from our pilots and yesterday, we were pelased to annouce, on our Discord server that we released a new verion of the Pilots for Hire desktop app (v1.1.0) and the feedback has been awesome thus far – We’re really pleased that you’re enjoying all of the improved features and the polished UI!

As you may have noticed too, I have been adding many new customers and themed jobs each night this past week and will continue to do so over the next three weeks. We’re slowly ramping up more customers, jobs and aircraft types!

I think the only feedback that I’ve not addressed as yet is “Can you just group aircraft together and allow them to fly X job (eg. a B738 job should allow a B737, B378, B739 and B38M) – No! It’s not something that I want to do as the “Pilots For Hire job board” is a super-easy (arcade-mode-like) way for pilots to “make easy money” – the only thing that I’m asking of them is to fly the specific type of aircraft that is listed… that’s all, really! The pilot is being hired by a customer to fly a specific aircraft. For what it’s worth, those customer jobs mostly DO have the ability to spawn all other similar variations of that aircraft, so it’s just a case of waiting for “the perfect job” to be advertised (much like in the real world, I guess).

I would also quickly mention that I am aware that some of the jobs that are spawning are incompatible with some of the required aircraft – I’m addressing this (just been busy with all of the other updates) and for now, I would suggest just double-checking the departure and arrival airports before departing!

What’s the next (Aeroconomy) feature that’s being released, huh?

On September the 1st, I plan to roll out the next feature within Aeroconomy and, as with the “Pilots for Hire” feature, this will be “early access” for “premium” users for 4 weeks and then, released to everyone else (the “free” tier) afterwards – there’s gotta be some other benefits to helping and supporting the platform, right!

If you would like to get early access to Aeroconomy and the roll-out as we go (maybe you just can’t wait), feel free to donate and become a “Premium” member today!

So tell me already, how can I soon start spending my money??

For those of you who have been saving up your hard-earned Aeroconomy dollars – either by having flown the daily flight challenges for the past year or, more recently, flying the Aeroconomy PFH jobs- you’ll be pleased to know that you’ll soon be able to start spending this “hard-earned” virtual currency.

Residential property (or more specifically the “Property Portfolio” feature) is the next thing that will be released and will go into “early access” on September 1st – Our “premium members”, again, will gain early access to this feature and have four weeks to test, take advantage of, and enjoy this feature ahead of the “general availability” release to our “free tier” members.

So you’re probably wondering… “Residential property”? What’s that all about? What’s that got to do with flight simulation and why would I want to spend my virtual cash on buying property instead of waiting to buy aircraft, small airfields or transfering it to my favourite virtual airline for them to use it for leasing gates or cargo pods? And ofcourse, the many other things that you mentioned before that is possible in Aeroconomy? Well, let me explain…

Firstly, it’s important to know that the rollout of these features (in the order that I’m releasing them) has been carefully planned and enables us to test key and important features of the platform “as we go” – The recent release of the “Pilots For Hire” system has given us the ability to test and monitor the processing of flights from Aeroconomy (transfering of data from FsHub in real-time) and that Aeroncomy is processing that data correctly. This release also helped test “paying” pilots and the banking system as a whole. The release of the “Property Portfolio” will enable us to test the economic effect that property ownership has on the generation of PAX, cargo, and tourist demand in geographical areas (another major and critical feature of the economic physics of the platform).

Whilst some of you might want to hold out and continue to save to buy your “dream” GA aircraft or maybe even your own personal BizJet – ya high-roller you 😉…

Aeroconomy is more than just about buying up private airfields, aircraft and the all important leasing of airport gates or cargo pads (to enable you to build passenger and cargo routes) for your VA to fly. Aeroconomy aims to be more of a “tycoon” simulation too with many alternative ways (side-gigs/side-hustles) to “play the game” and the ownership of residential properties within the game, this can be an extremely lucrative way to “invest” and drives all kinds of other parallel ventures (when, maybe you cannot be “in the simulator” but still want to contribute in some way – managing your personal estate, for example) and ability to increase your wealth without having to fly at all!

So let me give you a few examples here, maybe some things that might excite you:-

1. Building a property on your favourite island or another favourite part of the world that you’re fond of? Or finding a tiny island and building on all available “lots” to make that island truly yours – literally king or queen of your own island! – Richard Branson 😉
2. Buy and put your real house or your real-world “dream house” on the map (and visible to other pilots through your Aeroconomy property portfolio profile)!
3. Build and own a property in beautiful areas of the world – Building on the available “slots” and then “sitting on your investment” will likely lead to players, in the future, wanting to buy the property from you for a very generous price – supply and demand, right? – “a lot/slot” is a game mechanic that I have devised to ensure that only so many properties can exist in an area, and helps provide supply and demand/personal goals to reach outside of just aviation-related stuff.
4. Building a property within 20 kilometres of an airport means that your personal “landing” and “hangarage” fees are totally free (as a “local resident” of the area). – It’s just a game mechanic thing and an additional benefit to owning a residential property or others that possibly fly from your local neighbourhood wanting to “rent” it off you!
5. Building residential property (and then upgrading all-three-levels [house, mansion, hotel] to a “hotel” – yeah, just like in the board game, Monopoly 👍) will generate the highest amount of PAX to the surrounding airports within 20 kilometers – so, you might want to consider “influnencing the market” for your main (virtual airline) business, ensuring that more passengers are generating at airports that you have managed to lease gates or cargo pads from. – Some might call this “mafia tactics”, but it’s fair game!
6. Other than aircraft, stocks and shares, side businesses and other airport related stuff… owning property such as your own “personal holiday home” or your “week-day city condo” (is cool, right? and you can show it off too on your profile and on the property map!), running it as a hotel or being able to “rent it out” to other users (so they can benefit from free landing and hangar fees or be able to influence [more] PAX to a specific airport) is a pretty cool way to invest your money (no more having to fly jobs to pay the landing fees for your personal GA/leisure flights etc – the passive income from you renting out your property would probably cover all of that!).
   

Interesting to know: When the “Property Portfolio” feature goes live (on the 1st of September), there will be zero domestic property in “the world” so being able to “buy off other players” will be impossible initially and so, everyone that wants to secure their favourite vanity locations or strategic [economic] property locations will have to “build” – building a property is a multiple part process in Aeroconomy which consists of requesting planning permission (choosing and validating an available real-world location for the property), choosing the size (house, mansion or hotel), customising the address and uploading a photo (because, hey, it’s cool to show off your property right!?) and finally paying the “build cost” – the “build cost” fluctuates based on the current economy and you can expect to pay the highest prices for land and construction near the busiest airports.

Want to learn more about the “Property Portfolio” feature, the mechanics and other useful information? Check out the Property Portfolio wiki page here.

So yes, the Property Portfoilio feature will be the next major feature to be released and to reiterate, these “features” have been specifically choosen to be released in order but, for those wanting to know “when can I buy aircraft” and have them persist their location within the world… that’ll be the next release after the “Property Portfolio” feature!

**Everyone now goes and start grinding to be able to afford and buy their favourite islands before others snatch them up first hahahaha!! 😂**

Quick tip: You can expect the price of *building* a house (the lowest level, residential property) to be between $50,000 at the lowest end, scaling all the way up to $400,000. Two examples showing the absolute lowest and the highest land/construction values as follows:-

1) Lowest cost ($50,000 minimum) – Very remote locations/where the country has minimal flight movements and no airports within 200km of the property location.
2) Highest cost ($400,000 maximum) – Located within 20km of the busiest airports (think Heathrow, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, etc.) and rightly so, as these properties would benefit both the airport operations, too!

These prices scale according to the economy, the economy being ultimately driven by the daily flight movements within FsHub to specific aiports, the country and many other factors.

Banking interest payments are being enabled too…

As part of our September release, personal bank accounts will also start paying out interest on money in your personal banking account (and shortly after, on business accounts too [virtual airlines]).

Based on the bank account you choose when you initially enrol your account, the bank will pay out their interest rate on the balance of your bank account weekly, and so, yes, also worth “saving money” too!

Again, as an additional perk to Premium members, they will benefit from an additional 10% on the bank’s interest rate (as a thank you for supporting the platform and making this “free” to the other non-premium members.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any news or updates to the platform — but rest assured, there’s been plenty going on behind the scenes! I just don’t shout about it as much these days… (Maybe I just enjoy letting you guys discover new features on your own — or perhaps that’s just my excuse for not always finding time to write big blog posts like this one 😅).

Anyway, let’s quickly cover a few small (but still important) updates first — and then we’ll get into the meaty stuff around Aeroconomy.

JoinFS and MSFS2024 Issues (Resolved)

A couple of users reported problems using JoinFS with MSFS2024. Thankfully, one of our awesome community members discovered a fix, and I’ve updated our wiki page accordingly.

If you’re having issues and are running MSFS2024, check out the updated guide here: https://wiki.fshub.io/en/lrm-client/join_fs_integration

Flight Achievements (API Improvements)

FsHub’s REST API (v3) now allows pilots and virtual airlines to query which achievements were unlocked by a specific flight report. The API now returns:

• The unlocked achievement(s)
• Title and rewards
• Emblem (badge) image URL
• Direct link to the achievement overview page
  
  …and some other helpful info.

Check the new section under Flight Endpoints > Flight Achievements in the API docs. This will mostly interest the tech-savvy VA developers among you — but hey, it’s there now!

New “Advanced Stats” Metrics

I added a few new metrics to the Advanced Stats section this week — you’ll find the link to these Pilot Dashboard. Go take a look and let me know what you think!

Homepage Performance Improvements

Okay, this isn’t a “new feature” per se, but a small tweak to improve loading times…

You might remember that the FsHub homepage had a full-page background video animation (which, let’s be honest, looked pretty cool 😎). However, it did slow things down a bit.

So now, the homepage only loads the video if you’re logged out. Visitors and potential new users still get that visual wow-factor, while logged-in users now enjoy a faster, static version of the page.

Did I remove the video entirely? Nope — just “hidden” when you’re logged in. If you miss it, simply log out and head back to the homepage for a quick nostalgia hit!

Helicopter (Personal) Achievements

A few users have requested helicopter-specific personal achievements — and while I’ll admit I’m not much of a helicopter guy myself, I’m all ears!

If you’ve got specific ideas (and even better, some ICAO codes), please reach out using our contact page, and I’ll get some new personal achievements added next week.

In addition to personal achievements, we realise too that we’ve just been too busy to devise other Flight Achievements and so, if you’d like to see a specific, possibly historic or maybe a geographically-awesome flight achievement in mind, we’d love to hear about it too, and we can design and get them added to the platform!

Our New “IPDE” Platform Has Launched!

In my last blog post, I talked about some of the technical hurdles we needed to clear before fully integrating Aeroconomy with FsHub. While there were a few hiccups last week around job processing, I’m happy to report that our new IPDE (Inter-Platform Data Exchange) system is now fully live and working great!

IPDE is responsible for securely transferring key data between FsHub and Aeroconomy — including things like Daily Flight Challenge rewards. Since ironing out a few early issues, it’s been running smoothly, which is great news.

This rollout was a critical prerequisite for enabling many of the more advanced Aeroconomy features — and I’ll dive deeper into those a bit later in this post!

FsHub User Survey Is Back — Please Take It!

I know, I know… It’s been hectic lately! We’ve had a ton of behind-the-scenes work going into the Aeroconomy integration — but we’d still really love to hear from you.

If you have a few minutes (perhaps while waiting for this week’s big release 👀), please consider filling out the FsHub User Survey. Your feedback helps shape the future of the platform!

…and finally… Aeroconomy’s feature debut

This week, we’re releasing access to our “Pilots For Hire” (PFH) feature — you could think of it as an “arcade mode” for Aeroconomy, where you can browse, filter, pick up ad-hoc jobs, and fly them for money.

The PFH jobs board does not require personal aircraft ownership or airline membership. It’s designed for contract or “stand-in” pilots to simply pick up a job or manifest and fly it using the aircraft provided by the customer — they supply the aircraft, and you provide the skill (and manpower) to fly it.

These jobs are primarily aimed at helping new users start flying and earning money within the Aeroconomy world. They’re also a fantastic way to discover exciting new routes or enjoy random flights — all while earning virtual currency. That currency can later be used to buy personal aircraft, properties, or any of the many features coming to Aeroconomy.

Built for Developers and Virtual Airlines

Aeroconomy has been developed with an API-first approach. Developers and VAs (Virtual Airlines) can build dedicated applications or integrate Aeroconomy features directly into their own websites. This includes functionality like aircraft ownership, gate rentals, sales, and much more.

I know this all sounds a bit complex — and we’ll explain it better on a dedicated website soon — but for the developers among you, I’m sure you already have an idea of what’s possible. Which brings me to…

The Tech Behind It All (Just a Bit Geeky 😅)

I won’t get too technical right now (I know many of you are just here for the jobs! 😂), but for those interested: the technology behind Aeroconomy — something I’ve personally developed — is a platform for object/meta-processing and data persistence. It’s affectionately named “Li.”

(Yes, we software engineers get to give cool names to things. Don’t judge me! 😄)

Li. handles all the behind-the-scenes crunching: stock market values, currency exchanges, oil prices, airframe ageing, passenger demand, and more — all dynamically shaping the Aeroconomy world. I first wrote about this concept a few years ago on our forums, and now, with the launch of PFH, we’re finally putting it into action.

So, What Does That Mean for You?

As mentioned, while Aeroconomy is built with an API-first approach, most users will simply interact through the Aeroconomy website. However, for this important testing phase, we’ve built a dedicated desktop app (available for Windows, macOS, and Linux this Friday!). The app fully utilises our API and is required for testing.

We’re inviting all Premium users to join this initial four-week testing phase. The app (screenshots below to hype you up!) allows you to browse, filter, accept, and fly PFH (Pilots for Hire) jobs. Completing them will earn you virtual Aeroconomy Dollars, deposited into your personal Aeroconomy bank account.

To our free users: hang tight — once the testing phase is complete and PFH is considered officially “live,” you’ll be able to log in and use the app too. For now, we want to limit the initial impact (influx of users/flights being flown), and we want to show appreciation to Premium members who have supported the platform financially by donating, helping cover hosting and development costs – a huge thank-you to you guys!!!

What Do You Get During the Testing Phase?

Well… some seriously fun and themed jobs! 🚁✈️

You’ll find everything from:

• Emergency medical (transfer) flights
• Scenic island tours in New Zealand
• Fresh fish and grocery deliveries in Alaska
• Real-world routes based on major commercial airlines in Europe

And best of all, PFH jobs during the testing phase will pay an extra bonus currency! This early income can be transferred to your virtual airline of choice or saved for future purchases like personal GA aircraft, property, or other in-game assets.

VA Owners, Take Note!

You can think of the PFH Jobs Board as a much-needed goldmine for VA owners. Encourage your pilots to enrol in Aeroconomy and fly PFH jobs, then transfer their hard-earned income to your VA bank account. This will provide essential startup funds for aircraft leasing, purchases, gate rentals, and more — when those features roll out.

Got Ideas for PFH Jobs?

We’re eager to hear your ideas! If you have suggestions for themed PFH job packs or customer concepts, please submit them through our contact page. We’d love:

• A business name
• Example job types (e.g., cargo)
• A general geographical region
• A list of valid ICAO aircraft codes

…and we’ll aim to get them added to the pool of jobs in due course – we figured, at the start, however, it’s best to test with fewer customers/jobs, but let’s see how quickly the jobs are being flown!

It’s all very exciting — at least in my opinion! 😄

Here are a few screenshots of the Aeroconomy PFH app to whet your appetite ahead of Friday’s release. And yes — helicopter pilots are included too!

We understand… some of you might not be thrilled about the idea of a dedicated desktop app (please don’t moan at us about it!), but I cannot stress enough how much easier this will make the testing phase. It’s really important to us — and most importantly, to me!

Access to the web version of the PFH board (which, for your information, is actually less feature-rich) will be available after the initial testing phase is complete.

Don’t get us wrong — the jobs you fly and the money you accumulate during the testing phase are completely valid (and yes, you get to keep your earnings). The reason we’re calling it a “testing phase” is so we can identify and fix any bugs or loopholes, especially if something affects the in-game bank accounts. So fly to your heart’s content and start banking that all-important AED (Aeroconomy Dollars)!

This blog post will be updated on Friday the 1st, with download links for the PFH client. You’re welcome to download and use it both during the testing phase and afterwards, even once the web version is available — the choice is yours!

I’d also like to quickly remind pilots — especially those planning to participate in Aeroconomy — that we have a dedicated section on our Forums for Aeroconomy discussions. Plus, we’ve recently opened a new Discord channel specifically for Aeroconomy support (including help with the PFH app).

A very special thanks to Clorix, who has been assembling the desktop app and working closely with me (I’ve been handling the backend API) to make this initial release possible!

That’s all for now — check back here on Friday for the Aeroconomy PFH app download links (if you’d like to, that is)!

As promised, the Pilot’s For Hire feature has now been released. Download links and useful information can be found on this page! – Have fun guys!

Good evening, pilots!

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post, and so I wanted to give you a quick update on everything that’s been going on behind the scenes regarding the platform and other things that I mentioned previously.

NAVAID Updates (Completed)

The latest (April 2025) NAVAID updates have now been applied to our core databases (and synced to the WXG microservice). Our NAVAID data (VORs, DMEs and Waypoint data) is based on the very latest AIRAC navdata update.

This has been live for a couple of weeks now – we hope that you’ve benefited from these updates, specifically on your flight plans or when importing from the likes of SimBrief.

I have developed some semi-automated software that can now very quickly ingest the latest data and make it available across our platform and so, future navaid updates should also be made available to you super-quick (within a few hours of release)!

Screenshot migrations (Almost completed!)

Migrating (downloading, optimising and re-uploading to our new CDN-backed S3 storage) is, for the most part, now complete.

Our worker nodes still have approximately 80,000 images to process (convert from PNG to WEBP) and re-upload, but we’re nearly there – YAY!!

We have seen a substantial decrease in the amount of object storage space requirements, which is both good for the environment and our monthly operating costs of this platform!

Our object storage requirements (the type of storage used for storing and serving your uploaded content – screenshots, avatars and achievement badges/splash images) have dropped from just over 1TB to ~65GB – That’s an INSANE difference and props to the more-modern WEBP image format!

Search engine migration (Completed)

I took several days to monitor our K8S cluster to identify “other areas” for performance improvements, and one of the biggest “memory hogs” was identified as our Meilisearch index containers.

I decided to alleviate some resource pressure of the main cluster and moved our Meilisearch service to its own compute node (server) – The performance (general speed of navigating the site) was immediately noticeable with excellent feedback from the rest of the team too!

…hopefully, you guys have also noticed the speed improvements, too?

Database capacity & reporting improvements (Scheduled)

As mentioned in an earlier post, given the sheer amount of I/O and requests to our primary (R/W) database, my plan was to spin up one or more additional database servers to enable us to re-enable the VA reporting features of which are super resource-intensive and put extreme pressure on our master database.

Whilst this is still-onging (testing, mainly), I plan to bring into service, an additional two database servers that will be “in-sync” from our master database – these “slave” nodes (now known as a policially incorrect term and so, I’ll use “secondary” instead) will enable me to re-route all “read-only” API requests (of which, our platform recieves litterally hundreds of thousands A DAY to these secondary servers – ensuring that the “all important” writes hit the master database with total reliability.

This process however, will require ~40 minutes of downtime in order to complete the initial sync between our master DB cluster and the new “secondary” replicated databases.

Whilst I will communicate this ahead of time, I suspect that this “one off” task will take place on Tuesay the 6th of May (at 10:00am UK time). I will ensure that a platform message (warning) is visible a whole 24 hours ahread of time, and a message will ofcourse be posted to our status page during this “outage window” too.

Migration away from Google Maps (Ongoing)

To be honest, I’ve been so busy with the above-mentioned tasks these past couple of weeks (any “spare” moments that I’ve had) that this, unfortunately and whilst I’ve received yet another large bill this month, has had to take a backseat for the time being. I do plan to work on this very soon, though and we will have then finally and completely be migrated over to OpenStreetMap and our 3rd party tile-provider (Stadia Maps).

Public profile (Live flight status widget)

Some of you may have noticed a new “Live Flight Widget” on your public profile pages?!

I thought it would be fairly cool to provide similar information on the public profile pages that our Discord activity feature provides, regardless of whether you are logged in to Discord.

The widget shows general flight information such as where the pilot is “flying near”, current speed, altitude and, if the pilot have an active flight plan submitted, will output the departure and expected arrival information too.

Just a few “Live flight status” examples from this evening:-

I also plan to add the same “flight progress” bar and information to the public profile pages for pilots that have a flight plan entered – displaying further information and a progress bar, similar to what is displayed when clicking on an active aircraft from the Radar page:-

This should be coming soon!

LRM Client updates for MSFS2024 erroneous flight distances

As some of you may have noticed with MSFS2024 some flights appear to be logging with varying additional distance of which is due to the way that MSFS2024 (and MSFS2020) “places” the aircraft when you are in the game menus – essentially putting you at the centre of the globe (lat/lng).

Whilst one way to counteract this would be to open the LRM client once your aircraft is loaded in at the gate (and what we are recommending at this time), I understand that this is less than desirable.

I have a “fix” planned and hope to release in the next release of the LRM client – this should be happening (released) in the next couple of weeks, so keep those eyes peeled!

…we’d naturally love your feedback on this too!

Hoppie integration for airlines (Planned)

Hoppie provides in-aircraft ACARS functionality, from the website, this is described as:-

ACARS by itself is mostly a transport network, used to pass short messages back and forth between aircraft and ground facilities. It can be compared to e-mail, or even better, to cell phone text messaging. However it uses quite different technology, based on either classical VHF transmission or satellite communications. These aspects of ACARS are not simulated by the system that Hoppie Provides; we use the internet as transport layer.

If you know all about Hoppie and think this is cool – that’s awesome 🙂

We realise that we’ve not added too many cool integrations recently, and so, I have planned to integrate a new section within the Crew Portal (for VA managers) to enable them to communicate with their pilots (with a Hoppie-enabled aircraft).

VAs will be able to send/receive messages and other information to VA pilots directly from the Crew Portal (that’s the plan, at least!)

More details on this will be published soon and “early access” will be granted to a number of airlines in due course.

Aeroconomy updates!

I am extremely happy with the recent platform performance improvements and, with the additional databaes servers and some additional planned RabbitMQ nodes, this really will enable the platform to take on the additional load that Areoconomy (in it’s entirety) will bring.

I look forward to updating you in, hopefully in 3 – 4 weeks will a full rollout plan for Aeroconomy – I just have to complete the other mentioned tasks above first!

…now is certainly the time to be flying those Daily Flight challenges (to earn you and your VA’s those virtual dollars)

That’s all (for now) folks,
Bobby

Follow on from my previous blog post, our servers have been busy converting the previous screenshots from PNG format to WebP (yep, all ~331,000 of them) and continue to be uploaded around the clock to our new CDN-backed storage servers.

Whilst the conversion process is still ongoing and will continue to take several more days to complete, we are going to start “the switchover” at 23:00 UTC today (14/04/2025). [UPDATE: This has now been completed!]

We will disable the ability for any file uploads to the platform and any new registrations for a duration of 1 hour [UPDATE: This has now been completed!] – this will enable us to “re-sync” any new pilot avatars, charts and any airline achievement badge/splash images and upload those to the new storage backend.

The website will then be switched (pointed to) to our new CDN domain to load and server screenshots at lightening speeds – from a server closer to you (wherever you might reside in the world) 🤩

Given however that many screenshots (~200,000) still need to be converted and uploaded (which is an automated process we have running at the moment), downloading, converting and re-uploading ~330,000 screenshots is a long process and so, please be patient – some of your screenshots will appear as “missing” for a day or two but rest assured that these will re-appear automatically as soon as the screenshot(s) in question have been converted and uploaded to our new CDN-based storage servers.

I would also like to take a moment to thank those that answered the call to help in my previous blog post – we really appreciate those extra donations and will these help deploy a couple of new database servers to help us improve/future-proof performance of FsHub and re-enable the reporting feature(s) of which I will tackle (provisioning, configuring an deploying) later this week (once I am happy with the optimised storage and new CDN is working as required). NAVDATA database updates should also be completed by the end of the week too, all going well 🤞.

In the meantime, whilst you wait for the remaining screenshots to complete the migration and upload process (start to fill up your flight reports again), you will be able to continue to upload screenshots, and create achievements etc. once the uploads are re-enabled in a few hours time regardless of whether your existing screenshots have “re-appeared” yet – this will just “continue to run in the background”.

If you have any questions about this, please feel free to discuss in our Discord server of our community forums.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog post – life has been pretty hectic of late and recent (smaller) updates have been in the form of Discord NOTAMs but this announcement is going to require a bit of a lengthier post so, here goes…

The TL;DR on this post however is that we’re trying to drive some donations to enable us to make some much-needed improvements to our current FsHub infrastructure that will enable some other features, further improve the performance and capacity of the platform and, more importantly, enable us to step-release Aeroconomy – The biggest and most drastic platform improvements in the 10 years that FsHub has been running – we could also call it future-proofing!

If you’re not interested in reading the technical details or just want to show your support and help us, please consider any of the following:-

• Make a one-off donation to PayPal.
• Join our Patreon and help us increase our monthly recurring donations.
• Not yet a “premium” member? Consider upgrading your account today.

What I’m trying to achieve here is to build a “fund” that will enable us to provision more cloud compute to host and support the new Aeroconomy platform over the next 12 months and some additional database servers for FsHub (to improve performance and stability and enable our VA reports system once more).

Other notable things in this post however include, should you be interested in understanding more:-

• Aeroconomy release.
• Updating our NAVDATA database.
• Changes to screenshot storage formats.
• New screenshot upload (amount) restrictions for “standard” users and why do we have to do this?
• Re-enabling our VA reports feature.
• Speed and stability improvements to FsHub as a whole.
• Reducing monthly hosting costs where we can.

If however, you want to learn more, hear what we’re doing and why we need this injection of funds, please read on…

Aeroconomy release

We’re working as hard as we can to realise (release) Aeroconomy, the code, as far as I’m concerned is ready for production but I have been “holding off” step-releasing it given that it requires more servers at this present time and it’s not something that we can afford at the moment.

You may recall that I recently increased the minimum “donation” amount for a user to obtain “premium” status – this was for two reasons:-

• The advanced features that premium members can use on virtual airlines are costly (our platform has to work harder to generate missions/jobs, and detect duty schedules and flights that should be awarded “achievements”).
• We’re still not able to cover the costs of running this platform each month, the increase in the one-time minimum amount for “premium” access has reduced the number of users making the upgrade meaning I’m still having to make up “the difference” each month despite a lovely bunch of you contributing via. Patreon each month (this is so appreciated – I beg (🤣) that you continue to do that as it makes my life so much easier, having to pay out less from my own pocket each month 🫶)

It’s a tough one as we don’t seem to be making much movement with being able to afford to spin up and keep up the monthly payments for Aeroconomy as the increase in the “premium” upgrade seems to have deterred people on the plus side however, the platform hasn’t seen any degredation in performance of late.

Updating our NAVDATA database

As some of you know, our current navigation aid database is rather old and needs an upgrade.

Some might think that upgrading this is “simple” and unfortunately for me, this is not the case, the data has to be obtained, formatted and replaced into our master database and then synchronised to our other microservices.

I am however in the process of meticulously upgrading our navigation database and hope that this will “go live” across all of our sites and services by the end of the month.

Improvements to screenshot storage

At present, screenshots are stored as lossless PNGs (and of which, are relatively large in filesize) and whilst this was a decision taken many year ago (10 to be precise), I am now working to convert and use more modern image formats (WebP) as this should benefit (reduce) our monthly hosting costs for screenshot storage and bandwidth costs.

The benefits of using the “new” WebP format include being “greener”/better for the environment as smaller (filesize) images require fewer hard drives and bandwidth requirements – this will also mean that screenshots will load much faster for you!

At the moment, our hosting bill for screenshots alone is one of our largest monthly outgoings and with every month and keeps increasing – in the last 30 days alone a whooping 11,229 screenshots have been uploaded to the platform – the current total number of screenshots, at the time of writing this post stands at just over 330,000 and naturally, this number is growing every day as is the monthly storage costs.

New screenshot upload limits for “standard” users and why we’re having to do this.

As of today (09/04/2025) I have deployed a change that will restrict “standard” users to only being able to upload a maximum of 20 screenshots over a 24-hour period.

This change is unfortunately required due to a handful of “rogue accounts” that seem to be using our service to store non-flight-sim related images… possibly using us as a Google Photos replacement haha! – It’s a shame that a few bad eggs have to spoil it for everyone else but I guess, that’s just how it goes – as and when people find a “loophole” they’ll exploit it.

Please be aware however that premium users are not affected and can continue to enjoy unlimited screenshot uploads without any restrictions.

Re-enabling our VA reports feature.

Some of you may also recall that we released a VA reports feature with a handful of pre-built reports which we had to disable (temporarily) shortly after release due to issues with platform stability and while we know how we can get around this (we need to introduce another replicated “read-only” database server to offload the reports too) it incurs more monthly hosting fees.

We are hoping that with this “donation fund” we will be able to add another two database servers into our existing cluster for the sole purpose of running “expensive” (in terms of CPU and RAM utilisation) database queries without impacting the main FsHub platform and then, we will be able to re-enable the VA reports feature.

Speed and stability improvements to FsHub as a whole.

The new database servers that I mentioned above will be able to “offload” expensive database queries such as generating the platform stats, and API requests in addition to the new VA reports system mentioned above.

Ultimately the result should be that the entire site loads and works “much faster”.

Reducing monthly hosting costs where we can.

Whilst we are trying to grow our infrastructure to be able to accommodate the new Aeroconomy platform and enable some additional features for FsHub and improve performance across the board, careful consideration has also been taken to reduce costs where we can, for those that are interested, I have been working on and continue to work the following cost-savings:

• Aiming to replace our current SMTP relay service provider (we pay monthly for the ability to send massive amounts of emails to ensure delivery) – I have been slowly “warming up” our own mail server IP address so that we can terminate our current contract with this service provider and have all emails sent from our own existing infrastructure – there is a risk that some emails *may* appear in “Junk” folders but we’re doing our best to ensure that this doesn’t happen.
• Working to fully replace Google Maps (currently used on our Global Radar, VA Radar and WebGPS pages) with a different provider (Stadia Maps) as the Google Maps bill that I received this month was eye-watering-ly depressing 😢😂
• Reducing our screenshot storage (space) requirements by migrating over to the WebP image format, leaving behind the older PNG format – converting existing screenshots to WebP format should literally save us hundreds of gigabytes of storage requirements and should hopefully make a sizable difference in the monthly storage costs.

Whilst the above changes don’t appear too complex and at this time aren’t too necessary – albeit I would like to reduce the amount that we pay to third-party companies this exercise is being done “sooner rather than later” mainly due to the recent concerns about the economy and tariff increases which I can only assume will incur increases in cloud hosting over the next 12 months.

Want something added or improved – Sponsor a feature!

I’m extremely keen to build up a “donation fund” to enable us to expand our cloud hosting infrastructure and today, I’m kinda asking for people to consider donating “what they can” I also appreciate that however happy someone might be with the work that we do at FsHub they might prefer to “sponsor” a new feature or improvement to the existing platform instead.

If there is something that you would like to see implemented and yet, might not exactly be considered a “top priority” for us, please get in contact and discuss the feature or improvement – I will be able to provide you with a monetary figure that we would ask as a “donation” for the feature to be developed and released for everyone to enjoy.

What else have we considered to help with the monthly hosting fees and making Aeroconomy

Well, asking for donations isn’t ideal and I certainly hate doing it but I have considered some other “ideas” that might appeal to virtual airlines – I had considered adding the ability for virtual airlines to “advertise” their virtual airline around the site (on airport information pages, the user’s dashboard and possible some other places too) – these ads would be very subtle (all efforts would be taken to ensure that these ads don’t clutter the site) and could be used to advertise their VA website and for recruitment purposes, a virtual airline could “buy” advert space monthly for a “reasonable fee” and have their logo, a short text description (customisable) and a custom link to either their own website, virtual airline profile page or another custom external URL.

Consideration would also be given as to if premium users should be able to “hide” all ads or not.

The main thing here however is that these “ads” won’t be massive banners, just some relatively small advert boxes that would “sit” nicely in the design-tracking stats (number of times an ad has been shown and number of times it’s been clicked) would be available for virtual airlines to view in an “Advert Manager” module in the virtual airline dashboard.

I’d be keen to hear your feedback on this “idea” – I kinda like this idea and would be an easier way for smaller but “serious” virtual airlines to advertise.

Happy to help a good cause?

If you’re happy to help us build a “fund/pot” of money that we can use today and over the next 12 months, regardless of whether you are already a “premium” member, please consider donating what you can by using any of these methods:-

• Make a one-off donation to PayPal.
• Join our Patreon and help us increase our monthly recurring donations.
• Not yet a “premium” member? Consider upgrading your account today.

Well, that’s all folks! Thanks for taking the time to read this post and I hope that we can make another, more exciting annoucement very soon hopefully as a result of some donations.

Do you have feedback about this post or want to ask some specific questions? Feel free to discuss this in our forums or on our Discord server.

It’s that time of year again when the FsHub team and I would like to wish all pilots and their families a truly magical holiday season!

Whilst we do have various peices of news and new features to announce (going live soon) and improvements for MSFS2024 users, we’ll save these for another day to ensure that you can concentrate on just “having a great time with your families and loved ones”!

If you’ve not yet seen on our Flight Achievements page, we have published our annual special event for the holiday season that is obtainable until the 31st of December – be sure to check it out if collecting badges and achievements are “your thing”.

Tomorrow (Christmas Day), for those that refuse not to fly (🤣) there will be three special custom Daily Flight Challenges to choose from, they will of course be holiday season-related destinations – We like to keep you entertained 🫡😉

I want to send a very special thanks to Clorix, Uwe, Aurora, and JimG for their help and support over the past year too; they tirelessly work to provide user support on a voluntary basis in addition to designing and publishing new global flight achievements, this enables me to concentrate on the development and more technical aspects of the FsHub platform – FsHub wouldn’t be what it was if it weren’t for these guys and I would be a nervous wreck (too much to handle 😂) – Thank you so much guys!

I would also like to personally thank all those pilots (users) that have donated to the platform over the past year too, earning Premium status and for helping us cover the on-going hosting costs of FsHub.

Well all that is left to say, for now, is that on behalf of the FsHub team (ballen, Clorix, Uwe, Aurora and JimG) we wish you a truly fantastic Christmas/holiday season and we look forward to providing more updates and features in 2025!