Today, Orbx released a new update for its flight tracker for flight simulators, Volanta, and there are plenty of interesting features on the menu.
This update boosts the integration with Navigraph and SimBrief, on top of Flightradar24.
You’ll get AMDB layers for airports, real-life air traffic near your position, and the ability to compare real flights, and more
Below you can read the patch notes, directly from Volanta’s Discord.
nhancements for Navigraph Unlimited subscribers
- Added AMDB airport layers. When zooming into (supported) airports, our basic airport maps will now be replaced by Navigraph’s AMDB layers. You can turn off AMDB layers in satellite mode if you want to see the original markings on the right-hand side map settings panel.
- Added Flightradar24 flights in a 150 km radius around your flight, letting you see real-world live traffic, for example to check which runways are live at your departure airport. The flights will only show up on the map when you’re tracking a flight and can be turned off from the right-hand side map settings panel.
- Added the ability to compare your flight to a Flightradar24 flight in real-time. After starting your flight in Volanta, open the flight settings menu on the top right of the flight card and click “Add live comparison”, which lets you select a flight from around you. This aircraft will be highlighted on the map and on the Statistics tab on your active flight, you’ll be able to track its current speed, altitude and distance from you, as well as center it on the map and toggle the visibility of its flight path.
Enhancements for everyone
- We integrated the SimBrief v2 API, which means you will now need to sign in with Navigraph in Settings → Connections to dispatch flights as opposed to using your SimBrief username. The dispatch with SimBrief option now runs in the background and will no longer show a pop up window. Manual dispatch (”using SimBrief.com”) is unchanged.
- Added Simbrief’s performance calculator, which can be used for any flight with a SimBrief flight plan included with the button on the bottom of your flight card, between Briefing and Prefile. By default, the calculator takes all information from your flight plan and current weather and calculates the first result automatically. Of course, you can adjust data to your actual ZFW or in-sim weather parameters and recalculate results. SimBrief compatible aircraft and their performance characteristics are now also automatically updated.
- Added new schedule filters:
- Origin and destination countries (allowing multiple to be chosen at the same time). You can now also choose multiple origin or destination airports.
- Hourly departure time range filter to schedules, where you can select multiple continuous or non-continuous periods in which the flight should depart.
- Days of week filter to schedules, so you can limit results to specific days (for example weekdays only).
- Added automatic aircraft metadata retrieval. Creating a new aircraft now requires you to enter the registration first, which does a search in the aircraft database and automatically fills the rest of the details (airline, aircraft group, exact model, mode s transponder code). For existing aircraft, you can request metadata to be backfilled from the top right menu on the individual aircraft pages. Volanta will also now use this data when creating aircraft automatically.
- Added fields for aircraft models (e.g. A320-214) and mode s transponder codes to aircraft pages. You can search the aircraft list by model and they will be shown next to the 4-letter ICAO code on aircraft previews.
- Added Planespotters images when hovering over non-Volanta flights (VATSIM, IVAO etc).
- Fuel burn calculation now takes all fuel burning into account, including when running the APU or starting engines stationary as opposed to starting recording only after first movement (off blocks time).
- Volanta now prompts you to complete a security check if there are issues with cloudflare and your connection.
- Improved reliability of live connections so map traffic, friends and other realtime updates recover more cleanly when servers are added and removed.
Fixes
- Fixed scheduled block times not being able to be removed when pressing the remove button.
- Fixed X-Plane .fms flight plan imports not being able to handle custom coordinate waypoints.
- Fixed scheduled block times on completed flights not being removed when pressing the remove button.
- Fixed the in-app browser breaking when zooming Volanta in or out.
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. Subscribers can also get early access to updates.
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, Xbox, 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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