Additional pilot logbook and airline flight filter options

Additional information received from the recent User Survey also included a request to be able to search for flights (both personal logbook flights and virtual airline flights) that are either “Duty Schedule legs” (following the latest release of the new virtual airline “daily duty schedule” feature and flights (either personal or VA) that either do or do not contain user comments/remarks.

I can confirm that both of these features have also now been added and are immediately available!

If you didn’t know… FsHub has a super powerful personal logbook filter and, airlines are also able to take advantage of the same feature too…

You can access the flight filter section either using your personal logbook’s Filter Flights button or, if you want to search all airline flights, the airline flights page also includes this “Filter flights” button as shown here:

Filter flights in a pilot’s personal logbook.
Filter virtual airline flights (to include flights from all virtual airline members).

Clicking on the either of the “Filter Flights” button, the user will be presented with the advanced filter feature, the addition of three new filter options can now be found in the following locations:

The new filter options

New “SimBrief” integration

Following up on some of the feedback from the recent User Survey as mentioned in a previous blog post.

Previously, given that we’re not officially associated with SimBrief or Navigraph (- the company that builds and maintains it) and I didn’t want to make the FsHub user interface too cluttered, I had only implemented the feature (a link to generate a flight plan based on the departure and arrival airport) to the “Daily Flight Challenge” page.

I know that many users, in particular, GA users will not use SimBrief and instead might favour other tools for flight tracking such as LittleNavMap, with this in mind and due to the request to add this “SimBrief” integration to almost every page where there is a departure/arrival airport, I have decided to make this an optional feature.

To enable the many various “Generate SimBrief” links around FsHub you can do so by visiting the Settings > Integration section and enabling, under the “Third-party integration” section, the integration named “SimBrief” as shown here:

Once the SimBrief integration is enabled, FsHub will display many links around the various application sections (pages) that will when clicked on, take you to SimBrief and automatically start a new Flight Plan with the associated departure and/or arrival airport information prepopulated – some of the pages (such as route pages will also intelligently pre-populate (coming later today) your flight number too – assuming your route name is constructed in a standard way (the first word being the flight number, eg EZY123X).

The following pages and sections, with this feature enabled, will display the option to generate a SimBrief flight plan directly are…

  • Airport information page (ability to choose to depart/arrive)
  • Flight report page
  • Route browser page
  • Route overview page
  • Achievement details page
  • Airline duty schedule page
  • Daily Flight Challenge page

If you think I have missed some sections of the site that could benefit from this feature too.. please let me know!

Here are a few screenshots demonstrating the location of these (trying not too hard to look too subtle) links..

Airline “Daily Duty Schedule” feature released!

In my last blog post, I mentioned that I would be adding a new “Daily Duty Schedule” feature to FsHub. This feature adds an extra level of realism and depth to virtual airlines that have company routes set up and if they decide to enable this (optional) feature for their pilots.

This new feature brings with it many advantages for your virtual airline, including:

  • Realism – Many airline pilots will be given a “daily schedule” by their company, this details what routes they will fly that day.
  • Explore new places – Maybe your airline has a ton of routes but you either don’t know where to fly or like to stick to your “favourite” routes or airports.
  • Pilots get an improved sense of achievement – completing a full schedule of flights that their virtual airline has given you for the day.
  • Future economy system (Aeroconomy) – Having your pilots fly these schedules will likely increase your airline “efficiency” metrics as more of your lesser-flown/favoured routes will be flown and will directly impact your airline’s performance metrics.
  • We now track how many duty schedules and duty schedule legs a pilot completes adding another “score” metric to your airline and the global stats – essentially capturing and acknowledging those pilots for realistically flying virtual airline routes.

As an airline owner, you have several options available to you in order to customise how these features work and how you might use it within your virtual airline.

When I originally planned this feature I modelled it on the fact that many real-world airlines would provide a daily duty schedule to their pilots, for example, EasyJet and Ryanair (both European budget airlines) who’s pilots would turn up to work in the morning and be given a duty schedule by their dispatch team – this schedule would tell them where they would fly that day and be expected to complete it) – Now I’m sure that many pilot’s would love certain routes but, we all have bad days at the office and things we don’t necessarily want to do!

This system will generate a personal schedule for your airline pilot, the schedule will start at a Hub or Airport as selected by the pilot prior to them “Generating” the schedule, FsHub will then generate a joined-up schedule (airport to airport) within the pilot’s specified time – In the real world, this “time” would be their shift duration – maybe 8 hours? – In FsHub, this time is the amount of time that you feel you can spend on the simulator that day.

If this feature is a successful, we will also look at adding an option for “charter” airlines where the system can generate a random charter flight from one of your hubs to a random (adequately size) airport – This will likely to be in the new year however given other things (such as the new LRM client and Economy system) that we plan to work on next!

Once a virtual airline admin has enabled the new “Duty Schedule” system (and has airline routes setup for your virtual airline), your pilots’ will be able to generate and access their active duty schedule using the “Duty Schedule” icon on the Crew Portal as shown here:

The Duty Schedule screen will enable the users to generate a new Duty schedule based on the hours they can “fly the sim” today…

The pilot doesn’t have to complete all legs in the generated schedule but for each leg they complete (in order) the bonus will increase – paying them more each leg!

Once the pilot generates their “Duty Schedule”, the legs will be displayed as shown (this example, as I only set 2 hours and a minimum leg distance would obviously generate less legs as the system tries to find suitable routes along the way whilst keeping it in your time limit but, with more time and randomly chosen shorter legs, your duty schedule could consist of 3, 4, 5 leg etc)…

In this example fewer legs were generated as I specified 2 hours as being able to fly and, as I prefer flying bigger aircraft, ensuring that the minimum leg distance was set to 150nm as the absolute minimum leg distance I wanted to fly.

From the above example, the generated duty schedule has two legs (this fits in based on the airline’s configured “average miles to hour” setting and should fit nicely in with the time that the pilot has specified he/she has in the “Hours” text box.

The first (active/yet to complete) leg is highlighted with an orange border as shown in the above screenshot [1], indicating that you need to complete this leg first, and future legs (shown in the above screens [2]).

When flying duty schedules, you must fly each leg in order – you cannot jump to say leg 3 and expect it to complete!

Once you complete a leg, refreshing the page should move the active leg indicator to the next leg and subdue any previous legs as demonstrated here:

(1) This leg is now completed (is darkened/subdued and the aircraft indicator has been removed. (2) This is now the active/next leg the pilot must complete. (3) Shows the normal route points plus the computed bonus amount, in this example, I have set the airline route leg bonus to 100% – paying your pilot’s a higher bonus will encourage them to use this system and level the XP/v$ distance between those that can fly regularly and those that cannot) – it’s the total of both of these values that will be “paid” to the pilot upon completing this leg!

It’s also good to note that this new system adds a kind of persistence to your current location as, when you land on any leg of your duty schedule, FsHub will automatically update your “last known” location by updating the departure airport as shown here:

And so, when you next come to generate a new Duty schedule, the departure airport will default to the last airport that you landed at when “on duty”… whilst not overly exciting it does mean that if you want to add to the realism, your next duty schedule can generate your schedule from your last know duty (landing) location having potentially a career of virtual airline flights all joined up nicely.

Once you complete the final leg in your duty schedule, refreshing the page will give you confirmation that you have completed it, you will see a message confirming that you have completed the daily duty schedule and, unless the airline admin hasn’t enabled the “Enforce 12 hours duty schedule”, you will be immediately able to Generate a new Duty Schedule as demonstrated below:

Confirmation of successful duty schedule completion!

Each flight that was detected as a “Duty Schedule” flight will also “tag” the flight report and the total rewards for the (route reward points + duty leg bonus) and will be indicated on the flight report as shown here:

(1) Shows the flight was “tagged” as a “Duty Schedule”. (2) Shows the amount rewarded/paid to this pilot for completing the duty leg (the route points + % bonus as shown in the previous screenshot)!

Whilst my other screenshots show the ability to specify a “Maximum leg distance) in the “Duty Schedule Generator” panel. If this option is disabled by the admin, the interface will only show three options for generating a duty schedule (for added realism) as demonstrated here:

The Schedule Generator form will not allow the user to specify the maximum leg distance if the admin has disabled it – to improve “realism”.

Additionally, in my screenshots above (during testing), I didn’t enable any of the “12-hour restrictions”, but just to demonstrate what a pilot would see if the airline did enable this feature…. the “Generate duty schedule” button would be “locked out” until the 12 hour period had elapsed with a count down time as shown here:

As an airline manager/owner, we have provided you many options to customise this system for your own use, as a recommendation, however, if you are trying to simulate real-world operations or want to “level the field” within your virtual airline for pilots who are unable to fly as regularly as others, whilst still wanting to give them an (optional) points bonus, I would suggest the following settings:

Recommended “settings” for airlines that want to simulate real-world ops or want to level out the gap between those pilots who can fly regularly and earn lots of XP to the pilots who want to fly and be in with a chance of ranking high in terms of XP.

Let me quickly explain these settings…

  1. This option turns on/off the “Duty Schedule” system for your virtual airline – in order for this to work, however, the airline must have “Company routes” added into the system given that this system uses the airline routes to build a duty schedule.

    Once this feature is enabled, the pilots can access the “Duty Schedule” feature and generate their daily schedule from the Airline’s Crew dashboard icon and use the “Generate duty schedule” to automatically build a joined-up schedule (from the departure airport they choose).
  2. When enabled, this option will allow any pilot to generate a duty schedule and unless the pilot completes the duty schedule within the 12 hours at the point at which they generated it, will not be able to generate another duty schedule until the 12-hour period has elapsed – for realism purposes, we, at the minimum recommend that pilots should accept that is the route they have been given and must fly regardless of if they like certain airports or routes – this, I’m sure would be the same in the real-world – You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth πŸ˜‰
  3. When this option is enabled, regardless of the fact that the pilot completes their generated duty schedule will not allow them to generate a new one until the 12 hours is up – ensuring that they can only benefit from the additional route bonus once a day! – giving other pilots in your virtual airline the ability to “catch up” in terms of points/XP/v$.
  4. I would suggest unticking this box, real airlines would expect pilots’ to fly whatever length route they are given (which fits within their hours per day), by unchecking this feature, adds more of a “potluck” approach – the virtual VA dispatcher could give the pilot a couple of longer routes or say 5 shorter routes…. remember that each completed leg of the Duty Schedule awards (Leg# * bonus %). The issue with enabling this option (in my opinion and this is why it is disabled by default) is the fact that airline pilots could easily manipulate the amount of bonus XP by engineering their duty schedule to pay them more for many shorter flights. – Ultimately though, this feature has been added for airlines to decide themselves!
  5. This is the Route Bonus * Leg# (%) bonus that the airline awards to the pilot, this is designed to encourage the pilot to fly all legs, each consecutive leg awarding more bonus than the previous (basically the maths is Route Points + (% bonus of the route points x the leg #)! – A higher bonus here might REALLY encourage pilots to fly even the not so nicer-generated schedules in addition to adding more points/v$/XP etc to pilots of whom struggle to keep up with other pilots that can fly many routes a day – also, the pilot may find that one of the “middle legs” of their schedule just happens to be one of their favourite routes and whilst this specific route might normally pay poorly, having it as the 2nd or 3rd leg in a duty schedule might really make it pay well given the bonus multiplier!

As you can see from the above options there are many ways in which you can make this work and customise it for your own virtual airline flying style or requirements.

As an airline, if you solely wanted to use the “Duty Schedule Generator” as a way of randomising and giving your airline pilots a random schedule, I would suggest that you might want to consider using the following settings instead…

The above options will ensure that a pilot can generate (and re-generate) random duty schedules but, and more importantly, won’t benefit from any additional schedule leg XP/points/v$ as a way of manipulating their earned XP.

These settings will enable your pilots to generate a route (they are happy with – eg. they won’t have to fly it and can immediately generate a new one if they wanted a different set of routes) and by setting the Route Bonus modifier to 0(%), the pilot’s won’t receive any extra bonus XP for their flights – ensuring that they cannot generate a ton of XP/v$/points… ultimately the decision, as an airline manager is yours, however – the options and features that I’ve added should cater for the vast majority of virtual airline requirements.

The other options as shown in the above screenshot will be fully documented by the end of this week and will be available on our documentation Wiki – I will update the interface to link back so airline admins and pilots can better understand the system over time.

FsHub also tracks now how many “Duty Schedule” legs a pilot has completed too, this will, over the coming weeks be added to the main platform and virtual airline stats too… yet another metric to determine which pilots like to complete real-world style operations for virtual airlines.

…and finally, I would like to mention that the duty schedule system will also play a big part in the new optional Aeroconomy platform that I also mentioned in my last blog post whereby completed “12hr” Duty Schedules will “score” more than normal routes – as Aeroconomy is designed to simulate a real-world airline economy, this will also help your airline’s performance metrics by ensuring that more of your lesser enjoyed routes will be flown and that the airline’s efficiency metric is kept at a high level (more on this later though!).

I hope this all makes sense, if something is not clear though, please visit our Discord server and ask us to clarify/update this blog post.

October 2022 Platform Updates

This month has mainly seen more features specifically designed for virtual airlines given the amount of demand and feature requests coming in over the last six weeks – fear not though, many more “GA” features and updates will be coming in the next couple of weeks (and also detailed in this blog update).

Let’s just jump straight in, as this post will probably be fairly lengthy (again!)…. I’m happy to announce that, once again, several new features and tweaks to existing features have been deployed this week – in summary, these are as follows:

  • Airline Route Import & Export feature
  • Airline achievements can now optionally award pilots reward points for completing them.
  • Airline achievements can now be restricted to certain aircraft types.
  • Airlines can now earn XP (in addition to their pilots).
  • Airline routes can now be restricted to certain aircraft types.
  • Updates and improvements to the virtual airline radar map.
  • We released the new “Virtual Airline Radar Map Plugin” (for use on your own virtual airline website) is now available to download and use!
  • Virtual airline managers can set a new option “Company routes only” to ignore VA pilot flights that are not on your airlines’ list of “Routes”.
  • Other smaller UI and UX updates to the platform.
  • aeroconomy.com – Our new “opt-in” virtual airline economy system – we’ve decided on the name and secured the domain!

In the rest of this blog post, we will take a deeper look into each of these new features and how airlines can start to use them.

In addition to the above features that will be showcased in this blog, a the end of this blog update I will also cover the other features that I plan to work on next and, if you have an opinion, I would love for you to contact me using our official FsHub contact page.

I have also released a new User Survey (link can be found at the end of this blog post) – this is your chance to have your say as to what you would like to be added, updated or prioritised next!

In addition to the above, I would just like to quickly say that whilst some of you may have been disappointed to not have many new pilot achievements the last month – I took the decision to hold off releasing new ones until November (to enable newer pilots to catch up etc)… we will however be starting to design and release more at the start of November!

Airline Route Import & Export feature

Virtual airlines that have many routes setup inside FsHub previously had to manually edit these routes individually through the FsHub Crew Portal admin section – even though the feature of “Airline Routes” is relatively new, already we have several airlines with well over 500 routes in the system each and so (especially given the other new features that I will mention in this blog post later which may lead to airlines wanting to update all of/many of their routes to use the other new features), editing these routes individually can be a massive pain point.

Yesterday, I released a new feature so that airlines can now export their existing routes, edit them and then re-import (sync) them – this is great if you want to mass update your routes, bulk add new routes, disable/enable a whole load in one go (maybe you want to make seasonal changes or decided to remove an entire hub) then this option is what you may have been waiting for! – I would like to thank 6 knots (Ciaran) for helping me test this feature last night!

The route export/import file is in CSV format and enables you to open and modify it using a spreadsheet application (such as Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Google Docs etc).

Access to the Import and Export Routes features can be found at the top of the Airline Routes admin section as shown here:

Given that the ability to edit and re-import a CSV file can come with issues such as not necessarily being able to trust that the input is correct in each column or row and that the FsHub platform must be resilient enough to handle bad input data – I understand that from a support perspective this could become a real nightmare for myself and the support team here at FsHub such as if users constantly need our help to understand why route import files are failing to import – In order to mitigate this issue and empower the users I have implemented a new “Last import log” feature so that the user can very easily and quickly identify and fix data issues with their own imports (will tell you which line and what’s wrong – basically how to fix the issue yourself) using this new log viewer window that will automatically appear when you first run an import:

Easily debug any route imports using the Log Import window.

Depending on what you’re updating (or if you are creating a ton of new routes), the import process will be throttled (they’ll trickle create or re-process every few seconds) to prevent performance issues on the rest of the platform – other simple changes to things (even bulk changes) such as the route name (eg. the flight number), reward points and restricted aircraft types (ICAOs) will be almost instantaneous (eg. a few seconds for the entire import as most – even with a few thousand lines in your import file) as our platform doesn’t need to go away, behind the scenes, and calculate distances and verify waypoints exist etc) – So just keep this in mind… what I’m really saying is, you may notice that sometimes the import process is super fast and other times may take a couple of minutes to complete so just sit back and watch for the “Last import log” window to update with the results πŸ™‚ – If there are any issues reported in the “Last import log”, simple “fix” the data in that line and re-import the file.

The file import process has been designed to be as intuitive as possible – to delete rows from your company routes (that exist on FsHub) simply delete the line (or multiple lines) and then run the import, don’t want to delete the route but instead hide it? – simply update the “enabled” column from “1” to “0” save the changes and re-import the file – there is a safety mechanism in place that will not delete any deleted row unless the user checks the “Delete routes that have been deleted from the import file?” option as shown here:

The Route Import screen.

In addition to that, to create new routes, simply add new rows to the CSV file but do not enter a value into the first (id) column – then again, to ensure that duplicates aren’t automatically created by accidentally re-running the same file, the option to “Create routes that don’t have an ID column value?” must be checked at the point of re-import.

If you are an airline admin and want to grant permission to other members of your VA to export and/or import routes (as by default, only the airline admin can do this) an airline admin will need to grant the required permissions to the desired role, these can be granted from the Permissions Editor, the new role permissions that have been added are shown here:

If the concept of these advanced permissions seems complicated, please see this blog post (about halfway down) as this explains how you (as an airline admin) can utilise this powerful permission system.

More information about how to use this advanced feature, including how to create new routes, delete routes, update routes and how you can easily filter by Hub or any other custom filters when editing the CSV file in your spreadsheet application of choice can be found in this wiki article – I suggest, if you plan to use this feature that you have a good read to understand it fully, it’s definitely considered more of an “advanced feature” and probably not for the faint-hearted πŸ˜‰

Airline achievements can now optionally award pilot reward points for completing them

This has been a highly requested feature and one that, given other requests and changes recently has been put on “the back burner” – I’m pleased to say however that this is now fully implemented and working great!

In order to set up “points” (v$/XP or whatever else you may have configured your airline’s point system as) simply edit (or create a new achievement) and fill out the “{insert your point name} rewards” field like so:

How to add points for airline achievements

Unlike the pilot routes reward (if using the new “Enable airline reward points?” virtual airline setting), airline achievements will not award the virtual airline any additional XP – this value simply rewards the pilot for completing the achievement.

If you do not wish to award XP for a certain achievement (or all of your achievements) simply leave this box blank!

Please keep in mind that only pilots that complete the achievement AFTER you have updated the achievement will be awarded – if you want to back-date pilot rewards (award them for having completed them in the past) – An airline admin should use the manual XP award feature that is found on the airline pilot’s HR. record as shown in this screenshot:

Access to the above screen can be achieved using the icon “Human Resources” in the airline’s “Administration” section of the Crew Portal page!

Airline achievements can now be restricted to certain aircraft types

Another much-requested feature (and in my opinion, a pretty cool feature) is the ability to now create airline achievements which will only be awarded if the pilot has used one of the listed aircraft type designators (ICAOs).

You can now add one or more (comma-separated aircraft type designators – ICAO codes) to the new field shown here:

Demonstration of restricting types of aircraft for a virtual airline achievement.

So, in the above example, we’re going to “allow” any of the following aircraft types (Boeing 737-700, Boeing 737-800, Boeing 737-900, Airbus A320, Airbus A320 Neo, Airbus A321 and the Airbus A321 Neo).

Each aircraft ICAO should be separated with a comma (if you’re only adding a single/specific type of aircraft then you do not need to add a comma at the end)– I have however done my best to sanitise any other form of input – for example, if you use spaces instead, add too many spaces etc. then the system will automatically clean these up and format it correctly once you save/create the achievement!

Again, much like the optional point reward value as discussed above, if you do not wish to enforce a specific (or various) allowed aircraft type that can complete the achievement you can simply leave this field blank and any aircraft will be able to be flown in order to complete it.

What happens to your current virtual airline achievements ?- Unless you update them with a list (or single) ICAO then your existing achievements will continue to function in the same way they did before – they’ll simply allow any aircraft to be used!

The achievement page has also been updated to indicate to users if a virtual airline achievement has a specific (or list of) aircraft that must be used as shown here:

Demonstration of an airline achievement with optional aircraft type (ICAO) restrictions.

If you fly the achievement but don’t use a valid aircraft OR the aircraft you flew had not previously been designated then the flight will still register as a virtual airline flight (unless the VA management team have enabled the new feature “Company route flights only” – that is of course unless this achievement is a valid company route flight) but will not award the achievement.

So as a small piece of advice – be sure to check the achievement requirements carefully before flying and that you use an aircraft (and livery) that is designated correctly – you can check if an aircraft has been designated correctly but checking on a previous fight report using that same aircraft/livery as shown here:

How to check if an aircraft/livery has been designated correctly!

In future, I will add a new feature to the LRM client that will enable you to quickly check the current detected designation for any loaded aircraft – this may even be released next week πŸ™‚

Airlines can now earn XP (just like pilots can).

Some of the more prominent virtual airlines wanted a way to identify and have a measurement for how well the airline is doing and/or to measure the throughput of the routes that are being flown within a virtual airline.

When an airline admin enables the new “Enable airline reward points” setting, the airline will start to generate reward points when pilots fly company routes, this setting can be enabled through the “Airline Details” admin panel section as shown here:

Pay special attention to the fact that you must enable the “Pilot Awards feature to” for this to work!

Once that’s enabled, heading back to your airline’s Crew Portal page, as the “owner” of the virtual airline you will immediately see this section:

As your pilots fly your company routes, this value will start to increase.

If you want other virtual airline members to be able to see this section/amount too, be sure you edit the airline member role’s permission set by granting this new permission:

With the above permission enabled for that security role, any airline members with that role will then also see the virtual airline point balance on their Crew portal dashboard.

Now back to discussing this feature…

The way this works is that, as you may already know, a virtual airline can “reward” up to a maximum of 1000 points per company route or achievement to the pilot who completes the route or achievement – when a route was successfully flown (meaning that the pilot took off from and landed at the specified route’s airports) and will award the airline the remainder of the 1000 max “pilot reward” points to the virtual airline.

So, as an example, if a company route is configured to pay the pilot 300 points (v$/XP etc), the airline will receive 700 points upon successful completion of the flight.

The reason behind doing it like this (awarding the remainder of the 1000 max points) is to add an extra level of “planning” for virtual airlines – if they pay low rates for a flight, fewer pilots are likely to fly it, right? …and whilst that would therefore award the airline more points, it’ll be less likely they will be flown – this should give you airline managers a challenge between balancing the airline “profits” versus awarding (or paying) your pilots well!

So what can you do with these “airline points” within FsHub? – Well not a lot actually, this is more of an unopinionated way for you (as an airline manager) to use this value for whatever reason you may like… for example, one of our bigger VA’s is going to use that value to determine when they can (or should) open new Hub destinations.

What? You thought you might be able to spend those points on new VA aircraft, gate rent, fuel etc? – Nope, this is a simpler, unopinionated ‘be creative with it” feature and, if you don’t want to use it or don’t have a need, simply don’t enable it.

…if you do want to spend generated airline virtual cash and operate within an airline management economy etc. you should continue to read on… this “economy” feature will be coming in our new Aero(e)economy platform!

Airline routes can now be restricted to certain aircraft types

Just like we have added for the “Airline Achievements”, company routes can now be restricted to one or more aircraft type designators (ICAO codes).

If a pilot completes a company route but fails to use an aircraft listed in the list of “allowed” aircraft for the route, then the flight will not be tagged as a Company Route flight in addition to not awarding any points to both the pilot and virtual airline!

The list of aircraft that must be used can be found on the route listing page as shown here:

Updates and improvements to the virtual airline radar map

The virtual airline radar map has long been in need of some major updates – several weeks ago, I deployed major changes that saw the “instant loading” of all online virtual airline aircraft in addition to improved styling.

This week I have improved upon that further by adding the following additional features such as a collapsable list of all online pilots (with the ability to click their name and will therefore automatically select the aircraft and display flight and pilot details), if a flight plan is filed, it will display the flight plan details (eg. to/from airport, country, distance etc.) in addition to rendering the flight route path…

The new improvements to the virtual airline radar page.

The new “Virtual Airline Radar Plugin” (for your own websites)

Another long-requested feature has been the ability for airlines to be able to “embed” their virtual airline radar map on their own website.

Whilst it is somewhat common for sites to provide these kinds of map features as an IFRAME, I took this one step further and have developed and offered a customisable HTML, JavaScript and CSS solution so that you can host your own radar map that connects back (in real-time) to the FsHub platform to automatically update the aircraft positions on your own hosted map super efficiently (there’s not polling going on here!).

This now gives airlines the ability to use our standard “virtual airline radar” map view (the same that we host on our website) but with the ability to fully customise both the layout and style of the page, the map and the various panel components!

I had intended on providing you guys with a link to our own customised version on the Alaska Virtual (official test VA) website but with all these updates, I’ve been too busy to get that sorted… I will however get it done in the coming weeks to give you all some more inspiration πŸ˜‰

The downloadable plugin provides several files – more details about how to use it, host it and more importantly, customise it… can be found in the README.md file (included in the download ZIP file)

Virtual airline managers can set a new option “Company routes only” to ignore VA pilot flights that are not on your airlines’ list of published routes.

One of the great things about having the new “test” virtual airline (Alaska Virtual) is that I was able to very quickly see that some pilots fly in other locations of the world whether this is what the pilot wanted to do it or simply he or she forgot to change their virtual airline selection in the LRM client software… I very quickly realised that if an airline is trying to simulate a real-world airline or wants to ensure that its airline logbook remains “clean” can now enable this feature from the airline’s Airline Details section as shown here:

With this new setting activated, all virtual airline flights flown that DO NOT match a company route (that being a flight from a specific airport to another specific airport) will be ignored by the VA – the flight will not appear in the virtual airline list of flights and achievements (that are not based on a company route) will also be ignored.

This setting will essentially turn your virtual airline profile into a super clean – “approved flights” only log book and will ensure that you don’t have to manually go and delete a little GA flight that might have been completed by mistake by one of your pilots – from a pilot’s perspective, however, if the flight is “ignored” by the virtual airline, the pilot will still have the flight in their logbook (as a personal flight) ensuring that they don’t forfeit on flight hours or personal log book entries!

Personally, and whilst I know that many virtual airlines may not like to enable this feature (maybe they love hoarding all those lovely flight hours and nautical miles-flown stats) but for other virtual airlines, this is pretty powerful, especially if you’re trying to replicate real-world operations and have published a ton of company routes!

aeroconomy.com – Our new “opt-in” virtual airline economy system.

Whilst this may not surprise you – as I’ve discussed it in other recent blog posts, I wanted to give you all an update with regards to the economy system that I have mentioned in the past…

This week, I have not only decided on a name but also secured a new domain for our airline management “global economy” system…

aero(e)conomy will be the name of our new “opt-in” platform that will provide our global airline economy.

The way that it will work is that airlines will have to “opt-in” (simply click a button in FsHub) to participate in the global economy and everything that it has to offer – from a pilot’s perspective, they don’t need to do anything differently simply fly as they have been, behind the scenes FsHub will “hand off” data to the new aeroconomy platform where airline managers that choose to participate can then work to build a profitable business, have bills to pay, worry about the price of oil (fuel costs) in certain countries, pay maintenance and landing fees, the airline’s safety record (bad landings) will affect airline ticket prices and reduce PAX numbers. Airlines will be able to rent, purchase and upgrade hubs, deal with economic and weather-related issues, set up code-share and sub-contractor agreements with other opt-ed-in airlines – and I’ve only just scratched the surface!

Just because there is now another domain name, it doesn’t mean that you will need to register any new accounts or even visit that site directly – this new platform will be fully integrated (seamlessly) with FsHub – it’ll just keep FsHub cleaner for those users that don’t want to use the features and keep FsHub running nice and fast.

The website (aeroconomy.com), whilst nothing is currently available on it, will start to take shape – even if just an informational landing page over the next couple of weeks.

Work will then start on this platform based on the results of the user survey which I would encourage users to complete – a link to the survey can be found at the bottom of this blog post!

What features will be landing in the new few weeks?

There are a few other things that I would like to improve upon for both general aviation and VA’s, these are:

  • Improvements to departure and arrival airport detection – In order for FsHub to seamlessly work across all simulators, FsHub uses geolocation to detect the “correct” departure airport whilst this, for the most part, works well for most major airports there are several airports in our database of approx 50k airports that are very close to each other or have seaplane bases in the near vicinity… I have a few plans as to how to improve this functionality which should improve detection.
  • More flight performance stats on the flight report – I tested the waters with Cody, Uwe and Aurora (my support team) regarding adding “flight award points” for all flights based on performance – these stats would essentially report fuel economy, check that your speed is below 10,000ft was =< 250kt, general landing rate etc. but for the most part the consensus was they didn’t think it was a good idea for points specifically, with that said, I still feel that some further improvements could be made for general (fly and forget) users and so, if I get much feedback on adding these additional stats, I will look to implement them in the next couple of weeks too.
  • Personal message system – this will enable pilots to “Add a friend” and once the friend request has been approved, both pilots will be able to send each other direct/private messages.
  • Airline achievement Discord notifications – this will enable virtual airlines to have their own pilot achievements posted directly to their Discord server.
  • Online friends list – when you add and the other pilot accepts the “friend request”, you will be able to see a list of your friends of whom are online/flying – clicking on their name will automatically open up the global radar and select their aircraft (so you can see where they are/join them if you’d like) – you’ll also be able to send them a message directly and quickly link to their public profile page!
  • Integrated forums – Discord is great and all but messages can very quickly get lost, I’m planning on building a forum system whereby we can have a global “chat room” could maybe even be used for advertising your virtual airline or sharing links and other bits… in addition to this, the integrated forum system will allow virtual airlines to have their own private (VA members only) forums to discuss whatever they like!
  • More improvements to the VA radar page – This will add a two-colour scheme whereby Aircraft that are airborne will show in one colour and aircraft on the ground will be a dark shade of grey (just like the main radar page) at the moment the aircraft are all the same colour but I will improve this over the next couple of weeks. In addition to the aircraft style based upon if it’s on the ground or in the air, I also plan to add the automatic updates of distance and time remaining on any route plan (just like it does on the main radar page – at the moment, the new virtual airline radar only provides static route information when clicking on an aircraft (or user from the new “Users online list”!
  • The ability for company routes to have additional “rules” such as the ability for an airline to set a scheduled departure and arrival time – with the ability to customise the “grace period” – could be super handy for setting up different flight numbers for different times of the day as well as further customising the rewards/pay for different times of the day. Then, depending upon the “grace period” that you set up could be used as a way to only reward flights that departed and landed within the space of saying an hour from the scheduled times – whilst this may not be for everyone, some airlines might want to use this! – Do let me know if this is a feature that you may like me to add (otherwise I’ll deprioritise it!)
  • There are also several other niggly things that I will be improving on such as highlighting to a pilot if a daily achievement wasn’t quite completed correctly – we’ve had a couple of instances where a pilot’s daily achievement streak has reset as the landing recorded at a different (closer airport)

Progress on the new native (LRM) client software

To be honest, progress has been slow, I’ve been battling other requests (such as the ones mentioned in this blog post) but XPlane 12 has now been released – I mentioned in my last blog post that I was waiting to get my hands on a copy so I can start developing the native Windows, MacOSX and Linux client in addition to the native client for MSFS too.

The good news at least is that FsHub works flawlessly with XP12 and XPUIPC and so this isn’t too higher a priority now… given this, however, please do vote in the attached user survey to ensure that I better understand what the community would like me to concentrate on next!

As a reminder for those that didn’t read my last blog post, the new “native” client will see the requirement for FSUIPC and XPUIPC be removed – I will interface directly with the XPlane API and SimConnect as this has also been a much-requested “want” especially given MSFS and Windows 11’s dislike to FSUIPC πŸ˜‰

Ideas and suggestions for the Xmas “special event”

Last year we ran the first ever FsHub “special event” – named “Lapland 2021” – this ran over the Christmas period and saw flights to Rovaniemi from all over the world it really was a huge success!

I’m now taking suggestions for this year’s Xmas/holiday event and would like any suggestions to be provided to us via our official contact page!

As with last year, the event will probably run for three weeks during mid-December into January!

UPATE 26/10/2022: The “Airline Duty Schedule” feature has now been released, details about it can be found here: https://fshub.io/a/61/auyblxxe

Thanks for the continued support on Patreon!

I would also like to thank again the few Patreons that remain subscribed and help pay the bills each month, these are (in no particular order):

Thank you guys, I cannot express how much your continued support means to me!!

User survey autumn 2022

This is a much smaller user survey this time but, as in the past too, is really handy to get your feedback on the features and future direction as to how you would like to see FsHub grow (new features and improvements). I would urge as many of you as possible to complete it over the next couple of weeks – I will close the survey and review/share the results in my next blog post!

You can complete the new survey here!

Loving the platform and new features?

If you love and appreciate all the work and time that goes into supporting and developing FsHub, please consider donating – this really does help support the platform hosting costs, and my ability to improve and add more features (that requires additional cloud infrastructure).

September 2022 platform updates

We have a ton of updates and improvements to tell you about over the last couple of weeks, I’ll try and keep this blog post as quick and as-to-the point as possible as I know my last one was horrendously long…

The new route map

In my last blog post, I introduced the new “Routes Browser” feature that exists for virtual airlines and is accessible through the Crew Portal.

I’ve since taken this one step further and added an interactive route map whereby you and your airline pilots can see an overview on a map…

The new Airline Routes Map

Clicking on an airport will automatically filter flights to and from that particular airport too!

In addition to that, hovering over an airport will display its name and ICAO code too.

In this example, clicking on Anchorage (in Alaska) automatically filters to show only the flights to and from this particular airport!

Another update that has been made in the last 48 hours, now enables visitors to your public airline profile page (from the new “Browse Routes” quick line) to browse and interact with your routes on a map too…

The new “Browse Routes” link on a Virtual airline profile page.

Note that this icon will be “disabled” (not clickable) if your airline hasn’t published any company routes!

VA Codeshare

Whilst not yet implemented yet (will be coming in the optional economy features), given that it’s related to “company routes”, I thought I’d quickly mention that, in future, two virtual airlines will be able to “codeshare” a specific route meaning…

When Airline A flies the route (with the exact same flight number/code), Airline B (and have pre-agreed a codeshare contract) they will receive an equal share of the profit for that route!

Be sure that your virtual airline flies your share of the route though as otherwise, your partner VA may terminate the agreement if you don’t πŸ˜‰

I won’t go into too much detail about this now but it means that two virtual airlines can work together and both benefit!

Hubs!

In the past, our implementation of “hubs” has been subjective in the fact that I provided the ability for virtual airlines to add custom map markers to their virtual airline radar page, whilst this has provided a way for virtual airlines to highlight key points of interest, these “map markers” could be used by all kinds of virtual airlines such as by bush flying clubs to indicate their next or favourite short field landing sites or by military VA’s for setting key points of interest…

Up until now, virtual airlines that are “simulating” commercial passenger or cargo flights could only really distinguish hubs by placing markers on their VA map.

I’ve have now improved upon this feature, the “markers” are still very much part of FsHub (for the reasons mentioned above) but there is now the ability for virtual airlines to actually set airline actual Hubs, one of the benefits of doing this too is that you don’t need to set the custom map coordinates – simply enter the ICAO and FsHub will do the rest…

Adding and deleting hubs can be achieved through the FsHub airline crew portal by virtual airline admins.

At the moment, adding a hub gives two benefits…

  1. Your virtual airline’s Routes Browser and Route Map highlight and prioritise these “key” locations making it easier for your pilots to find routes out of your busier airports.
  2. Adding a hub to your airline will automatically promote it on the airport’s information page (but only if your virtual airline has a logo uploaded – as we want the airport pages to look nice!) – this is designed as a way to promote your virtual airline as well as for new users to the platform that might regularly use an airport information page to get METAR or chart information, will automatically see that you fly out of their favourite (or commonly flown) airport and may be tempted to apply and fly for your airline!

    Don’t worry about where your logo will be positioned either – the airport page will show the airline logo (with a link to the VA profile page) for the top most recent virtual airlines – so as long as your airline is actively flying you’ll be on the list!

    To prevent abuse (such as over-promotion) I have imposed a strict limit of 10 hubs (most major airlines don’t even have this many!) per virtual airline for the time being – I have other ideas as to how this limit can be extended or removed altogether in future but for the time being, this is how it will be.

In future, I will be expanding on this functionality further to add the following features:

  1. The ability for virtual airlines to “assign” pilots to hubs.
  2. Group the list of VA members/pilots (on the Airline Roster page) into hub groups – easier to see who is based and where!
  3. Potentially enable the VA to assign a “Hub Manager” of whom can be a key contact in your VA for adding and/or managing routes and the pilots based at that VA – I would love feedback on this idea especially!

In addition to that, the upcoming economy features (for those VA’s that choose to enable them) will extend on these features further such as being able to “rent” hubs, have to keep them profitable (or they’ll get shut down) and upgrade them to increase PAX numbers and ultimately the amount of revenue your airline can make.

Virtual airline radar updates

This one has been a long time coming and has been deprioritised a few times (as other more pressing features have been requested) and whilst I still have a few more bits to add to it (eg. display of current route details and the ability to click on any “online pilot” in the list of “On-duty pilots” (this will be a dropdown panel on the radar page so that you can click on a pilot name to automatically select and centre on the pilot’s aircraft) the radar page has seen the following improvements:

  1. Instant loading of all aircraft and pilot details panel information (in the past, this would take several seconds whilst aircraft were “pinging” their location to our servers…. with the introduction of a new microservice today, this is now instant!
  2. The total number of airline aircraft on the ground, airborne and the combined total of both are now displayed on the radar view too, in the bottom right!
  3. UI improvements (improved panel layout etc.)
  4. The addition of the VA logo (if the VA has one setup) is in the bottom left corner.
  5. The VA radar map code is now “embeddable” – I will publish this shortly for download with instructions as to how you can embed this into your own virtual airline website and have a live feed of your VA flights on your own website!

Here are a few of the “visual” update improvements – the rest of the improvements so far however are backend “technical” changes which make the instant loading of aircraft possible and the radar map embeddable into your own virtual airline websites:

New visual improvements to the VA airline radar page.

These new improvements are considered “BETA” throughout this next week (as I’m going on a last-minute holiday for a few days – gotta keep the family happy…. happy wife, happy life… you know what I mean!) and so, any issues, please let us know and I’ll address them upon my return!

Finally, as I have simply run out of time today, I will then also be adding the following features to complete the airline radar improvements when I get back:

  1. Distinguish airborne and on-ground aircraft – much like the global radar page, but slightly different whereby airborne aircraft will show the VA’s colour scheme (as set in the Airline Styling options) and aircraft on the ground will be dark grey – I won’t be using different shades for different altitudes as it degrades performance and feedback in the community has generally been that the radar aircraft shades (at different altitudes) are simply confusing, aircraft on the VA radar will therefore be either dark grey (for on the ground) or the VA colour scheme for airborne aircraft.
  2. When an aircraft is clicked on and the pilot has an active route set, the routing information (and track line) will display on the map too – kind of like it does on the global radar at the moment but the layout will be a lot better and less condensed – you’ll see what I mean πŸ˜‰
  3. A full drop-down list of all pilots currently flying – clicking on the pilot’s name will automatically centre on the aircraft and display the pilot/flight information – you’ll therefore no longer need to hunt around, clicking on all the aircraft to see who’s online or which aircraft is being piloted by who.
  4. Selected aircraft will render (show on the map) the actual flown path in a lighter shaded line – just like the AeroPad Live GPS does – therefore there will be two lines that could possibly appear when clicking an aircraft, firstly the planned route (if one is set by the pilot) just like the global radar does at the moment and secondly the actual flown path (flight track) that the aircraft as already flow (eg. the vapour trail).

Various UI improvements

Ok, so UI improvements are subjective, I know but the pilot dashboard page and the virtual airline profile page have had some UI improvements – replaced the large panel headings with smaller indicators instead, moved some things around, styled some buttons using the virtual airline’s configured colour scheme and added a new “Quick links” section.

Airline Profile Page UI improvements

In addition to that, the airline website URL is now moved under the “External links” section and I’ve compressed up the top section by moving the buttons around closing up the page a bit more…

I fixed the annoying “Back links” on the Client Portal (Improved UX)

Until I recently set up and have been testing on our “showcase” airline (Alaska Virtual), I didn’t really realise how annoying some of the Crew Portal links were whereby…

If you clicked on Airline Roster (this also applies to “Airline Flights” and “Achievements“), these would open up but the “Back to Airline” button would bump you back to the Airline Profile page and thus completely breaking your user journey and meant you had to navigate back through to the Crew Portal – an absolute pain to say the least…

I have now made these “Back” buttons context-aware and will now take you back to where you wanted to go πŸ™‚

…it’s a small change I guess but one that has already seen a warm welcome but a handful of FsHub users including myself!

Export flight map to GeoJSON format

At the request of a community member (it was super easy and quick to implement) I have added the ability for pilots to download the flight track (flown path) in GeoJSON format.

Any logged-in user can use the new “GeoJSON” button just above a flight report’s flight path map to download the GeoJSON file.

This file can then be imported and used both on external map browser tools (like Google Earth) in addition to your own websites using Javascript and a mapping solution such as Google Maps, Bing Maps or OpenStreetmap.

Want to test it out? It’s super easy, just download a GeoJSON file from one of your flight reports (see screenshot above) and then, using a free website such as geojson.io, you can open the file and have it draw your path on the world map!

A new VA badge template/layout has been added

Probably pretty minor for the vast majority of you but in the last couple of days a new Airline ID badge template has been added and includes the pilot’s national flag (based on their nationality) and display’s the pilot’s earned XP points too…

Feel free to go and test it out – maybe you fancy designing and changing up your existing virtual airline ID card πŸ™‚

An airline member with the appropriate admin permissions can find and set this from the “Airline Styling” section from the crew portal, the new template option is shown here:

A few bug fixes too…

We noticed a few layout issues with the site, namely the display of the “FSEconomy integration” and the “Edit Chart” modal window – these have been now been fixed!

There was also an issue raised by a virtual airline whereby RBAC permissions were reset randomly, this too has been fixed!

Aurora joins the FsHub Team!

We would like to officially welcome Aurora to the FsHub support team – she has, for a while now been very active in our Discord server, helping other members of the community and her recent work on the new Documentation site has been such a help!

Aurora will now join Clorix and thunfischbaum on the support team and has all the access required to help resolve data issues with airports, approve aircraft ICAO changes, password resets – you name it… Welcome to the team Aurora!

New achievements

As we’ve been doing in most updates, despite originally thinking that we may hold off for a few more months (to give users a chance to get all the badges) we have very recently extended our “US Cities” series adding another multi-leg achievement (US Cities Volume 3) which will see you explore and visit five more major cities in the USA! – Thanks must go to JimG for creating and setting up this addition to our US Cities series!

In addition to that, with the MSFS World Update XI on the horizon, Clorix has been proactive and have already setup another “Bespoke Airports Tour” multi-leg achievement that covers the five custom airports that will be released, this time, the world update focuses on Canada – be sure to keep your eyes peeled for when we release this achievement on the data that the World Update is officially released!

Don’t try and fly the Canadian Bespoke Airport Tour achievement yet though as we won’t be enabling it/releasing it until the MSFS World Update XI has gone live and it will not be awarded to you – we just wanted to share the excitement with you in this blog update!

FsTube – Upload and share your flight sim recordings!

FsHub has long provided pilots with the ability to upload, share and store their flight sim screenshots and more recently, people have started to suggest that we may consider enabling the ability to upload and share recorded videos such as landings and airline promotion videos.

Coming soon!

Whilst I don’t personally have the time to build in these features at the moment (there are other features that are taking first place), thunfischbaum has found an open-source solution and, with his expert IT knowledge, has used his experience to configure and host it on behalf of the FsHub community.

We’re still ironing out a few kinks but expect it to be released in the coming days, storage is plentiful and between thunfischbaum and the rest of the FsHub team here, we’ll be providing support to that platform too – with tight integration features coming very soon!

We’ll be sure to give a further announcement on our Discord server and links will be added to the FsHub site once it’s fully ready for use.

In the near future, any videos uploaded to FsTube will be fully embeddable into FsHub on VA profile pages and your flight reports too!

In addition to that, we have created our own official channel there too whereby we plan to record and share tutorial videos covering how to setup and use the many features that LRM and FsHub including AeroPad and how to setup, configure and run virtual airlines – those being just a few examples!

New documentation site and improved documentation!

In our official User Surveys it has been a well voted for topic and unfortunately, given that FsHub is developed and provided free of charge, and in our spare time, our resource in the past has always been stretched with appetite learning more towards new features and improvements as opposed to documentation

Full credit goes to Aurora here – she’s been working tirelessly the last few days to migrate and set up a new documentation site (wiki) that covers all-things FsHub and LRM-related.

The site covers all topics from how to set up and manage a virtual airline, advanced features as well as support documentation about how to set up LRM, Aeropad and the other features that it has to offer.

Whilst this is still a work in progress (obviously features are added to FsHub all the time), there is already a ton of new and useful information on there.

You will notice over the next few days, that the older documentation site will start redirecting to the new site which, is far more modern and easy to search and navigate – we hope you share the same view!

What’s next

A ton of things (as usual), and at the moment I’m still working on various things, tweaks and improvements as well as everything that is “coming soon” that I’ve mentioned above.

My last blog post covers many of the other features that will be coming next and I personally, am especially excited to start working on some more of the economy features and the new LRM client versions that will natively support the for MSFS and XP12 users (no more FSUIPC requirements for you guys) in addition to including full support for Linux and MacOS for those XP users!

I could go on a massive rant about what specifically is being done next and timeframes but again, I seem to have a habit of making these update messages wayyyyy too long – apologies for that!

That’s all for now!

So anyway, it’s just gone 03:15 in the morning here and I have a plane to catch in a few hours and I obviously haven’t packed yet either πŸ˜‰

For those of you that are into aviation (ermmmm… I guess that’s all of you then πŸ˜€) and are interested (of course you are πŸ˜‰) – I’ll be flying from London’s Stansted airport (EGSS) to Palma De Mallorca (LEPA) tomorrow evening onboard a TUI Boeing 737-800 and spending the week in Puerto Pollensa.

Luckily my brother has the week off work and will be house-sitting for me and looking after my trusty cockerpoo (Henry).

Cat pictures are overrated and so, here’s one of my best-est buddy….

Henry aka. “The Boy”

Whilst I will be taking my iPad with me and will be able to access all the systems (if the need arises)…. please don’t DM me unless you want to meet up for a beer πŸ˜‰

Clorix, thunfischbaum and Aurora will be on hand to help with any support matters so please post in the main FsHub Discord channels or use our website contact form.

Speak again with you all very soon!

August 2022 platform updates

Hey guys, it seems like it’s been ages since I last posted any updates and added any major new features to FsHub (in reality it was only June but hey!), that wasn’t intentional though…

I had COVID…

Yeah, it wasn’t fun and although I was bed-bound for a few days, the biggest impact to me personally was actually the weeks that followed having very little energy and so, whilst I was able to return to work (the day job), I didn’t have much energy for much else and so, FsHub development had to be put on the back burner for a few weeks.

That said however, I’m now fully recovered, my energy levels are now back to normal and pleased to report that I have some news of features and improvements to update you guys on…

Thanks for the user survey responses…

Firstly I want to thank everyone that replied to the User Survey that I posted in June – it was super useful and provided myself and the team with some interesting insights into what you guys value and want to see improved or implemented into FsHub the near future.

Before I go into what’s been released this week and the direction we’ll be taking going forwards, I thought I’d quickly summarise what seems to be the common requests and feedback from User Survey and later, I will then explain how we plan to deliver these to you!

So, whilst we did receive responses like…

…the majority of user responses, when asked what main features they wanted me to focus my attention to next (in order to most requested) are:

  • More virtual airline features.
  • An economy mode.
  • …closely followed by improvements to the LRM client and the AeroPad EFB…
Screenshot of User Survey results

As per the results, whilst the LRM client and AeroPad EFB could do with some updates for sure and both are on my list of things to do, in reality, the LRM client works perfectly fine (as long as FSUIPC behaves for the MSFS2020 users… and you don’t have internet issues mid-flight πŸ˜‰).

Taking the above into account – the updates for LRM and the integrated EFB will now be the priority of this coming Autumn/Winter – users can expect a seriously cool new borderless (modern) client interface with a simplified menu system and improved scaling support; the new versions of the LRM client will drop FSUIPC/XPUIPC and I will be developing two independent LRM versions – One of MSFS2020 (using SimConnect) and a bespoke X-Plane 12 client that will work for Windows, MacOSX and Linux too.

In the past I have said that, and whilst I still fully stand by my statement – I’d rather have a single LRM client to make my life easier (after all, I’m the only developer that builds, maintains both FsHub and LRM client and all of this is done in my “spare time” – I have a full-time job and family too) with maintaining it, the issue that I have now is that FSUIPC is starting to cause issues for MSFS users (not automatically starting etc.) and of course, the new X-Plane 12 releasing at some point.

It does makes sense to push the new client back to the Autumn/Winter as I’m holding out to see what the X-Plane 12 API looks like as XPUIPC support for this version of X-Plane will probably be non-existent – due to the developer of XPUIPC having gone AWOL a long time ago!)

I will also continue to support users of FS2004, FSX, P3D and older versions of X-Plane but continue to maintain the current (v5.x.x) version of the LRM client too.

Anyway, back to the Virtual Airline feature improvement requests/votes….

Whilst this feedback has been great, it has forced me to really think about and make some serious decisions as to how to implement (which would essentially mean shoehorning) these complex and opinionated/non-generic features into the core of FsHub without upsetting the majority of users.

….I’ve been working with a number of virtual airlines recently and it’s clear that the more features I add to the platform that initially aim to be as generic and as unopinionated as possible, it seems that, through requests from these airlines that it’s clear that each virtual airline is different and have their own specific requirements and/or ideas on how FsHub could and/or should work for them.

The honest truth is that I would love to help all these airlines to implement exactly what they want and “need” but these features, i’m sure would clash with each VA’s views and opinions and worst still, massively bloat the FsHub platform, impact the smaller VA’s by adding further complexity (as per the feedback screenshotted further up in this blog post) and furthermore probably annoy the general non-VA users of whom have little care for virtual airline features.

With the above said, this is something that I’m not prepared to do (keep shoehorning virtual airline features into the core) and whilst this may sound like I’m pushing back or simply denying features to users, rest assured, I will be addressing how I plan to deliver a better solution that will cater for everyone without bloating or detracting away from what FsHub was always supposed to be a fast and stable, extensible data platform later on in this blog post!

And so, other than a few remaining things to finish off for the Crew Portal on FsHub (eg. Company Messages and Filterable route maps) – All future complex virtual airline-specific features will be implemented separately from FsHub – Development on FsHub specifically will concentrate again on improving and enhancing its current feature set.

To be clear nothing will be removed from FsHub, everything will remain as is now but going forwards, I will be championing the use of external site integrations for custom/advanced virtual airline features through plugins – these are very exciting times – read on to hear more about how this will be achieved and how you can get involved!

So what new features have been released recently?

This release has been mainly geared towards virtual airlines for two reasons:-

  1. I’m running out of ideas and improvements for general non-VA users and so, please, if you think I’m missing something (after reading this blog post) for non-VA / logbook only users, please contact me directly here – I don’t want you guys feeling left out and will be happy to tackle any features very soon!
  2. The majority of the user feedback from the survey was heavily based around virtual airline-specific features and, features that I know are fairly generic or common to all virtual airlines in terms of functionality.

I’ve wanted to finalise some of the features that I’ve added in the last set of major updates back in June too (before I got COVID) and had previously only partially completed or “disabled” and whilst I now have a clear direction on how I plan to deliver the more bespoke/advanced VA features, this release is essentially a “roll up” release, finalising and solidifying the extent of the VA features that will be provided in the “core” of FsHub.

Here is a quick overview of the main features that have been released:

Optional pilot rewards (XP, v$) for virtual airline routes

It’s not a full-blown economy mode but does add another level of achievement for virtual airline pilots and should entice them to fly your published company routes over and over again – I guess it’s kind of like the Pilot achievements but instead, they are rewarded with “points” every time they fly specific routes – should counteract the boredom factor on those less interesting or long haul flights.

More information about this specifically can be found on our documentation Wiki here: https://docs.fshub.io/fshub/features/route_rewards_system

Some airlines might be trying to replicate real-world routes or are simply trying to simulate the real-world operations of flying hub and spoke networks – this feature was designed to and should really help you retain pilots as you can not only customise the “reward point” unit name (eg. v$, XP, tokens) but now configure the number of reward points (v$, XP etc) that get automatically transferred to each of your pilots’ when they complete a company route.

The reward points can be enabled through the virtual airline’s “Airline details” section as shown here:

Use the Airline Details section to enable the new Pilot Reward Points system.

Once loaded, scroll down to the Options section and enable this setting:

Enabling the optional Pilot Reward Points system.

Once enabled, you can customise the point unit name and label and, depending on if you want your virtual airline to use a monetary value instead of say “Experience Points”, you may choose not to enable the “Show pilot points in the airline members list?” option above.

Each virtual airline can customise the reward point name/label however they like!

Once that is enabled, you can set the number of reward points that will be awarded to your pilot(s) when they fly your routes – you can therefore edit any existing routes or create new ones and specify the number of reward points awarded like so:

In order to encourage pilots to fly the route as you specified (following the waypoints etc), I have coded some logic into the system whereby, if the pilot flies > 95% of the track distance, he or she will receive the full number of Pilot award points. If the pilot flies less than 95% of the total track distance (as set in the route), he or she will receive the associated percentage amount of points based on the distance percentage he or she flew – discouraging them from flying it directly, this logic is also documented here.

You can of course have a mixture of routes that payout points and those that don’t pay out any at all – simply don’t enter a number in the Point rewards field if you wish a certain route to not reward anything!

Spendable Pilot Reward Points (XP, v$) – in the real world!

Again, working with some of the largest virtual airlines on FsHub that stream their content online, they have recently expressed that they would like the ability for VA members to be able to “spend” / “redeem” their reward points that they’ve earned through flying company routes but in the real world.

Given this request, I have therefore added several new API endpoints and additional RBAC role permissions that make this possible (more details further on in this blog post)!

So you may be thinking, huh? wtf?, What does that even mean?

As an example, you could be watching a Twitch stream of your favourite MSFS content creator of whom runs a VA of which you are a member of and been flying a ton of their company routes – you’ve earnt a ton of “reward points” and so, through the FsHub API, you can develop and share bots and/or other integrations for quite literally any type of modern application or service.

FsHub virtual airlines can now enable their pilots to exchange their virtual points/currency for Twitch “redeems”, physical merchandise, “buying” custom Discord Server roles, these are just a few examples – quite literally anything though as the API provides a feature to securely “withdraw” the specified number of points from a pilot’s account whilst validating said balance is sufficient!

The “Routes browser” feature

Given the large amount of work that I’ve been doing on the routes system specifically this past week (needed to support the new Reward Points system), one of the remaining features that needed to be enabled in the VA Crew Portals was the “Routes rrowser”.

The Routes browser is now accessible from your virtual airlines’ Crew Portal and, when opened will enable you and your pilots to very easily filter down any published company routes and provide easy access for VA pilots to locate and get route information and/or find out how many (optional) “reward points” they can earn by flying a specific route.

How to access the “Routes Browser” feature from the airline Crew Portal page.
Company Routes Browser with advanced filtering options

The routes browser displays all routes that are configured and published by the virtual airline (and as you would expect, hides any disabled routes), in addition, a route filter can help you locate routes to and from your favourite airports quickly.

NOTE: A filterable route map is coming in the next couple of weeks – I’ve just been super busy with these other bits so do keep your eyes peeled for that appearing in FsHub shortly too!

API improvements

To better cater for external site integrations, the following new features and “integration abilities” have now been added to our REST API (v3):

  • Retrieve all airline routes
  • Retrieve all airline roles
  • Retrieve all airline ranks
  • Set a pilot’s rank (could be used in conduction with the point system to “buy” a custom rank using the new Reward Points system within your VA)
  • Check airline pilot point balance.
  • Reward points debit transaction (deduct points from a VA pilot’s account)
  • Reward points credit transaction (credit points to a VA pilot’s account)

These features, combined with examples can all be found documented in our REST API documentation.

The addition of these endpoints have now required some new RBAC role permissions to be added into the system, users that are accessing the API with an associated API token will only be able to credit or withdraw (spend) VA pilot points if they are granted a role with these new permissions.

New RBAC role permissions for Pilot Reward Point management through the HR system and REST API.

Company messages (WIP)

The company message system is nearing completion and is due to be fully released later this week.

The company message system is designed for Virtual Airline managers to publish “memos” to virtual airline pilots, these kind of messages could include:

  • General news and updates relating to the virtual airline.
  • Organisation of upcoming virtual airline events.
  • Changes to operating procedures.
  • Updates to your fleet inventory.
  • Notify pilots of route additions or removals from the network.
  • Announcement of new virtual airline achievements.
  • Celebrate internal promotions.
  • etc. etc. etc.

I’ve run out of time this week to fully complete it but suffice to say, this will be released in the next week – I’ll be spending my evenings after work getting this finalised!

Virtual Airline members will be able to access the list of published Company Messages using this button – the number of unread/new company messages will also be highly visible!

Any number of new/unread company messages will be indicated from the Crew Portal page.

In addition to the message being readable through the Crew Portal, there will be additional webhooks that will be added too so that when a Company Message is created, external systems (Such as Discord) can instantly be notified of a new company message, can format it and automatically post it to your DIscord server too (much like how we output landings etc).

…and a few more smaller features and bug fixes

A few more items that have been “plucked” directly from the user feedback, have been release and immediately available are:

  • Ability to disable (hide) airline routes – This was requested to make it easier for VA’s to disable/hide seasonal routes without having to delete and re-add them at a later date. You can now use the “Edit route” feature to uncheck the “Enabled” checkbox, this will prevent the specific route from being displayed in the new Routes Browser, the Flight Planner and the LRM “Import from Company Route” list feature.
  • Improved navigation in the Crew Portal sections – the addition of context-aware navigation buttons, reducing the number of times you need to re-navigate back to the crew portal or use the browser’s “back” button.
  • Fixes for the virtual airline ID card on mobile devices.
  • Fix for the daily flight achievement “Longest streak” reset issue.
  • Several bug fixes – One major one being the last leg in multi-leg achievements, despite the multi-leg achievement being awarded wasn’t “ticking” the final leg.

New achievements

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve rolled out a handful of new achievements over the last few weeks, these include:

  • The Orient Express (multi-leg)
  • US Cities Volume 1 (multi-leg)
  • US Cities Volume 2 (multi-leg)
  • Pirate Gold Of Adak Island (multi-leg)
  • Petanque (single-leg)
  • Bakewell Tart Day (special event – goes live 11th August)

My plan is to add a couple more official achievements by the end of this coming week so do keep your eyes peeled for those coming too!

So what about those virtual airlines that need complex features?

If you currently operate a virtual airline on FsHub and are happy with the features that already exist, have zero-to-little desire to want to add complex features or integrate FsHub data into your own website then you can pretty much skip this reading this section entirely and can continue to use FsHub as you have been – safe in the knowledge that you won’t have to worry about further added complexity πŸ˜‰

For those wanting additional, advanced and/or granular features for their virtual airline, keep reading…

As I mentioned above, some virtual airliens have been chomping at the bit for more advanced features and VA-specific functionality and, as I’ve mentioned before FsHub provides all the integration power you need to build powerful systems whilst utilising FsHub as the main data processing and storage engine.

It’s clear that despite the documentation, the majority of virtual airlines have yet to harness this power of which, to be fair, is probably due to a lack of development skills within the virtual airline and is completely understandable.

I have therefore decided and due to the previous comments on the User Survey that we will start to develop plugins and integrations for WordPress that utilise our powerful platform integration features.

Why have I chosen to use WordPress? – As a software engineer, WordPress wouldn’t naturally be my first choice but then again, I’m not the end user in this scenario and we must remember that WordPress powers the majority of websites online, it has a massive user base, online documentation and tutorials are plentiful and if you dabble in web design/development, you may already be using software to run your website on anyway.

These plugins will be developed and released as community “open-source” plugins and can be used as-is and/or modified by virtual airlines for their own custom/advanced functionality.

We have started a community discord for collaborating and building these plugins – read on to hear more info about this and how to get involved!

Ideally, I would love to involve as many FsHub users and VA members as possible of whom want to further enhance their virtual airlines and build integrations for their sites and collaborate together (on GitHub) to build out some amazing plugins and add-ons that can be freely installed and customised by other FsHub virtual airlines in the community.

If you’re getting confused at this point as to what this means – No, WordPress plugins won’t replace FsHub, It would be almost impossible to achieve what FsHub is able to do very efficiently in WordPress alone – these plugins would provide automated integration with FsHub; the WordPress plugins would be able to automatically receive, download and store processed data from FsHub in near real-time and present and manipulate it on the website however you want.

If you know much about Cloud technology and systems architecture – your WordPress website would essentially sit at “the edge”, FsHub would be “the cloud” infrastructure – your virtual airline solution would then become a “hybrid” solution (combining the power of “cloud” and “edge” compute) – Core data processing is done in the cloud (at FsHub) and then specific/custom features and functionality would live within your WordPress site but in full communication with FsHub.

Whilst I barely get the opportunity to fly all that often (I have a full-time job and build FsHub in my spare time) – it’s clear that in order for this to be a success, we need to start a virtual airline (that we can control) and myself and the rest of the FsHub team need to be involved in – we can then understand the likely requirements of a larger and more complex virtual airline – the kind of airline that would want to use such custom/complex integrations and therefore, we have decided to kick start this new initiative by officially launching a virtual airline that will simulate the real-world airline operations of a large airline – thus giving us real-world problems to solve and provide complex solutions for through the use of WordPress plugins. – Continue reading on to see how you can get involved and hopefully want to fly for it too – we could really do with all the generated data we can get our hands on πŸ™‚

The TL;DR here really is – If you want to really your virtual airline’s data (in real-time) with your own website, take advantage of live, completely customisable virtual airline radar maps, extend upon the economy features in addition to a powerful content management system (CMS) and are not already using WordPress, you may want to consider migrating your existing static HTML, Wix, GitHub Pages or Netlify website over to a WordPress site soon as I expect these plugins to be available in the next few months!

We may look at offering a WordPress hosting service too for those that like the sound of this but wouldn’t know where to start with server hosting/rental and the installation of WordPress itself – this will be based on demand however and so, if you would be interested, please let us know otherwise we’ll assume you’re happy to watch YouTube videos and work it out for yourself πŸ™‚

New virtual airline – come and join Alaska Virtual!

As a continuation of the above – In an attempt to better understand the needs and “pain points” for existing virtual airlines on FsHub and to demonstrate to other virtual airlines how they can deeply integrate FsHub into their own websites and applications – we’ve decided to start an official virtual airline on FsHub and welcome anyone to come to join and help us fly the routes that are flown by the real-world airline.

Whilst this airline will be a “showcase” airline and used to test run all new advanced (WordPress plugin) features, it will be run professionally and pilots who join can be assured to get their hands on the most advanced software and integrations that I can personally build out in order to really enhance your experience for flying with a virtual airline on FsHub and stimulating real-world airline ops – these advanced features and pieces of software will then be shared with other virtual airlines on FsHub and available to install as open-source community WordPress plugins.

We really wanted to simulate a real-world airline (routes and aircraft primarily) and so we settled on simulating Alaska Airlines as our official virtual airline for FsHub. In addition to some really great scenery in Alaska and some challenging smaller airports (especially along the Milk Run by far my favourite FsHub achievement to date!), Alaska Airlines and its subsidiaries (Horizon, etc) of which we will simulate in our virtual airline fly literally hundreds of routes across America (inc. Canada, Mexico to name a few) and so, it certainly isn’t just flying in Alaska!

The new airline already has over 240 real-world routes added (and so far we have Anchorage (PANC), Portland (KDPX) and Seattle-Tacoma (KSEA) hub routes entered and ready to be flown immediately – The Los Angeles (KLAX) hub routes will be added shortly).

The virtual airline is also configured to “pay” pilots (using the new Pilots Rewards system mentioned earlier in this blog post) when they fly our published routes, you’ll be rewarded with virtual dollars ($) – giving you more reason to fly and stick to our VA routes.

In addition to this, we have set up Pilot Ranks (based on flight hours) and will have several custom virtual airline achievements published by the end of the weekend – all of these achievements will be based on the operations and historical facts of this real-world airline.

We encourage anyone that likes to fly in the PNW and America in general (Alaska Airlines cover a wide area!) and especially with a love of Boeing and/or Airbus aircraft to consider joining and flying for our virtual airline.

We’ll also be looking for members to help us run the virtual airline – although Cody, Uwe and I are already “Senior Managers” within the airline, it would be great to have others pick up some of the responsibility of managing routes, HR roles etc. etc.

We’ve already started preparing our website too (which will run our WordPress site complete with the custom FsHub plugins), set up a separate Discord server and of course, created the VA on FsHub πŸ™‚

If you’re interested in joining the virtual airline to fly with us and become part of an official FsHub community airline be sure to use the links above to join the airline (on FsHub) and our Discord server.

If you’re a WordPress developer or website designer and would love to work with us to build out some initial website templates (that look like and functions like an airline website and including features like “Book a flight”/ “Boarding passes generation” etc and would love to get involved with the project, maybe even upskill your development skills by working closely with myself – join the Discord Server and introduce yourself πŸ™‚

If you’re already a VA admin and have no interest in flying for the virtual airline BUT want to contribute plugin ideas we have a “feature-discussions” channel in the Discord Server and so, encourage you to join that to post/discuss your feature requests there! – Remember, these plugins are being developed externally to FsHub now but directly link back to your FsHub airline through our core APIs.

Would love to hear your feedback!

If you’ve made it this far – let me know what you think of these latest updates, do you agree or disagree?

Please provide feedback either using our Contact Form or using our #feedback channel on the official FsHub Discord server!

If you really love what you’ve read and would like to donate and show your support for the work that goes on behind the scenes, the details can be found here.

…and finally a special mention for FireFly Air

This month, TwoToneMurphy and the virtual pilots over at FireFly Air completed their 10,000th flight, in total the airline has racked up well over 2.5 million nautical miles in just under 3 months!

This is fantastic, the team at FsHub would like to say a huge congratulations to the many pilots (227 of them) that have flown and achieved this massive milestone in such a short period of time!

Great going guys!

User Survey June 2022 – Have your say!

We have just published our latest “User Survey June 2022” – Be sure you give your honest feedback and help shape the features and changes to FsHub and the LRM over the next few months.

Now is YOUR CHANCE to have your say and give honest (positive or negative) feedback to ensure we’re doing the right thing and concentrating in the right areas…

We take the outcomes of these user surveys very seriously and new features and/or future improvements are worked on based on the collective outcome of your feedback!

Follow this link to complete the Google Forms survey…

— Survey link now removed/Survey has ended —

Many thanks for your time and we look forward to hearing how we can better improve our services and products and provide the best experience to you are our valued users!

May 2022 round-up – Virtual airline improvements, LRM 5.5.9 released and other news.

In my last update blog post (last week), I mentioned some of the updates that had been released in closed beta mainly aimed at virtual airlines which had been in the works and planned for a while.

I’m happy to provide updates today and to announce that the majority of these new features are now immediately available for all virtual airlines and I’m looking forward to sharing screenshots, a quick tutorial of the new airline permissions system and insights with you below but first, let’s cover some of the other general updates that all pilots, regardless of if they manage or fly for a virtual airline can enjoy too….

LRM 5.5.9 released!

This morning I have released LRM 5.5.9 which can be immediately downloaded from the main LRM client website here: https://www.lrmclient.org/

The release notes can also be found on the website too but in summary, this release includes the following bug fixes, features and improvements – nothing major but does address things that have been reported to me over the last couple of weeks:

  • Bugfix: Company Route notes window (if there are optional company routes attached to an imported route plan) now correctly displays the notes window regardless of using the “Auto-activate” route option.
  • UX Improvement: Clicking “Preview plan in FsHub” on Route Planner window now displays the planned route map and waypoint info (instead of going to the Web GPS and requiring the user to click/load the flight plan – reducing user clicks and provides improved route information).
  • Feature: Clicking the red “Disconnected” status message on the main LRM client window now opens a useful webpage with information as to why LRM cannot connect to the simulator and how to resolve it.
  • Performance Improvements: General application performance tweaks on the main thread during the status cycle.

I don’t personally feel that this release warrants a forced update and as such, you can install if you want to use the “latest and greatest” version of LRM otherwise upgrade as you see fit – this version is, however, the version that new users will be downloading and using going forward.

Logbook filter improvements

The logbook filter feature enables pilots (and airlines) to filter and sort their logbooks based on many options, this week I have also added the ability for pilots to filter their logbooks by virtual airline flights too…

Hopefully, a welcomed edition especially if you want to quickly and easily filter and sort your logbook flights for a specific airline(s) too!

The new “Crew Portal” features and advanced management features for virtual airline admins

Some of you may have noticed if you fly for one or more virtual airlines that the “My Airlines” page has been updated and simplified this week and now shows a simple “Crew Portal” link for each airline that you are a member of, as shown here:

Clicking on any of these “Open Crew Portal” links will now load a separate portal (in a new tab) which, it’s important to understand that whilst this may seem strange to show a separate portal, the statistics and links within this portal (as shown below) are within the context of the virtual airline specifically – FsHub obviously provides personal logbook functionality in addition to enabling pilots to fly for one or more virtual airlines and a pilot’s personal profile will show all flights and statistics for all flights flown regardless of the virtual airline or if the user is flying “Personal” flights only.

As per previous “User Surveys” I had several requests to enable features such as Pilot ranks and “Carry over hours” to name but a few, whilst these features are useful, the way in which FsHub was previously designed could have meant that users of these virtual airline features could have put them at an unfair advantage in the global statistics (for those of whom care about those things) and as such, the “Crew Portal” provides a separate area of FsHub that enables such features as pilot ranks and carry over hours to be used whilst not impacting other member VA’s or pilot stats to name a few.

Loading the “Crew Portal” portal for whichever virtual airline you are a member of will open a new dashboard like so:

As you will see immediately, this page is branded with the virtual airline’s logo and the pilot’s airline “ID Badge”, the stats shown on this page are the pilot’s airline-specific statistics – flight hours and the pilot’s rank (as shown on the ID card) take into account any VA managed “Carry over hours”.

The airline portal page also provides quick links to other VA specific pages such as the following:

  • Airline profile – Opens the airline’s public profile page.
  • My flights – Opens the pilot’s flight logbook with the new “Filter by airline” filter automatically applied.
  • NOTAMs – Airline specific “Company messages” will be able to be published by the VA’s management team here (current a work in progress) and will probably be renamed to “CO MSGS” instead.
  • Staff room – This button will become active/clickable when a staff room URL (could be a Discord server URL or forum weblink) is set by a member of the VA management team in the VA General Settings page (simply provides a nice and easy way for new and existing pilots to understand where they can immediately start speaking with other VA members)
  • Achievements – Opens the new custom airline achievements page and will show all achieved and available custom virtual airline achievements.
  • Resign – Probably obvious but this button enables you (the VA member) to resign from the virtual airline essentially removing you as a member of that virtual airline.

A quick word on the new “Pilot ID badge”…

This gained much attention this week as I rolled it out to some of the virtual airlines, originally, I used it as a way of simply showing the pilot’s rank (based on the flight hours/carry over hours for this airline specifically) and simply had used the airlines standard colour scheme to render out the ID badge.

It was pretty obvious however that several of the VA’s loved this feature and so, I quickly expanded on the features and customizability of this badge πŸ™‚

The airline pilot can now “Download” their badge too (using the “Download” link below) which will enable them to upload to forums or other websites and even print out too (if they really wanted to haha)

The airline management team (the CEO and anyone else that the CEO has given specific permissions to) are also able to upload not only a custom background PNG image but also a transparency layer too – enabling airlines to very easily get VERY creative with airline pilot badges and the ability to apply “badge shine” and/or watermarks/embedded chips and fake scratches too! – These features can be configured in the new “Airline Styling” section as shown here:

The “Administration section” buttons (shown above) will only display to VA members when certain permissions and roles have been applied to them by the airline CEO and/or other members that the airline CEO has granted administration access too – we’ll cover this in more detail later in this blog post..

From the “Airline Styling” page, the custom background image, optional overlay image and customisation of the airline badge foreground (text) colour can be updated here:

If this is all too much for you as an airline owner or simply not fussed about this level of customisation, then just leave the defaults – FsHub will automatically render a suitable (but clearly less advanced) badge – an example of which would look as follows:

Example shows using the default airline colour scheme and the uploaded (LRM client) logo in the top right.

The customisation levels are endless though, here are a few other examples of some airline ID badges…

Custom background PNG (with white used for the foreground text without a transparency overlay)
The FireFly air “test” ID badge – uses black foreground text and a custom PNG background.

Applying a transparency overlay too, this example shows how you can really get creative (I’ve uploaded a transparency layer to the above “EasyJet” example badge) πŸ˜€

Whilst the above is a very crude example, the main point to take away here is that the transparency overlay will ensure that any pilot specific information on the badge (such as the pilot’s name, VA rank and photo) is below the transparency layer enabling you to add watermarks, scratches and any other ideas to the card which enhances these badges.

I’ve talked wayyy too much about this particular feature (which was never supposed to be so in-depth haha) so now we should probably move on but I hope you guys find this useful!

Airline management permissions

It’s been requested for a while now that Airline CEO’s should be able to give permission to trusted members within their airline(s) and up until last week, only the airline CEO was able to customise all aspects of the virtual airline.

I’m pleased to announce that I have now implemented a new “Role-based access control (RBAC)” system for virtual airline CEO’s to enable them to grant granular permissions to their most trusted airline members or create specific roles (groups) that can be granted to VA members.

Whilst this may sound complicated at first, I’ll walk you through the steps (with screenshots) and demonstrate how we can grant specific access to users.

The new “Roles and Permissions” system can be accessed from the new Crew Portal, by default only the Airline CEO has access to this section at first, we can access this new section like so:

Access to the “Roles and Permissions” section can be found on the airline’s “Crew Portal”.

Once you have clicked on the above button, the “Roles and Permissions” page will appear like so:

Clicking on the “Manage permissions” enables you to customise the permissions for each role.

The above screenshot shows that I have already added several “roles” – I guess you can think of these as “user groups” too if this terminology is new to you.

From the above screenshot, and for this example, I have created some custom roles, these being:

  • Senior Managers – I will enable this group to have ALL access to the admin functions for this virtual airline – these users will be able to do ANYTHING expect for deleting the airline and remove CEO access to the airline CEO.
  • Dispatchers – I will use this “role” to enable users that are granted this role to add, edit and delete virtual airline company routes only.
  • HR Personnel – I will use this “role” to enable users that are granted this role to approve and reject VA applications.
  • Design and Marketing team – I will use this “role” to enable users that are granted this role to customise the virtual airline-style (upload and set logos and ID badge background etc)

The first thing you should know, is that the above role names and my example use-cases for each of these roles are just for demo purposes, you can name your roles and assign whatever permissions you want for any of them but these are a good basis for our example walkthrough below.

The next thing you should know is that “roles” contain granular permissions, and that multiple roles can be applied to users – these permissions that make up the “role” are applied inclusive of other roles that a user may have, so as an example, lets say that “John” is granted both the “Dispatchers” and “HR Personnel” roles… he would, from our examples above, be able to add, edit and delete virtual airline company routes AND be able to approve and reject VA member applications.

Now that we understand how this works, let’s now take a look at the Roles permissions page (remember that a role has one or more granular permissions):

The “HR Personnel” role enables users with this role to be able to approve and reject pilot applications.

It’s important to note that you must also grant “Enable VA Admin sections” too – without this,the VA member, when logging into the Crew Portal will not see any of the “Administration” feature icons.

Our “Dispatchers” role permissions are set as follows:

By now, as you’ve probably already guessed, our “Marketing and Design Team” which we said should be able to update our Airline profile page (social media links) and upload airline logos and ID badge backgrounds.

Our “Senior managers” role, given that we want them to be able to do pretty much everything, will include all permissions for that role specifically ad demonstrated here:

Once you have created the role(s) you can then assign roles to your VA members by editing their HR information – therefore, back on the “Crew Portal” (Dashboard) page, click on the “Human Resources” link like so:

A full list of all airline members will then be displayed, clicking on the “Edit” button next to the pilot you wish to add roles for:

The Pilot’s HR record will then open and you can then add or remove any number of roles like so:

Remove to “Save changes” once you have added or removed any roles.

The next time the Pilot accesses the crew portal, he or she should then be granted the specific permissions as setup for each role they have been granted.

Whilst this may appear at first sight as being somewhat complex, the power and possibilities of using this system will, at least amongst the larger virtual airlines on the FsHub platform prove to be most useful in providing specific permissions to certain members and alleviating the burden on the virtual airline CEO to have to manage all aspects him or herself.

If you get stuck using this feature or would like to ask for our help or advice you can always contact us and we’ll be sure to help you as quickly as possible!

Airline Pilot Ranks

A big feature that has been requested for a long while now has been the ability for virtual airlines to add custom pilot ranks based on VA flight hours.

This feature is now available for airline CEO’s and management teams to configure and setup on a VA basis, this feature can be accessed from the new Crew Portal’s “Pilot Ranks” section (which will be visible to the airline CEO and any other VA member that the CEO has granted permissions and roles too.

The VA ranks page looks as follows:

It’s pretty simple in terms of how it works, you can add new ranks and set the minimum required number of flight hours (flight hours being, hours flown by the pilot for this VA specifically)

When a pilot lands (which flying for your duty airline – having the airline selected in the LRM client) their flight hours are automatically recalculated and new ranks applied where applicable.

Airline Admins, using the “Human Resources” page can also manually override a pilot’s rank if they wish like so:

Like with almost everything in FsHub, features are fully optional and by default, airlines will not use pilot ranks until they have been setup by the airline management team.

Whilst a VA pilot’s rank is displayed on their ID badge when they login to their VA’s Crew Portal (as shown further up in this blog post), a member of the virtual airline management team can also enable the “Rank” column on the airline’s “Pilots” page.

VA admins can enable this column using the “Airline Settings” icon from the Crew Portal and enabling this option:

Once this option has been enabled, the airline pilot’s listing page will show the additional column like so (hovering over the rank abbreviation will pop up the full rank name too):

The way in which this is implemented in FsHub enables a pilot to fly for different airlines and hold different ranks within these airlines – this is ideal for both Commerical “tubeliner” VA’s as well as military VA’s too – both types of VA clearly using a different type of ranks (eg. Captian, First Officer vs. Wing Commander, Flight Lieutenant. etc) .

Virtual airline (custom) achievements

It’s great to see that virtual airlines are already making use of and starting to publish VA-member exclusive virtual airline achievements too.

Custom virtual airline achievements can now be configured through this icon (found in the new Crew Portal) by the airline CEO or any VA member that has a role assigned to them that enables the required permissions:

Osprey Airways have already published several airline achievements which can now be flown by their VA members exclusively.

If you’ve not yet seen them, public airline profiles (where one or more custom achievements have been setup) now show a button like so:

Clicking this button will show you the airline-specific achievement listing page like so and the available VA-specific achievements that can be earned:

Other airlines such as TwoToneMurphy’s FireFly Air and Coastal International. are also starting to publish their own custom achievements too.

I’m really excited about this as many other virtual airlines or “bush flying clubs” could start to emerge and publish some amazing and very creative bush trips etc and start to attract new airline members simply for the reason of flying these amazing achievements – which, could equally be planned for group flying events using MSFS’s multiplayer servers or our recent JoinFS integration features.

As a member of one of more airlines, all of your VA specific achievements will also be merged and shown on your own pilot’s achievements page too as demonstrated here:

As a quick reminder, and I know that recently FsHub has focused on bringing pilot achievements into the system, we are however still very much supportive of the fact that some pilots will prefer to fly how and where they want – whilst these features have been added to FsHub we do not impose them on to any pilots.

Some pilots may really find the pilot achievements annoying and therefore, as a reminder, any FsHub user can completely disable the achievement system (both in terms of processing achievements for their flights specifically but also the displaying of achievement icons, badges, buttons and pages) by simply enabling the “Enable Distraction Free Mode” from their Settings page as shown here:

Thanks for reading…

Further updates, tweaks and new additions will be making it into the new “Crew Portal” soon but I wanted to give you all a great overview and explain some of the more complex features so that you can understand them sooner rather than later (if you’re super excited to start using the new features right away) πŸ™‚

As always, thanks for taking the time to read this rather large update, there are many other features on the new “Crew Portal” that are still left to be explored and too much for me to write about this weekend (I still need to find some time to spend with my family too)

Like what you’ve seen and read today or have feedback, questions and/or maybe you need help or a further explanation as to how to use some of these new features then please contact us.

If you love what’s happening with FsHub and haven’t already, please consider donating as it really does help.

Thanks again and I hope you have a great weekend!

May 2022 platform updates

G’day pilots!

Just a quick update from me (conscious that my updates are normally super long) with a few updates on new features, achievements, and what I’m currently working on…

New achievements released in celebration of World Update 9!

Firstly, as Microsoft Flight Simulator World Update 9 was released today we have, as we have for other recent World update releases, released a handful of new achievements for you to explore and obtain (if that’s your thing) whilst exploring the improvements to the area, these achievements will see you visit a couple of airports Rome (and this one), Pisa and Florence.

In addition to adding achievements in and around Italy and Malta we’ve also added a few more in other parts of the world too including “The Big Apple” (New York), another achievement in New Zealand, an exploration of Japan and several more.

You can browse all the additional achievements on your pilot’s achievements page.

We’re now in BETA testing for the new VA Portal (features) updates

These new features enable virtual airlines to publish their own custom VA achievements (like the ones above) in addition to adding pilot ranks, carry-over hours and advanced airline management permissions (RBAC) – enabling airline CEO’s to give granular management permissions to other pilots within their virtual airline allowing the CEO to share the load of approving/rejecting pilot applications, managing ranks, roles, custom achievements and much, much more.

BETA testing will continue through this week and once I’m happy that everything is working “as it should” I will slowly roll these new features out to more and more airlines – these features, as with others before are entirely optional and can be used at the discretion of the Airline CEO.

I will post screenshots and go into further details in my next update but suffice to say, this has been the biggest area of improvement the last few weeks and should provide many of the advanced airline features that have been requested in recent months!

For more information on these new features (that have been planned for a while now), please refer back to my earlier blog post where I detail the new features in a little more detail.

New “Advanced pilot stats” page

Whilst still in BETA and many more charts and other useful stats will be coming to this page over the coming weeks, I decided to roll this page out sooner rather than later in order to get feedback and allow pilots’ to take a quick look at some of the already existing stats.

Pilots can get to this page from their main dashboard page but by clicking on this link…

Various other updates and improvements

There are also many other updates and improvements that have been rolled out “in the background” over the last month that many of you may have already noticed but if not, these include:

  • Airline flight filters.
  • Airline page style improvements (we now display the VA logo on all associated airline pages).
  • The ability to one-click copy a flight route from an existing flight report.
  • Major search engine results display improvements – VA logos, achievement badges, user avatars now displayed in results.
  • Achievements now included in the search results.
  • Search results can be filtered by type (eg. airlines, achievements, airports, virtual airlines etc)
  • A pilot’s logbook filter can now filter on achievement type too.
  • Optional 2FA account protection – You can now further secure your FsHub by using a mobile authenticator app (such as Google Authenticator or Microsoft Authenticator) when logging into FsHub – You can enable this from the Settings > Security section.
  • Flight report “flags” – easily see what characteristics a flight report had both through the web-based flight reports and via the REST API.
  • Airport info pages now display “related” achievements – Unless you have disabled these from being displayed in your FsHub account settings (also a new feature ;))
  • …and probably more that have simply slipped my mind!

In addition to the above FsHub improvements, in May and the latter part of April, I released several new versions of the LRM client which fixes a few minor bugs, adds experimental support for helicopters, and a hotkey to maximise and minimise the LRM client window (CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+L), super useful if you’re flying MSFS in full-screen mode and several other improvements and other minor features.

What’s next on the agenda….

Whilst I’m still very much improving virtual airline features that are provided by the new Virtual Airline Portal and fixing up any issues that *may* arise from the current BETA, I will also be adding more improvements to the new “Advanced pilot stats” page, and then be overhauling the virtual airline radar page and bringing it in line with the current style and functionality of the main global radar page (instant load of aircraft, aircraft colours by altitude etc.)

Right, keeping it short and sweet for this update, that’s all from me, I will post a more detailed update with screenshots as soon as the new virtual airline portal (and advance VA features) are fully released later this month!

Stay safe people!

Happy Easter 2022!

From myself (Bobby) and the team (Clorix, thunfischbaum and CIVA008Jim) at FsHub we would like to wish you all a very Happy Easter break!

To mark the occasion, another “Special Event” has been set up today and is now live and will run until next week (the 25th April 2022), this event will see you fly into KMCO (Orlando International, Florida) to take passengers to the famous Walt Disney World resort.

More details of this event and the criteria to obtain the “special event” achievement can be found on the achievement details page.

A few other bits of news and updates to make you aware of over the last week (between doing several flights and enjoying myself in the simulator)… I know I said that I’d be taking a small break before working on the VA improvements mentioned in my last post and whilst, for the most part, that has been true, I have also added the following improvements to the FsHub site:

  • Pilot logbook can now be filtered by Aircraft type
  • Pilot logbook can now be additionally filtered by flights with or without screenshots.
  • Pilot logbooks can be additionally filtered as “Daily challenge” and/or “Pilot achievement” flights only.
  • Major improvements to the main search feature – you can now navigate large result sets (pagination) as well as specifically filter by different types of results (airports only, pilots, airlines and flights)
  • Ability to show/hide expired “special events” on the achievements page.
  • A few other minor tweaks and performance optimisations.
  • The ability to filter the logbook by flight number and tail number (if you use these features in LRM) will be released on Tuesday too – just finishing up a few things on these features specifically.

I would also like to say that it’s been great to see a handful of people already using the new Live Traffic/JoinFS integration and I myself have bumped into a couple of other users randomly – which has been great!

Once again, happy easter from myself and the rest of the FsHub team!