Improvement

We heard you. Loud and clear.

In our Open Beta survey, 75% of you told us it was difficult or very difficult to turn a profit. The economy was the #1 frustration. Charter limitations, demand distribution, and the feeling that the deck was stacked against smaller operators came up again and again. This patch is our answer to those concerns.

Here's what matters most:

The charter aircraft cap is gone. Fly charters in anything, with a new bonus system that makes small charters way more profitable. The demand engine has been rebuilt from the ground up with fairer global distribution, more economy passengers at airports that matter, and higher economy fares to match. A new Create Charter Mode lets you pick an aircraft and find work for it instead of the other way around. And every new and existing aircraft gets one free cabin reconfiguration to adapt to the new demand landscape. Full details below.

What's Changed

1. Charter is Unshackled

The 20-seat charter cap is gone. Completely removed. You can now charter any aircraft in your fleet, from a Cessna 172 to a 777. No permits, no artificial restrictions.

The economy now naturally balances itself. Charter now uses an exclusivity bonus that rewards small, intimate charters and progressively penalises you for trying to run a 200-seat airliner as a taxi service. Passengers expect exclusivity when they book a charter. Cram 100 people in and your revenue per head drops by ~75%. Keep it under 40 passengers and you get the full bonus with no penalty at all.

Charter bonus per person: Up to £967 per person for a solo charter, scaling down as you add passengers. A 10-passenger charter still earns £716 per person on top of the base fare. The bonus tails off around 30-40 passengers, and above 40 a capacity penalty kicks in.

The takeaway: small charters are now genuinely lucrative. A well-planned 4-passenger business jet charter can earn good money. We hope that this is a giant leap in the right direction for the economy that the survey called for. Smaller operators have a real competitive edge in the charter market now.

But it's not just small aircraft that benefit. Combined with the demand changes below (more economy passengers, higher economy fares), chartering economy passengers in larger aircraft is now a genuinely viable strategy. There's a ton of demand out there and the charter bonus still applies up to 40 passengers with no penalty. The cap removal plus the new bonus structure means you have options that simply didn't exist before. For the full breakdown of how charter bonuses and the exclusivity multiplier work, check out the Charter Jobs documentation.

2. Demand Has Been Rebuilt From the Ground Up

We've overhauled how the demand engine generates and distributes passengers across the world. The old system had a massive skew toward the USA and Brazil (where ~60% of all airports are), with places like Spain and China getting disproportionately little traffic. The new system accounts for:

• Airport density: Areas with hundreds of tiny airfields in a small radius (New York, Sao Paulo) no longer hog a disproportionate share of global demand
• Country airport count: Countries with fewer airports are no longer punished for it
• Class-specific geo-scoring: Every airport now has separate economy, business, and first class scores that influence where passengers spawn and where they want to go

What this means in practice:

• Economy passengers cluster around larger airports. No more random economy demand spawning at a grass strip in the middle of nowhere. If you're running economy routes, focus on the airports people actually fly through.
• First and business class are more spread out. Premium passengers travel to more varied destinations, rewarding diverse route networks.
• Economy passengers pay more. With the demand ratio shifting toward economy, we've increased economy fares proportionally so that economy routes remain profitable. Any existing collaborative demand has also had prices scaled up.
• Demand fills fast. The demand engine can now generate the full 8 million passenger groups in approximately 3 hours instead of taking over a week. After this patch, demand has been fully reset and will populate quickly.

Behind the Scenes: The Demand-o-Matic

Distributing demand fairly across 36,000+ airports is a serious big data problem, and getting it right required purpose-built tooling. RCTO has developed an internal tool (that we affectionately refer to as the Demand-o-Matic) that powers the new geo-scoring system behind this update.

The tool combines UN travel data, World Bank GDP figures, and a database of over 40,000 real-world entities (think Disneyland Paris, the Bank of England, the Statue of Liberty) to build a model of where passengers actually want to go and why. Each entity contributes a weighted pull on nearby airports, giving demand a grounding in real-world travel motivation rather than random distribution.

Passenger class scoring is split by travel purpose. Economy passengers are weighted more heavily toward tourism entities, while business class passengers lean toward commercial and financial centres. First class demand is deliberately spread thinner and into less obvious locations, making premium passengers harder to gather but more rewarding when you do.

One of the biggest problems the tool solves is clustering. In the old system, every airport effectively acted as a lottery ticket for demand. The more airports a country or region had, the more demand it won. The USA holds roughly 60% of all airports in the game, so areas like New York and Sao Paulo were hoovering up a disproportionate share of global traffic. Meanwhile, countries like Spain, which has relatively few airports for its size, were being unfairly underserved. The Demand-o-Matic runs geospatial calculations to counteract this, so demand distribution is based on where people actually travel rather than where airports happen to be densely packed.

This tool is what makes it possible to keep iterating on demand balance going forward. The scores in this patch are the result of months of testing and adjustment, but the tooling is now in place to make further refinements as we gather feedback.

3. Create Charter Mode (Premium Core)

A massive quality-of-life upgrade for charter companies. Create Charter Mode flips the Dispatch Plan workflow on its head. Instead of browsing demand and hoping something fits your aircraft, you pick your aircraft first and the system shows you what it can fly.

The old way: Browse the demand map, find interesting passengers, then figure out which aircraft can fly them.

The new way: Pick your aircraft first. The system shows you every demand group it can reach, filtered to its range and capacity.

Key features:

• Interactive seat map: Watch passengers fill your cabin in real time as you select demand groups. Click any filled seat to remove that group.
• Filter Sync: Toggle this on and the demand list automatically updates as you fill seats. Select 12 of 19 seats? The list now only shows groups of 7 or fewer. No more accidentally overfilling.
• Map integration: Ctrl/Cmd-click demand lines on the map to add or remove groups directly.
• Release & Accept: One-click shortcut that publishes the job and immediately assigns it to you as the pilot. No need to visit the marketplace.
• Switch aircraft mid-flow: Realise a different aircraft would be better? Swap it out without losing your selected passengers.
• Ferry companion: Each aircraft row has a split button with both Charter and Ferry actions. Reposition to a better airport first, then charter from there.

Create Charter Mode is available from the Operations Cockpit > Aircraft lens. It complements the existing demand-first workflow. Use whichever fits what you're doing.

You can read more about Create Charter Mode in the documentation.

4. Free Seat Reconfiguration

Every aircraft now gets one free cabin reconfiguration, applied instantly with no downtime. This new feature can be accessed from the Aircraft Layout tab of your Aircraft dialog in the Operations Cockpit.

With the demand model shifting toward more economy passengers, your current cabin layouts may not be optimal. This free reconfiguration lets you adapt without penalty. Use it to match the new demand reality. You'll likely want more economy seats on most aircraft going forward.

Financial Previews

You can now see estimated and actual financials for all jobs and routes, including fuel costs, landing fees, ATC charges, customs fees, and revenue. Available both during charter creation and after the fact.

• During charter creation: See revenue estimates and cost breakdowns as you build your dispatch plan, so you know whether a charter is profitable before you commit.
• After completion: Review what you actually earned vs. what it cost. Fuel burn is calculated from your real flight history average for that aircraft type.
• Ferry jobs too: Fuel and landing fee estimates for repositioning flights, so you can factor ferry costs into your charter planning.
• Route financials: View estimated revenue based on demand minimums, with a passenger count parameter to model different load factors.

No more flying blind on whether a job is worth taking.

Other Improvements

• Release & Accept for jobs: Jobs and dispatch plans can now be released and accepted in a single action. No more releasing to the marketplace and then racing to accept your own job.
• Restyled Aircraft rows: The Aircraft lens in the Operations Cockpit has been redesigned with split action buttons, letting you launch Create Charter Mode or create ferry flights directly from the dock without extra navigation.
• Aircraft location flags: Aircraft rows now display the flag of the country where the aircraft is currently located, making it easy to scan your fleet's global positioning at a glance.
• Demand date filter: Filter demand by the date it was generated, useful for spotting fresh demand.
• Demand badge on jobs: The Job dialog now shows a badge with seat requirements by cabin class (Economy/Business/First), so you can see at a glance what a job needs.
• Massively faster route demand loading: Route demand queries have been optimised from ~8 seconds down to ~266ms (a 30x speedup). The demand map and route demand refresh should feel dramatically snappier, especially on servers with full 8M-row demand tables.
• Map reliability fixes: Fixed race conditions in the deck.gl map layers that could cause route lines to not update properly when dragging or switching views.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed unfair last-leg payment distribution. A significant bug where the final leg of a multi-leg journey was receiving a disproportionately large share of the total payment. All legs now receive their fair proportional share based on distance contribution. Also corrected the calculation that determines how passenger budgets are split across legs, ensuring accurate pricing throughout multi-leg journeys.
• Fixed charter job configuration bugs. Resolved multiple issues in dispatch plan and job configuration that could cause incorrect leg assignments, seat allocation errors, and routing problems.
• Fixed orphaned jobs after demand removal. Removing demand from a dispatch plan now correctly cleans up orphaned job legs and recalculates seat requirements, preventing ghost jobs from lingering.

A Note on Testing

These changes have been through extensive internal testing over the past few weeks. We've been hammering the new demand engine and the charter economics on staging for a while now. That said, this is a big patch touching a lot of interconnected systems. If anything doesn't look right, feels off, or the numbers seem wrong, please reach out. We'd much rather hear about it than have you quietly frustrated. Your feedback is what got us here, and it's what'll keep us improving.

What's Next

Next up: cargo. It was the #1 most-requested feature in the survey and it's on the roadmap. More to come on that soon.

Estimated pay for charter hire

Charter hire demand no longer shows a misleading per-row payout of £0.00. Instead, you get an estimated pay shown at the top based on your rank and the expected flight time for the route. The estimate is calculated from the route distance (multipled by 1.2) and the aircraft’s cruise speed.

A new help tooltip explains the calculation and the realism factor used to account for climb, descent, and non-perfect routing.

Other improvements

• Relocation for hireable aircraft is now based on your rank’s aircraft constraint radius (one consistent rule), instead of separate aircraft-level relocation settings.
  
• Fixed an issue where switching between aircraft could leave old demand filters behind, causing incorrect or missing demand results.
  

Aircraft Database Update

• Added Gulfstream G550 GV-SP
• Added Aerospatiale SA342 Gazelle
• Added Airbus A320 neo ACJ
• Added Boeing 737 BBJ2
• Added Boeing 307 Stratoliner
• Added Socata TBM850
• Added Airbus Helicopters/Eurocopter H160/X4
• Added Maule M-7 235
• Added Piper PA-46 M500
• Added Learjet 35A
• Added Tecnam P2012 Traveller
• Added Van's RV-10
• Added Airbus Helicopters/Eurocopter H130/EC130 B4
• Added Cessna 408 Sky Courier
• Added Airbus A340 300
• Added Cessna CJ3
• Added Lancair Evolution
• Added Piper PA-23 Aztec
• Added Cessna 404 Titan
• Added Pilatus PC-24
• Added Beechcraft Starship
• Added NAMC YS-11A 200
• Added Boeing 737 Max 8
• Added GippsAero GA8 Airvan
• Added Boeing 747 SP
• Added Airbus A340 200
• Updated seats on Lockheed L-1011 from 246 to 315
• Updated seats on Airbus A319 from 156 to 160
• Updated seats on Airbus A310 from 230 to 275
• Updated seats on Embraer Legacy 650 from 13 to 19
• Updated seats on Pilatus PC-12 from 10 to 9 and increased MTOW from 4,500kg to 4,740kg
• Updated seats on Airbus A321 neo from 230 to 244 and renamed to A321neo LR
• Updated OEW for Airbus A321XLR from 49,000kg to 46,600kg

Persistent Rank Approval

You no longer need to re-apply every time you return to a rank you’ve already been cleared for.

When a company approves you for a rank (whether manually by a manager or automatically through progression or eligibility) that approval is now remembered. If you later switch away and decide to come back, you can move straight into the rank without waiting for approval again.

In the Pilot Portal, ranks you’ve previously been approved for are clearly marked as Pre-Approved. These ranks let you switch instantly, even if they would normally require an application.

Other Improvements

• NOTAM messages now show a live character counter, so you always know how close you are to the 255-character limit
• Fixed arrow key navigation being intercepted while typing in company description and message fields

Batch Release for Collaborative Demand

Managing the release of collaborative demand across multiple airports is now significantly faster and more controlled.

You can select multiple airports directly in the Collaboration Dashboard and release demand for all of them in one action. A new batch selection bar appears as soon as you start selecting rows, clearly showing how many airports are selected and which actions are available.

Two batch actions are available when you have the appropriate company privileges:

• Release All: Releases all collaborative demand for the selected airports.
• Release Urgent: Releases only demand that has exceeded the urgent threshold, leaving newer demand untouched.

Company Logos and User Avatars in Selectors

Company and user selection fields are now more visual and easier to scan. Wherever you choose a company or user (such as transferring funds, deleting a company, or selecting a recipient) logos and avatars are displayed alongside names instead of generic icons.

This makes it quicker to identify the right company or person at a glance, especially when working with long lists or similar names.

Aircraft Market Listing Enhancements

Used aircraft listings are now clearer and more informative. Broker sales and third-party sellers are highlighted directly on the aircraft image with new badges, making it obvious who is selling the aircraft.

Smarter Hangar Storage for Company-Owned Buildings

A bug with aircraft storage logic has been fixed to better reflect ownership. Previously, if you owned a hangar but had set it to public use for a fee, your own aircraft would not automatically use it after slot grace periods end.

Now, if you own a hangar, your aircraft will always automatically use it for storage, even if that hangar is set to public access with a price. You never pay storage fees to yourself, and aircraft will no longer be pushed into less suitable public storage because of pricing settings.

Other improvements

• Fixed tables scrolling slightly within tables
• Minor visual polish across aircraft listings and dashboards

When you select an aircraft for hire in the marketplace, the list of available jobs (demand) is now automatically filtered to only show contracts that are within a realistic operating range for that specific aircraft.

Previously, you might have selected a short-range aircraft only to be presented with job opportunities hundreds or thousands of nautical miles away, leading to jobs you couldn't actually complete. Now, the system automatically applies a distance filter to the job list. This filter is calculated to be 120% of the aircraft's base range, giving you a small buffer while ensuring the available jobs are sensible. If the aircraft owner has specified a manual range filter this will be applied instead of the default range filter.

Additionally, we've made it easier to see the passenger capacity of the aircraft you're about to hire. When browsing the demand for an aircraft you will now see a clear badge showing the number of First, Business, and Economy seats available on the aircraft right next to its name.

Other improvements

• Removed pagination from the aircraft for hire list to allow for quicker and more comprehensive browsing of all available aircraft without needing to click through pages. All aircraft are now shown by default.
• We've removed the default, non-functional marker that used to appear alongside the aircraft icon when you clicked to place a new aircraft in the world.
• The map used in the aircraft-for-hire marketplace no longer attempts to automatically zoom in every time you update the results or click the Search this area button.

We're replacing the former "Create Job" feature in your Passenger Services buildings with a more flexible and robust Company Collaboration system. This change simplifies how you share demand with partners, prevents issues related to automatically created, unoptimised micro-jobs and removes the requirement for partners to grant you Create Dispatch Plans privileges in your company.

Going forward, your Passenger Services building will no longer automatically create and dispatch jobs for you or your partners. Instead, it will assign the final leg's demand as a collaborative opportunity directly to the designated company.

When configuring a destination for your Passenger Services, select Company Collaboration and choose an active member of your partnership from the dropdown list. This demand will only be visible to the specified partner company and will appear as collaborative demand in their Demand lens. This means that they can combine it with other demand, route it efficiently, and dispatch full aircraft. This was previously possible on when the Internal Collaboration option was selected, which made the demand available to all members of the partnership.

Additionally, to prevent confusion and accidental transfers, any demand assigned via Company Collaboration is now "pinned" to the target company, meaning it won't accidentally be bundled into a partnership-wide asset transfer.

Other Improvements

• Data Migration: All existing Passenger Services configurations that used the old Create Job action have been automatically migrated to the new Company Collaboration action, and the company is now referenced by its permanent ID (UUID) instead of the ICAO code.
• Bug Fix: Addressed a critical bug that prevented you from accepting route jobs when a previous Passenger Services configuration was linked to an old, non-existent ICAO code.

You now have more flexibility when making large financial transfers from companies to users or other companies, such as for major deals with partners.

The maximum amount of money your company can transfer is now calculated using a new formula, which is designed to allow larger transfers for financially healthy companies while preventing exploitation of the company loan system.

Previously, your transfer limit was capped at your monthly profit. Now, the limit is the highest of the following two amounts:

1. Your current Bank Balance minus your Outstanding Loans.
2. Your Monthly Profit.

This means if you have a high bank balance and low debt, you can transfer more than your monthly profit. Conversely, if you have a high level of outstanding loans, the system defaults to your monthly profit limit, ensuring a safe limit is maintained.

This change opens up new avenues for partnership negotiation and collaboration, giving you better financial control without compromising the system's integrity.

Other improvements

• Improved error messages during money transfers to clearly indicate whether the balance-based or profit-based limit is being applied.

We've been listening to your feedback regarding the current implementation of the contracts system, particularly how the three-contract limit can too easily lock out non-premium users early in their FSCharter career. We hear you, and we agree. The current system isn't quite working as we had envisaged.

We are planning an improved, more accessible system that will benefit both pilots and companies. However, in the meantime, we have removed the three-contract limit for non-premium users. You can now apply to and hold as many active contracts as you need, giving you the flexibility to find suitable work without the fear of getting stuck with contracts from inactive companies or for undesirable routes.

Hopefully this change (coupled with the recent removal of withdrawal fees) makes the contract system more fit-for purpose as we work out a better long-term solution.

Aircraft Price Reductions

We have lowered the purchase price for all aircraft by 10% to better align to the current economy. To ensure fairness for those who have recently invested in their fleet, we have processed automatic refunds. If you own an aircraft affected by this price adjustment, the difference between your original purchase price and the new market value has been credited back to your company bank account.

Extended Loan Terms

To support faster fleet progression and better cash flow management, we have doubled the maximum repayment period for loans. You can now secure loans with terms of up to 120 cycles (previously capped at 60). Spreading payments over a longer period reduces your recurring cycle costs, allowing you to invest in larger, more capable aircraft earlier in your career.

Smarter Demand for Hireable Aircraft

Finding the right job for a rented aircraft just got easier. When browsing demand for a hireable aircraft, the marketplace now automatically filters out passenger groups that won't fit. The system now checks the aircraft's capacity against the available groups, ensuring you only see jobs you can actually fly.

Recurring Payments & Agreement Improvements

We have improved the company finance page to give you better visibility and control of recurring payments. You can now view the total of all recurring payments and the ability to view a detailed breakdown of your recurring expenses, categorised by type.

Additionally, the Recurring Payments tab now clearly displays the specific name of the agreement that it relates to. We have also added the ability to cancel agreements directly from the Agreements page within the Operations Cockpit, saving you unnecessary navigation steps.

Other Changes

• You can now generate and download CSV reports of all financial activity within a partnership.
• We have removed the fee for withdrawing a pending contract application. You can now change your mind and withdraw an application without financial penalty.
• Companies that are already members of an active partnership can no longer be invited to join a new one.
• Fixed an issue where "Passenger Facility Fees" (Departure) were not being refunded if a job was reset after boarding.
• Corrected the format for Hungarian aircraft tail numbers to adhere to the real-world 3-letter suffix standard (e.g., HA-ABC).
• When hovering over demand on the map, you will now see a specific breakdown of passenger classes (First, Business, Economy).
• Fixed the order of passenger class labels in the Job Overview dialog to be consistent.
• The "Create New Route" screen now displays the exact nautical mile distance between the selected airports.
• Added "Toggle All" controls to the Role Editor, allowing you to quickly check or uncheck entire groups of privileges and notifications.
• The Rank Pay editor now calculates and displays an "Effective Hourly Rate" based on the total salary and contract hours to help you set competitive wages.
• Fixed a bug where available aircraft for specific Ranks did not update immediately after modifying the Rank's constraints.
• Notifications sent when a job is reset now include detailed context, including the aircraft tail number, route, job number, and airports involved.
• Added specific filters to the job board to view only Charter jobs or Route jobs.
• Fixed an issue where all logbook entries were incorrectly labeled as charter flights regardless of their actual type.
• Fixed a bug preventing the deletion of a Rank if it had associated contracts that were already completed.
• Improved the aircraft database search; you can now search across the platform by tail number, type, ICAO code, manufacturer, model, or variant.
• Fixed the marketplace contract filter to correctly hide old, expired contracts.
• The aircraft selector in the Route Preview dialog now displays the airport where each aircraft is currently located.
• You will now see the estimated time required for jobs like "Reconfigure Seats" before confirming the work order.
• Added a filter to the job marketplace to view jobs belonging to a specific partnership.
• Fixed overlapping scrollbars on the Aircraft Database page.
• The flight map now display a "Fuel Consumed" badge for completed flights.

Route demand no longer includes corporate or executive demand that is designed for charter/bizjet usage.

## Other Changes

- The Can Traverse Routes filter now automatically excludes these incompatible demand types, preventing you from picking up passengers who would not be able to get to their destination via routes.

Maps have been upgraded to include specific gate numbers, visible when you zoom in on the terminal area. This detail appears automatically at higher zoom levels, keeping the view clean when you are looking at the broader airport layout.

A More Balanced Demand Market

We've updated the background tool that manages the global demand market. This tool already kept the total number of available demand in check, but it now also enforces a new, balanced ratio between economy, business, and first-class demand.

This change prevents any single passenger class from oversaturating the market. You should now find a more consistent and varied mix of opportunities across all classes.

You may find that demand numbers dip slightly as the tool rebuilds demand to the correct proportions.

A Clearer Live Flight Map

We've improved the Live Flight Map to give you a truer sense of air traffic, especially in busy airspace.

Previously, if an aircraft's label couldn't be shown without clashing with another, its aircraft icon would also be hidden. This meant aircraft would seem to 'pop in' as you zoomed.

Now, aircraft icons will always be displayed, even if they overlap. The map will still intelligently hide labels to prevent them from clashing and keep the view readable, but you will now see all aircraft icons in the area, giving you a much more accurate picture of live operations.

Other improvements

• Fixed a critical bug that could cause actions (like signing an agreement) to fail part-way through. This ensures that actions now either complete fully or fail safely, preventing issues like agreements being created without a corresponding payment.
• Corrected the internal mapping for several V1 aircraft purchase prices, fixing a bug where some aircraft could not be sold.
• Fixed a UI glitch issue on the subscription pricing page.
• Updated an error message for clarity when attempting to view finances without permission.