vAMSYS 5.4.9

What's new

• Dashboard banners

  A new Banners block for the dashboard builder. Staff upload images (with light and dark variants), optionally link each one to an external URL or a custom page, order them, and schedule when they're active. Pilots see them as an auto-scrolling carousel on the dashboard, replacing the fake-event workaround many Virtual Airlines used for promotional banners. Managed under Orwell's Pages cluster.

• Badge statistics

  The pilot profile now shows a badge summary: badges earned, total available and completion percentage. Badges tied to past events are excluded from the total since they can no longer be earned, and staff-awarded badges are included with a note. The Community Leaderboard also gains an all-time badges ranking, with the same privacy redaction as the other rankings.

• Activities leaderboard

  The Community Leaderboard gains an activities ranking with a per-type selector covering Events, Slotted Events, Focus Airports, Tours, Rosters and Curated Rosters, ranked by completions all-time.

• Activity completion statistics on the pilot profile

  The profile's statistics area now shows how many activities of each type a pilot has completed, using your airline's own naming for community activities. Completions only, not registrations.

• Disable PA and cabin announcements per fleet

  Fleet settings' ACARS Sounds tab gains a "Disable PA / Cabin Announcements" toggle. When enabled (for business jets, for example), no announcement sounds play for that fleet's flights, even when the airline has default sounds configured. No Pegasus update needed, and no more 10-second-silence-file workarounds.

• PIREP review shows the network callsigns actually flown

  The flight details panel now lists every network connection recorded during the flight window, with network, callsign and times, marks callsigns that differ from the booked one, and shows Offline when the pilot wasn't connected.

• An opt-in review rule for mismatched online callsigns

  A new Network Connectivity category in the autoreject rules lets you hold PIREPs for review when a pilot flew online under a callsign that doesn't match the booking for a configurable share of the flight. Prefix matching, an allowlist for acceptable alternate prefixes, and a minimum connected time so short or spotty sessions never trigger it. Flying offline never triggers the rule, and it's off by default for every Virtual Airline.

• Operations API: pilot ban and removal reasons

  GET /pilots and GET /pilots/{id} now include airline_ban_reason, platform_ban_reason and removal_reason, mirroring what airline staff already see in the back office. The existing filter[trashed] filter includes removed pilots, and webhook payloads that embed the pilot object carry the new fields. Non-breaking.

• Operations API: badge bonus points

  Badges created or updated via the API can now configure the per-PIREP bonus that back-office badges could always set: bonus_points, bonus_points_as_percentage and bonus_name, with validation mirroring the back office. Non-breaking.

What's improved

• The "Callsign may be in use" warning recognises your own connection

  If the connection or prefile holding the callsign belongs to your own linked VATSIM, IVAO, POSCON or APOC ID, the warning no longer fires. Genuine third-party collisions still warn.

• The Ready-to-Dispatch card shows your selected alternates

  The SimBrief row now lists the chosen alternate airports (or "No alternate selected"), live as they change, with a link that jumps straight to the alternate controls.

• The Alternate Finder follows your fleet's Alternate Management settings

  The search radius now honours the fleet's configured radius instead of a hidden cap, and the minimum runway and ceiling filters default from the fleet's SimBrief alternate settings, matching exactly what the OFP request uses. A "Follow fleet alternate settings" toggle (on by default) presets these; turning it off restores full manual control. A new bad-weather filter hides candidates currently reporting thunderstorms, fog, freezing rain or heavy rain, based on current METAR.

• The Alternate Finder ranks airports your airline serves first

  Candidates now order by your preferred alternates, then suitable alternates, then company airports and hubs, then everything else, with weather and distance breaking ties. Hubs and company airports get their own icons. Fixed alternates set on the arrival airport now pre-fill the finder's slots with a Fixed badge, so pilots can see what the airline locked in before choosing to replace it.

• The Orwell Activities table can now sort by its Registrations and Completions columns

What's fixed

• Account merges no longer clear platform bans. Merging a banned account into another account previously left the surviving account completely clean. The surviving account now inherits the platform ban automatically, and ACARS connections now properly enforce platform bans as well.

• The touchdown point on PIREP review is now accurate, and all its numbers agree. The "TD Point" figure could disagree with the drawn touchdown dot by 700 to 1,000ft, because the two came from different position-report samples. Both now derive from a single calculation, the percentage and remaining-distance figures use the correct runway lengths, and multi-touchdown PIREPs honour the selected touchdown. Because the display now recomputes live from position reports, historical PIREPs render correctly too, with no backfill needed.

• Rich-text editing on macOS no longer traps the cursor. Editing an airport briefing, email, badge or any other rich-text field on a Mac could trap the cursor so firmly that clicking Save did nothing. This turned out to be several separate problems stacked on top of each other, including a vendor bug triggered by documents containing numbered lists; each has been fixed, and as a belt-and-braces measure the editor now releases focus automatically the moment a save button is clicked.

• Accepting a transfer, pilot-invite or claim PIREP no longer errors. These PIREP types have no scheduled route by design, and accepting one crashed part-way through: the PIREP was marked accepted, but the statistics, activity and badge follow-ups silently never ran, and in a bulk accept the crash aborted the rest of the batch.

• Ground flap events now work for addons that don't name the flap position. Some addons log "Flaps set to position 0" with no detent name, and the parser dropped those lines entirely, so the ground-flaps scorers never fired on those fleets. These lines now parse correctly, and scorers that judge detent names skip events without one rather than misjudging them. See the note for Virtual Airline staff below.

• PIREPs flown on an "Ignored" livery are now held for review, as the documentation has always described. Ignored liveries were being treated the same as Accepted ones, so those PIREPs completed automatically with no review. They now hold PIREPs like any not-yet-reviewed livery, while still staying out of the pending-livery triage queue. See the note for Virtual Airline staff below.

• Tour and roster legs no longer get permanently stuck when a claim's hand-entered times slightly overlap the next leg. A claim whose entered landing time overlapped the next leg's departure by even a minute blocked that leg, and every leg after it, from crediting, with no way to override it. Sequential checks involving a claim now tolerate small overlaps as entry noise, while ACARS-to-ACARS comparisons stay strict. Affected logbooks self-correct the next time a relevant PIREP is filed or reprocessed.

• The departure-analysis and flight-analysis panels in Orwell printing raw JavaScript as visible text on the page

• Chart tooltips on those panels showing altitude and groundspeed readings from the wrong point on the flight path

• Dispatching a tour or roster leg failing with an error when the leg's stored airport data had drifted from its linked route

• Event, slot and roster page booking links being rejected for every route except the last one in the list

• The billing consent page crashing instead of loading, blocking affected owners from reaching billing

• The departure time field rejecting correctly typed times after losing its typing mask

• Payload changes made with the number spinner buttons not updating the live dispatch figures

• Payload edits freezing the Ready-to-Dispatch card's Payload, Cargo and ZFW readouts until a full page reload

• The Orwell dashboard and beta-site footer continuing to advertise a beta version, with a dead changelog link, after the beta cycle had ended

• Deleting an airline staff member leaving their airport-manager assignments behind; the existing backlog has been cleaned up

• Owners of closed Virtual Airlines being wrongly blocked from deleting their vAMSYS accounts

• A user being able to end up with two active pilot accounts at one airline; existing duplicates have been merged

• Pegasus reporting no booking for pilots affected by those duplicate records