vAMSYS 5.4.6
What's new
Slotted Events — departure-slot booking for events (launching in beta)
A new activity type for running structured flyouts and delivery events. Instead of every pilot trying to depart at once, you publish a grid of departure times organised into Waves, and each pilot reserves a slot — reserving is their event registration, so there's no separate sign-up step. Waves can unlock progressively (immediately, once the previous wave fills, or at a set time), and slots are tracked separately per network, so the same 09:00 departure can be held by one pilot on VATSIM and another on IVAO. On the day, the pilot dispatches from the event page straight into the normal Dispatch flow, with their reserved callsign and network locked in. Set it all up from a new Slotted Events tab in Orwell. We're launching this in beta capacity — expect us to be watching closely and ironing out rough edges quickly in the days after release.
Fresh activity window for returning pilots
When a pilot leaves and rejoins your Virtual Airline, you can now give them a fresh initial-activity window — exactly as if they were a new joiner — without changing their join date, stats, history or pilot number. This fixes the long-standing trap where a rejoining pilot would land back on the roster already past their activity window and get removed again the next night, with no way to tell why. When the window is reset, both the removal deadline and the activity reminder re-arm from the day the pilot returns. This applies to self-service rejoins and to staff restores alike. The new controls:
Reset Initial Activity Window on Rejoin — a toggle in Settings → Registration Settings (under your Rejoining options). Off by default, and only shown when Rejoining is enabled.
Returning Pilot Email — alongside it, choose what a returning pilot is emailed: Use the new-pilot welcome email (your existing one), or Use a separate returning-pilot email.
Returning-pilot email template — if you pick the separate option, write its own subject and content under Settings → Registration Emails. Leave it blank and no email is sent.
Restore action options — restoring a removed pilot in Orwell now offers a matching Reset initial activity window toggle (defaulting to your airline setting) and a Notify pilot by email toggle. Staff restores were previously silent, so this is the first time a restore can tell the pilot they're back.
A quick connection test
Pilots will have seen a short invite on their dashboard to run a one-minute connection test from the browser. This is a temporary measurement exercise to help us understand connection quality around the world .
What's improved
One active booking per route
You can now only hold one active booking for a given route at a time. Trying to book a route you've already got open is blocked. We also closed a related case where switching Virtual Airline mid-dispatch could create a booking under the wrong airline.
No more duplicate PIREPs or claims
Double-submitting a flight report, or a tracker retrying after a dropped connection, could previously file the same flight twice or claim the same booking twice. Filing and claiming are now race-safe: a booking can only ever hold one active PIREP, and a retry returns a clear "already filed" or "already claimed" response instead of quietly creating a duplicate.
Clearer PIREP review with Submit & Decide
Staff landing-rate decisions are now made on a single Submit & Decide panel (Reprocess, Accept, Reject or Invalidate). A decision made while a PIREP is still reprocessing is now applied safely once reprocessing finishes, instead of clashing with it — closing a race that could leave a PIREP in an inconsistent state. PIREPs that staff have already actioned no longer get re-flagged for review.
Alternate Finder no longer hides airports with old or missing weather
Previously, any candidate airport whose weather was more than a few hours old — or that had no recent report at all — was silently dropped from the Alternate Finder, so viable diversion airports simply didn't appear. The finder now always lists the airport and shows its last known weather with a clear label ("Stale" with an age, or "No recent weather"), leaving the judgement to you. Relatedly, the booking page no longer blanks out a METAR once it's a couple of hours old — it shows the latest available observation.
Global weather data flowing again
Fixed the upstream feeds that meant METAR and TAF data had stopped updating for many airports. Weather across the platform is being populated reliably again.
Operations API: older integrations no longer rejected
Fixed a case where integrations built on older API clients could be unexpectedly rejected when their access token refreshed, despite nothing changing on their end.
Faster across the board
The leaderboard year selector now loads roughly 250× faster, and a round of query work has sped up route creation, event filters, auto-reject rule editing, the hubs API, activity editing, the book-a-flight map and the flight generator. Behind the scenes we also rebuilt how flight position data is stored, reclaiming hundreds of gigabytes while keeping the live map fast as flight history keeps growing.
Saved OFP PDFs now kept for 90 days
Downloadable OFP PDFs are now removed 90 days after a flight. Your flight history and PIREP details are kept in full — only the saved PDF for older flights is no longer available to re-download.
What's fixed
Flights with an incorrectly formatted alternate airport could silently fail to generate an OFP, leaving you with no flight plan and no error — alternates are now cleaned and validated so SimBrief planning works reliably
The connected-apps page (Your Apps) erroring for some users
Saving a route occasionally crashing, and switching Virtual Airline in another tab leaving you editing under the wrong airline
A malformed pagination cursor on Operations API list endpoints returning a server error instead of a clear validation message
Invalid filter values on the Operations API PIREPs endpoint returning a server error instead of a clear validation message
⚠️ Operations API breaking change
To comply with Planespotters' terms, aircraft image fields on the live flight-map endpoint now return null when the photo is sourced from Planespotters. If your integration reads aircraft photos from this endpoint, expect null values for Planespotters-sourced images — airline-uploaded images are unaffected. The Phoenix flight map and Pegasus continue to show these photos with attribution, so pilots see no change.
