As well as a few new things to announce in this blog post, the FsHub Support team (clorix and thunfischbaum) and I (ballen) would like to take this opportunity to personally wish you all a very happy and merry holiday season – we hope you have a fantastic break and manage to spend some quality time with your families!

As mentioned, I have a few other things to announce this week…

LRM 5.1.1 has been released!

This version of LRM includes several improvements and new features which are as follows:-

• A new “Dark Mode” has now been added to LRM client which can be enabled from the “Edit > Preferences” window – this is disabled by default!
• Pilots who use the virtual airline features and particularly the “Import a plan from a Company Route” can now type/filter the company route to auto-select it (no need to scroll through a ton of company flight plans)
• Improvements made to the VA stlying of the LRM client (text boxes and stat text now utilise the VA configured colour scheme too).
• A new EFB app (“Airline Radar”) has been added that enables you to launch your virtual airline radar (to only display other pilots in your virtual airline on the radar page)
• A new EFB app (“Route Plan”) has been added that will automatically open up the FsHub “My Flight Plan” page to enable easier cross referencing of waypoint and navaid frequencies/coordinates when programming your MCDU/GPS etc.

You can download this release (LRM 5.1.1) from the main LRM client website now: https://lrmclient.org or by using this direct link!

Simply download and run the installer – the upgrade will be automatic!

Screenshots of changes and new features in this release can be seen here:

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We are aware of an issue at the moment where the EFB does not correctly load if you have configured LRM to auto-start when you login aka. “BlackBox mode” (this has been an issue since we first released the EFB features) – but rest assured this will be fixed in the new year, if you wish to use the EFB and are currently running LRM in “BlackBox mode” we recommend disabling BlackBox mode for now and starting the client manually – you won’t experience any issues that way!

Lapland 2021 event

With only a few days left until the end of the month, I would just like to remind all pilots that they have until the 31st of December to achieve this special “one-time” achievement and gain the “Lapland 2021” badge for their profile.

As a reminder, the achievement details and criteria can be found on the achievements page (along with the list of pilots who have already completed the achievement, their screenshots and the associated flight plans) here.

If you’re considering taking part in the event and would like details of how to get freeware of payware scenery for the airport itself, links can be found on the original event blog post.

So far we have had over 50 pilots complete the event – it has been great to see so many festive liveries used too; surrodox2001 even completed the achievement in a Concorde 🙂 and most pilots who have participated in the event posted some amazing screenshots so far, here are just a few of them (for your viewing pleasure)…

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What’s next on the list of things to do for FsHub/LRM client?

As well as several other little tweaks and improvements to FsHub over the last three weeks, which some of you may have already noticed, I’m going to take a couple of days off and spend some time with my family but improvements that will be worked on next are as follows:-

• Finally make use of the new Screenshot Geotagged data – I’ve been super busy with other user requests and changes recently which has meant that I’ve not yet had the time to finish off the displaying of geotagged screenshots on the FsHub site (flight map pins, airport “screenshots” features and the ability to search for screenshots in areas of the world etc) but this will be prioritised after the christmas break – I personally cannot wait to have this completed and be able to see and search for screenshots in various parts of the world or along my flight path – it’ll be great!
• Major improvements to the Radar page – you will be able to instantly see information about all flights/pilot details instead of having to wait several seconds for information to populate in addition to displaying the “already flown path” for each aircraft. A listing of all flights with flight plans will also be available. Clicking on a new button on the pilot profile page “Show on Radar” will automatically launch the radar page and select the pilot on the radar too!
• Pilot stats page – this is actually already 50% completed and already includes various graphs and charts but I do however want to add more features and charts and so it’ll be a month or so before this is fully completed and released but it is on it’s way!
• Further airport and navdata improvements.
• Adding a new instant messaging and “NOTAM” system for virtual airlines so they can keep in touch with other “company” pilots through the EFB and FsHub website – we *may* roll this out to everyone (personal users too) if pilots would like the ability to add “friends” and chat with them in real-time/get notifications when they are online etc – Not sure how people feel about this though so I will hold off making any decissions until I get feedback from other pilots!

Once the above is completed, I feel that FsHub will feel more complete and having added every feature that pilots of whom have completed the various “Pilot Surveys” throughout this past year I guess the next logical things for me to work on are as follows:

• Documentation!!! – We have created a new documentation site at: https://docs.fshub.io but it’s pretty sparse at the moment as I’ve just been so busy with coding etc but this will get some special attention very soon!
• More apps and improvements to the new Electronic Flight Bag system – improving the live GPS viewer will be one of the first tasks – we’ll be switching to vector based maps for a crisper look!
• A fully overhauled LRM client (v6) seeing a completely fresh and clean client “borderless” interface that can be run on MacOSX and Linux too! – This will be a long project and will take several months (possibily six months) to develop and test fully.

In the new year, I will publish a new User Survey which I invite you to all participate in – I want to know if you guys are happy with the recent improvements and features and maybe if there are certain things you would like to see in the near future too.

New achievements coming in January!

With the recent “Pilot achievement” system that we implemented this month, we have, up until now only added a single achievement (special event) to the system which is the “Lapland 2021” event.

Work is happening behind the scenes by Clorix and thunfischbaum to add many more “global” (all year round) achievements which will be available for pilots to complete and achieve from early January (if they want to participate – no pressure if achievements/badges aren’t your “cup of tea”).

A very special thanks to you guys…

I just wanted to thank (once again) all you generous pilots out there who have donated to the project this year and have helped relieve some of the hosting cost pressure from me; I would like to say an extra special thanks to John Gould, Jackson Strand, Charles Nadeau, Beefloh and Felix Richter for their continued support on Patreon (your monthly support alone helps pay for two of the five servers that make up our Kubernetes cluster that runs the FsHub platform – thank you so much for that!!) and to those pilots of whom have made one-off donations this year by PayPal too – thank you guys so much!

The pilots over at CIVA (Virtual airline) and SimPlanet (Virtual airline) have also recently sent over a few donations in the last week or so too – again, thank you!

We’d also like to thank and show our appreciation to our “Test Pilots” over on our Discord server of whom help us test releases and provide valuable feedback – Thanks guys, you do a fantastic job!

Well, that’s it from us for this blog post – again, we hope you have a fantastic holiday season and as always, please feel free to feed any comments or requests to us either on our Discord server, forums or by sending us a message using our contact form.

From myself (ballen), Cody (clorix) and Uwe (thunfischbaum) – Have a great Christmas and we’ll see you back again in a few days 🙂 – As you might expect though, we’ll be on hand for any support issues in Discord, emails or the forums if you need us – even on Christmas day 🙂