Today, Orbx released a new update for Volanta, its flight tracking application for flight simulators.
The most interesting feature is certainly the ability to search real-world data for information that will help you find inspiration for your flight, including destinations, airline callsigns, registrations, departure and arrival gates, and more.
The X-Plane 12 plugin has been rebuilt from the ground up, while the app will now automatically import your SimBrief flight plan if you wish.
There is more, and you can find it all in the full changelog below, directly from Volanta’s Discord server.
Premium Enhancements
- You can now search real-world schedules for any destination, airline or aircraft type without having to select an origin airport. We also added suggested flight details, like callsign, registration, departure and arrival terminal and gates (where data is available), as well as an arrival time sort option.
Enhancements
- Our X-Plane 12 plugin rebuilt from the ground up is now live and you’ll be prompted to install it on the next launch, which will remove the old version. The new plugin runs independently of the simulator, has a more robust reconnection mechanism and landing rate calculation logic to match the MSFS plugin. Note that the new plugin is only compatible with X-Plane 12.1.1+ and does not support aerocaches. The legacy plugins for X-Plane 11 and 12 remain available to install under Settings → Simulators.
- Volanta will now check and import your SimBrief flight plan when your aircraft first moves if you haven’t already imported it and the plan matches your detected departure airport. This behavior can be turned off in Settings → General under Automation.
- Updated recognized aircraft type list for SimBrief.
- Improved app smoothness and CPU usage by reducing the number of rerenders.
- Added emojis to team and party chats. Type the colon character followed by the emoji name and a dropdown will help you select and autocomplete the emoji.
Fixes
- Fixed weather radar zoom level not supported messages appearing on the map.
- Flights with diversions and tags will no longer flow off the flights list.
- Fixed aircraft locations being set to destination instead of diversion.
- Fixed multiplayer network flight plan imports choosing the wrong airport when the ICAO code is ambiguous.
- Fixed occasional duplicated and conflicting gate numbers appearing on the map.
- Improved search bar response times.
- Fixed team chat message sending issues.
If you’re unfamiliar with Volanta, it’s a flight-tracking application published by Orbx that is free to download and comes with a growing set of features on top of the basic ability to track your flights.
You can also opt to pay a premium subscription monthly or yearly to unlock even more advanced features like Scheduled pause and more.
Volanta is platform-agnostic, so it works with all major flight simulators, including Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, X-Plane, DCS World, Prepar3D, and more.
It’s currently available for PC, iOS, and Android, on top of a handy web browser version, which you can check out without an account to see who’s flying at any given time.
If you’d like to read more flight simulation news, you can find plenty in our latest roundup article from yesterday.
If you want to go further back, we have a handy overview video of the major flight simulation news in the past week. You can watch it below. As usual, leaving a like and a comment and subscribing to our growing YouTube channel is extremely helpful.
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