Project AirportsGet the app

Changelog

What's changed

Feature updates and fixes, plus any changes to the in-game economy. Newest first.

Update

Creator items can be refunded

Economy & balance

  • Creator items, the ones that pay their creator a share of every purchase, can now be refunded like any other object. The creator keeps the share they were paid, so a 10% creator item refunds 90% within 24 hours of buying it and 40% after. Within 24 hours the refund happens automatically when you delete the item in the builder and save, the same as other objects.
  • Creator logo platforms still can't be refunded: their whole price goes to the creator. They stay in your pool to move or re-place for free.

What's new & fixes

  • Wallet refunds and the builder's delete notice now show the creator-item amounts, and the cart shows the refund before you save.
v1.3.25

Hangar complexes and walkable towers

Economy & balance

  • Hangar complexes cost 6,000 to 12,000 Aeros depending on size and features. Supporters get 75% off all sixteen tower and complex items.

What's new & fixes

  • Twelve hangar complexes are in the builder under Hangars, from a 6,000 Aeros airpark hangar home to a 12,000 Aeros MRO base with a ramp tower. Each one is furnished inside and you can walk through it: offices, lounges, crew rooms, stairs to the upper floors, working hangar doors and wall clocks that keep sim time.
  • Six of the complexes have an ATC cab (Skyline FBO, Heritage Airfield Ops, ARFF Station, Rural Fire and Rescue, Coastal SAR Base and MRO Ramp Tower). Their radar and strip screens show live traffic, the same as the four PA control towers.
  • The four PA control towers are rebuilt at walkable size: wider stairs you can climb on foot, doors at the base and on the balconies, and consoles scaled to match. Towers already placed at your airports update on their own when the companion syncs; nothing needs rebuilding.
  • Doors open as you walk up to them. The companion app shares your camera position with towers and complexes you are standing near, so update the app to 1.3.25. With an older app the doors stay open.
  • Supporters pay 25% of the price for the four towers and the twelve complexes, with no end date.
Update

Charts at parallel runways and blank airport cards

What's new & fixes

  • Approach charts open again in the desktop Charts tab at airports with parallel runways. The app asked for RNAV RWY 21 when the chart is published as RNAV RWY 21R, so the viewer showed a 404 page. The website now accepts the app's request, so no app update is needed.
  • Airport cards no longer turn plain white when the build machine's picture renderer crashes. It now retries once, and if the second try also fails the previous picture stays up.
v1.3.24

Sign-in fix for 1.3.23

What's new & fixes

  • Version 1.3.23 was built without its connection settings, so it showed a JavaScript error and could not sign in. 1.3.24 is the same update built correctly.
  • If you installed 1.3.23, it cannot update itself. Download the installer from projectairports.com and run it; your airports and settings are kept.
v1.3.23

Full chart directory

What's new & fixes

  • The Charts tab now reaches every charted airport. The list used to stop after the first 24 alphabetically, around the letter G. Use Show more airports at the bottom of the list to load the rest; the status line shows how many are loaded out of the total.
  • The installed companion no longer crashes when it writes a log line after the launcher or updater that started it has closed. Logs are still saved to disk.
v1.3.22

Airport sync recovery

What's new & fixes

  • Sync refreshes the airport list when builds or visibility changes occur during verification, while preserving installed airports if the list remains unstable.
  • Download failure details identify the affected artifact and whether the transfer stalled before headers or during the body.
  • Airport cards use smaller cached previews as new previews are generated. The builder explains when the runway determines the effective ground reference.
v1.3.21

Tower radar and ground traffic

What's new & fixes

  • Tower radar and flight displays now activate around your camera, including drone views, even when your aircraft is parked across the airport.
  • The companion reads the camera position without moving or locking your view.
  • Parked PA aircraft keep reporting their location without earning active flight time. Nearby ground targets appear on tower radar and are marked GND on the flight strips.
v1.3.20

Working control towers

Economy & balance

  • The four new towers launch at 75% off their regular 6,000–8,000 Aeros prices for seven days.

What's new & fixes

  • Four furnished control towers show nearby Project Airports traffic, runway references and locally observed arrivals and departures through the companion.
  • Tower buildings retain their full-quality geometry, clear glass and night lighting. Featured towers lead matching catalogue lists.
  • New catalogue arrivals rank original objects; imported liveries no longer refresh or consume New shelf slots.
v1.3.19

Live sign recovery

What's new & fixes

  • Every loaded sign receives live text updates, without choosing signs by the viewer's distance or limiting updates to two airports.
  • Live sign text stays visible after an airport rebuild when the sign placement has not changed. Moving a sign or changing its elevation still requires the matching airport sync.
  • Signs waiting for simulator altitude data no longer block visitor names and statistics from updating on other signs. Missing altitude replies retry with a bounded recovery queue.
v1.3.18

Sign text placement

What's new & fixes

  • Live sign text follows the published sign's elevation offset and retains that elevation when visitor names and statistics update.
  • Sign text waits for the matching airport package after elevation changes are published.
v1.3.17

Airport signs for every setting

What's new & fixes

  • Supporters can choose Modern, Backcountry, Country or City welcome signs, with overhead lighting, ten recent visitors, supporter badges, world and regional rankings, and a QR code to their airport page.
  • Choose a new welcome sign's style from object settings without replacing it.
  • The classic three-visitor sign is no longer offered in the catalogue. Existing signs stay in place, and owners can replace them whenever they are ready.
  • Names, welcome messages and visitor stats update live on the new shared signs. Update the companion to display the new live fields.
v1.3.16

Optional MSFS terrain surveys

What's new & fixes

  • Sample MSFS terrain elevation from the companion while parked at an airport you own. The survey shows progress and returns your aircraft when finished or cancelled.
  • Completed surveys are saved locally until sharing succeeds. Interrupted aircraft restoration retains a recovery option.
  • Survey movements are excluded from flight rewards, landing detection and passive terrain sampling.
  • Shared terrain corrections use measurements outside airport modifications; recorded airport surfaces are kept separate from the natural terrain baseline.
Update

Deleted liveries now refund their Paint Bills

Economy & balance

  • Deleting a livery now returns every net Aero paid on its successful Paint Bills and frees the bay. Removing one decal or finish during an edit still does not credit the next publish bill. Wallets are also credited automatically for liveries deleted before this refund path was added.
v1.2.9

Connected Programs, cockpit trees, and better painting

What's new & fixes

  • Connected Programs detection now starts enabled on new companion installs, with the same always-visible switch to turn it off at any time. Project Airports still checks only its fixed aviation-app allowlist and reports recognized app identifiers — your full Windows process list never leaves your PC.
  • The companion now reports the Connected Programs switch separately from recognized-app activity. This keeps enabled pilots with no matching program in the real adoption denominator, while compact daily totals measure each program's unique users and detected time without exposing local executable names. Existing detection choices are preserved when updating.
  • Published airports that use supported stock tree models are being rebuilt with MSFS's native Tree placement so those trees remain visible from cockpit and VR cameras. Painted vegetation areas and unsupported brush models remain subject to the simulator's separate vegetation-polygon behavior.
  • Livery Workshop painters can press H to hide the hovered aircraft mesh, Shift+H to show everything again, and exclude hidden parts from a layer's paint bake without changing the underlying aircraft model.
v1.2.8

Old airport builds cannot linger after sync

What's new & fixes

  • Sync now removes obsolete Project Airports files left inside its managed Community packages after an interrupted or recovered install. An old airport BGL can no longer load alongside the current build and bring back deleted runways, aprons, towers, signs, aircraft, or monuments while the companion reports everything up to date. Third-party Community add-ons are never touched.
v1.2.7

Connected programs stay connected

What's new & fixes

  • Connected Programs no longer drops every detected app — and your 5× Command Center tier — when Windows is slow to return its process list during simulator startup or a busy flight. A brief failed scan keeps the last confirmed state, and reporting resumes as soon as Windows responds.
  • The same Windows scan failure can no longer masquerade as MSFS closing. Community-folder syncs now wait for a trustworthy result instead of writing while the simulator state is unknown.
Update

Hangar Bay prices cut in half

Economy & balance

  • Hangar Bays 2 to 5 now cost Ⓐ5,000 / Ⓐ10,000 / Ⓐ20,000 / Ⓐ40,000, half their previous prices. Anyone who already paid more keeps every bay and automatically receives the difference back in their wallet.
v1.2.6

Existing installs can sync again

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed a 1.2.5 regression that could reject every airport install or update when an older Community manifest contained multiple historical copies of the projected-mesh library. The repair accepts only a complete, previously installed library bundle; new, mixed, and unrelated file collisions remain blocked.
  • Partial or failed syncs now retry when the companion restarts after an update, and the sync banner reports a safe grouped cause instead of only an operation count. You do not need to delete your Community folder or reinstall existing scenery.
v1.2.5

Livery Workshop lands in the companion

What's new & fixes

  • The Livery Workshop tab is now live in the companion. Browse paints with previews, search and filter by airframe or creator, add individual paints to MSFS, or—as a Supporter—keep the entire community library synced. Your own published liveries always sync.
  • Airport and livery delivery is safer: Cloudflare downloads are size- and checksum-verified, stalled or expired links retry, sync records recover after interruptions, and Re-verify repairs missing or changed files without touching unrelated Community content.
  • Connected Programs now shows its full supported catalogue even when detection is off, and you can suggest a missing aviation app. Only the program name and optional executable filename are submitted; your process list never leaves your PC.
  • Fixed MSFS/SimConnect discovery in packaged Windows builds, restoring reliable flight tracking and live companion features.
Update

Four-character airport codes for reliable avionics

What's new & fixes

  • Airport codes are now exactly four letters or numbers. MSFS accepts longer airport records, but Garmin procedure handling can fail when the associated airport code exceeds four characters; the RNAV approach may stay visible on the map while its waypoint names, Direct-To, and sequencing break.
  • Existing airports keep their current code and installed package until their owner next saves the airport. The builder then requires a free four-character code. Codes remain reserved against Project Airports fields and the complete real-world/MSFS stock airport namespace.
  • Multi-elevation airports now receive a persistent four-character secondary simulator code from the same protected namespace, so their hidden second Airport record cannot collide with a stock or community airport.
v1.2.3

Required Cloudflare update

What's new & fixes

  • Desktop updates and simulator packages now download only through Project Airports' Cloudflare distribution. The retired direct-storage route is no longer used as a fallback.
  • New desktop releases are required before syncing can continue. The companion downloads the update automatically and restarts into the supported version as soon as it is ready.
v1.2.0

Flight income without the full-time shift

Economy & balance

  • Active flight income is now twice as fast: the base rate rises from Ⓐ1 to Ⓐ2 per minute while the daily limits stay at Ⓐ1,000 (Ⓐ2,500 for Supporters). Five different add-on categories now unlock a 5× Command Center multiplier, worth Ⓐ10 per active minute. At that top tier, a full day takes about 1 hour 40 minutes for a free pilot or 4 hours 10 minutes for a Supporter, less after idle income fills part of the bar.
  • Airport-owner visit income is 20% lower across the full value-based curve, now Ⓐ20–320 per eligible visitor. Investment still raises every payout on the same curve, the 20-paid-visitors-per-day limit is unchanged, and the visiting pilot's own reward is not affected.

What's new & fixes

  • Rebuilt the desktop overview around a unified Earnings panel: your wallet, effective Aeros-per-minute rate, category multiplier, and connected aviation programs now read as one system. Flight Tracking and a personalized Supporter card stay visible beside it, while system health is condensed into a single strip below. Free pilots can now see the locked Supporter portion of the daily earnings bar and exactly how much more room it unlocks.
  • Replaced the desktop's old view switcher with consistent Overview, Charts, and locked Coming Soon Liveries tabs. Charts are built directly into the client: airports are ordered nearest to your live aircraft, search stays nearest-first, and every procedure uses the exact published Project Airports chart in an in-client carousel: no browser or second window.
  • Flight income now follows the aircraft instead of the engine switch. Airborne time always counts (including a helicopter hover), and ground movement counts from 5 knots; sitting stationary on the runway or apron earns the idle rate instead of pretending to be an active flight.
  • Fixed half-step income rounding: the new Ⓐ2 base makes every tier pay the exact advertised whole-Aero rate: Ⓐ2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 10 per minute.
Update

Terrain height edits reach the sim

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed a build bug where a local Raise, Lower, Smooth or Level terrain edit could look correct in the builder and sync successfully, yet disappear completely in MSFS on a large airport. Sculpted patches now compile at their authored 10 m resolution instead of being sampled through the airport's much coarser field-leveling grid. Rebuild and sync the airport to pick up the fix; if MSFS already has the old scenery mounted, restart the sim after syncing.
Update

NDB beacons, tunable procedures, and stations anywhere on your claim

What's new & fixes

  • NDB beacons join the catalogue at 5,000 Aeros: three radio masts that broadcast a real non-directional beacon in the kHz band - tune the ADF and the needle points at your mast. An activated beacon unlocks free NDB approaches: the classic needle-and-stopwatch procedure with a 1-minute course-reversal hold, a groundspeed/timing table on the chart (no DME on a beacon), and a missed approach that returns to the beacon itself - the whole thing flies on the ADF alone. Bring an ADF-equipped aircraft.
  • Every terrain-critical number is now yours to set (community feedback from the first navaid testers): the circling final approach course, the platform and missed-approach altitudes, and the circling MDA - raise them as high as your mountains demand. Safety floors hold in one direction only: you can always make a procedure safer, never below the category minimums.
  • Approach charts follow real TERPS design rules: course reversals are published and drawn, circle-to-land minimums print by aircraft category, and minimums always round UP.
  • Navaid stations now broadcast a full-height 80 NM service volume - the DME keeps reading at any altitude you can reach (a tester found the old records went quiet in the flight levels).
  • Navaid stations are the one building allowed to stand ANYWHERE on your claim, even outside the blue building area - real VORs and NDBs are radio sites, not airport furniture. Approaches and charts follow the station wherever it goes, and the catalogue gives these buildings their own Navaid Stations shelf.
  • The Field Manual's approach-aids article now covers the whole system: ILS, RNAV, VOR/DME with arcs, NDB, circling, tuning, and the auto-published charts.
Update

VOR-A circling approaches

What's new & fixes

  • Your VOR/DME station can now publish the classic circling approach (community-requested): a final approach course deliberately offset from the runway, the missed approach point at the VOR itself, a LEFT-turn hold back at the station, and circle-to-land minimums by aircraft category - the full Jeppesen VOR-A experience, free with the station.
  • Toggle it on the station's card; the plate publishes as VOR-A (VOR-B for a second station) with a CIRCLING ONLY note, and the coded procedure ships to the sim's nav database with the next build.
Update

Stations that work out of the box

What's new & fixes

  • Navaid stations are now proper catalogue items: search "VOR", "DME" or "station" in Objects and you'll find 13 VOR/DME rotundas (₳30,000) and 6 DME sheds (₳10,000), each labelled as the station it is - most were previously hidden pending review, which is why the shelf looked empty.
  • The building IS the station: placing one auto-tunes a free frequency and ident on the spot - no separate activation step or hidden fee. The property card stays for renaming and retuning.
  • If you placed one of these buildings before stations existed, its card offers a free one-click activation.
Update

VOR approaches and DME arcs

What's new & fixes

  • An activated VOR/DME station now unlocks VOR/DME approaches for free: a new checkbox on any land runway 500 m+ publishes a full procedure anchored on your station - radials and DME all the way down, with the same draggable descent-profile editor as the ILS and RNAV.
  • Every VOR approach ships with two classic DME-arc transitions: entry fixes published on both sides, arcing around your station at the IAF's distance and rolling out onto final. The approach chart draws the whole ring, station symbol and all.
  • VOR/DME plates join the chart system (vor-XX links from the runway card and your public page) with proper non-precision minimums, and hold labels on all charts moved into boxed callouts beside the racetrack so angled courses can't strike the text.
Update

Functional VOR/DME stations

What's new & fixes

  • The VOR rotundas and DME sheds in the object catalogue can now be activated into real, tunable stations: place the building, activate it from its property card, and a working VOR/DME (or DME-only) radiates from that exact spot in MSFS - ident, frequency and all.
  • Station frequencies live on the VOR band (108-118 MHz), which can never collide with an ILS channel by design, and every activation is checked against 9,186 real-world stations plus other players' airports within 150 km - the same guard the ILS uses.
  • Activation is billed as a facility: ₳ 30,000 for a VOR/DME, ₳ 10,000 for a DME shed, on top of the building itself. This is the foundation for VOR approaches, DME arcs and the rest of the classic IFR toolkit.
Update

Approaches reach the sim's nav database

What's new & fixes

  • Published ILS and RNAV approaches now compile into your airport's nav data: the World Map lists them, GPS and FMS procedure pages can load them (IAF, FAF, missed approach and hold included), and default GPWS learns your runway. Rebuild your airport to pick this up - and tell us in Discord if your avionics do anything strange with them.
Update

RNAV (GPS) approaches

What's new & fixes

  • Any land runway 500 m or longer can now publish an RNAV (GPS) approach - no ground equipment, so grass strips qualify. One checkbox on the runway card; ₳1,000 per 5,000 m² of runway deck.
  • RNAV approaches get the same draggable descent-profile editor as the ILS (FAF, platform altitude, IAF, missed approach - all linked through your chosen descent angle) and their own auto-published approach chart with plan and profile views.
  • An RNAV approach can stack with an ILS on the same end with independently tuned profiles - the published fixes get their own names so avionics never mix them up.
  • Approach entries on your public airport page now list RNAV procedures alongside ILS ones, each linking to its chart.
v0.1.54

No more ghost sign text

What's new & fixes

  • Live sign text that failed to clean up (after a sign was rescaled or moved mid-session) could linger in the world with frozen values; removals now retry until the sim takes them, and slow spawns that outlive their tracking get removed instead of orphaned.
  • Resizing a sign no longer leaves baked numbers on the face underneath the live text: the moment a new size's overlay package is ready, every sign at that size gets its face rebaked automatically.
Update

Guides for people who haven't found us yet

What's new & fixes

  • New Guides section on the website (linked in the footer): six honest articles on building custom airports for MSFS 2024 - every route compared including the official SDK, fixing a missing airport, installing community scenery, flying custom fields with friends, and carving a bush strip. Written for search, so pilots googling these questions can actually find the project.
  • Site housekeeping for search engines: fixed doubled page titles and missing canonical tags on the supporter, creators, and download pages, added the creators pages to the sitemap, and wiki articles now carry proper structured data.
Update

The ILS flies you to the runway, not beside it

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed the localizer course: MSFS reads the ILS heading as magnetic, and we were emitting true - so anywhere with magnetic variation, the flown course was rotated by the local declination and pilots were guided down parallel to the runway, into the antenna. Courses now emit magnetic and line up with the centerline. Airports with an ILS will be rebuilt; thanks to the pilots who flew the broken approaches and reported exactly what they saw.
  • The PAPI bar and the glideslope antenna can now each be moved to either side of the runway from the property card - vacate your taxiway or shoreline.
  • New approach profile editor per ILS end: drag the final approach fix or type a platform altitude, and the FAF distance, platform, and DME readout recalculate together along your glideslope angle. These numbers save with the design and will feed the published instrument procedure as it rolls out.
  • The exact magnetic final approach course (like 229 degrees, not just runway 23) now shows on the runway property card and on public airport pages, alongside the glidepath angle.
  • Every ILS end now auto-publishes a printable instrument approach chart at /airports/<slug>/charts/ils-<rwy> - frequency, ident, final course, profile view with your FAF and platform altitude, CAT I minimums, lighting, and missed approach. Linked from the public airport page.
  • Groundwork: airports can now compile a published ILS approach (IAF, FAF, missed approach with a hold) into the sim's navigation database so FMS units, the World Map, and GPWS recognize the approach. Rolling out carefully behind a per-airport flag while we verify sim behavior.
v0.1.53

Live boards stay honest

What's new & fixes

  • If an airport owner moves their supporter sign or event board, the live text no longer floats in mid-air for players whose installed airport package still has the board at the old spot - it simply stays off until their next sync delivers the updated airport.
  • Live text also no longer appears over empty ground at airports you have never synced.
  • After traveling via the world map, boards refill several seconds sooner.
Update

Smoother editing everywhere

What's new & fixes

  • Scattered foliage in the editor now draws as instanced batches (one draw call per tree model instead of one per tree), and the 3D scene stops recomputing every object's transform on every frame.
  • Hovering in Select mode no longer raycasts trees and navigation props it can never select, and a resting mouse stops re-picking the scene every frame.
  • The right-hand rail (buildable area, object slots, materials, ground layers) no longer re-renders while you drag things on the map.
  • Terrain re-grounding of objects and lights skips entirely when nothing relevant changed, instead of rebuilding its bookkeeping on every frame in 3D mode.
  • A tree model that fails to load is no longer retried on every editor change.
Update

Terrain editing, off the main thread

What's new & fixes

  • Terrain tile compositing now runs in a background worker, so sculpting and leveling no longer freeze the page while tiles redraw.
  • The trailing terrain reconcile after you stop editing now serves unchanged tiles from cache instead of recomputing every visible tile: the post-edit hitch is gone.
  • Brush strokes only recompute the ground they touched instead of sweeping the whole terrain grid six times per tick.
  • Sculpt strokes no longer re-render the editor at stroke rate; the terrain, overlay dots and live height readout follow the brush directly.
  • Moving any object no longer rebuilds the terrain surface model: terrain math now recomputes only when terrain-relevant things change, at a lower priority than your pointer.
  • Contour lines trace once per stroke instead of on every brush tick.
  • Ownership checks under the brush are memoized, and sculpt commits skip the full-design boundary scan they never needed.
Update

Editor lag: quick wins

What's new & fixes

  • The builder no longer re-renders once a second for five minutes after you press Build; the cooldown countdown ticks on its own.
  • Editing taxi sign text no longer piles up a baked texture per keystroke; the editor's 3D model cache now evicts what nothing uses while structurally protecting every model still on screen.
  • Terrain edits re-ground only the objects and lights the change actually touched, instead of re-querying every placement twice per sculpt stroke.
  • Flat-mode edits skip the 3D placement push entirely when nothing moved, and light pushes skip when only unrelated features changed.
  • Assorted per-frame busywork removed: catalogue scans during object drags, full style serialization while contours are on, and a media-query re-evaluation on every render.
v0.1.52

Live event leaderboards

What's new & fixes

  • Fly-in event boards now show a live arrival table: pilots, aircraft and landing distances appear on the board moments after wheels touch.
  • Live sign updates are now smarter about when they redraw, reducing SimConnect chatter alongside other addons.
v0.1.51

Live signs at every size

What's new & fixes

  • Resized supporter signs now get live boards too: the overlay matches your sign exactly at any scale.
  • Depth alignment of live sign text follows the sign size.
v0.1.50

Supporter signs go live

What's new & fixes

  • Supporter stats signs now update in real time while you are at the airport: the visit count ticks up and new arrivals appear on the board the moment they happen.
  • Live event ticker boards can stream event updates at host airports.
  • Airport decorations (windsocks, decor, live sign data) are now always on; the old opt-out switch caused missing-content reports and has been removed.
Update

PAPI lights face the approach

What's new & fixes

  • PAPI boxes in the airport preview now show their red and white lenses toward the approaching pilot instead of showing their backs.
  • In-sim PAPI bars now convert their threshold aim point to MSFS's runway-centre coordinate correctly, keeping them at the intended touchdown-zone position on every runway length.
Update

AI-free stands stay clear

What's new & fixes

  • Turning off Allow AI aircraft now applies both of MSFS 2024's aircraft matching filters. Uncoded and general traffic can no longer fall back onto a reserved stand after missing its dummy airline code; the stand remains available to players. Multiplayer aircraft are not AI traffic and remain visible.
  • Airport buses and other native ambient vehicles are now disabled at every Project Airports field, including airports with Vehicle depots. MSFS can send these vehicles to any empty stand and provides no way to restrict them to vehicle-only parking, so keeping aircraft stands clear takes precedence.
  • A placed scenery aircraft is not AI and cannot be hidden by a parking traffic switch. The builder and package report now flag one sitting on a reserved stand so it can be moved or removed instead of being mistaken for spawned traffic.
v0.1.49

STOL landing rollouts reach the field board

What's new & fixes

  • The companion now measures ground distance from touchdown until the aircraft slows to taxi speed, including the ground-contact portion of touch-and-go landings.
  • Rocky Mountain STOL arrivals at Ralph Wenz Field can show pilot, aircraft and measured landing roll in feet on the live in-sim event board. Rollout reports are queued durably through network interruptions and never affect landing rewards.
Update

Performance wave 3: terrain edits without the freeze, and smarter defaults for modest PCs

What's new & fixes

  • Terrain shaping no longer freezes the editor. The heavy height-field math now runs on a background thread, so releasing a runway drag or sweeping the sculpt brush keeps the page responsive while the new terrain computes.
  • Moving the mouse over the builder map is now essentially free: measurement readouts, the selection box and snap hints draw directly to the screen instead of re-rendering the editor, and the side panels only re-render when something they show actually changes.
  • Showcase airports draw their forests as single batched meshes instead of one draw call per tree, and hovering over detailed buildings or painting an aircraft uses a spatial index instead of testing every triangle.
  • Modest PCs get coherent automatic defaults: machines with integrated graphics and limited memory now render maps at a gentler resolution, scatter fewer trees, and paint liveries at a lighter working resolution (exports stay full quality). Set localStorage key pa-quality to low, standard or high to pin it yourself.
Update

Performance wave 2: faster loads and steadier edits everywhere

What's new & fixes

  • Pages load much lighter. The claim map, the airport builder and the workshop no longer download two copies of the map engine, and the 3D model machinery now arrives in the background after the map is already on screen instead of holding up the first paint.
  • The airport builder computes prices, validation and the build check once per pause instead of several times per mouse movement. Status chips and the cart badge may trail a fast drag by a beat and catch up the moment you stop; everything you buy or build is always computed fresh at that moment.
  • Airport lighting, snapping guides and painted ground markings now update only the piece you are editing instead of recomputing the whole field every frame.
  • The claim map remembers airport layouts it has already built, so panning around a busy area no longer freezes after every camera stop.
  • Workshop groundwork: dragging a decal now previews at reduced sharpness and snaps to full quality when you release, panels no longer redraw on every pointer movement, and the decal art catalogue downloads only when you open the library.
Update

Performance: smoother editing and maps on lower-end machines

What's new & fixes

  • Airport builder: dragging runways, taxiways and objects is much lighter. The editor no longer re-checks terrain height for every light fixture, re-requests elevation data, or re-validates and re-prices the whole airport dozens of times a second mid-drag; that work now happens once, when you let go.
  • Maps site-wide now cap their render resolution on very high-DPI screens, cutting GPU work by up to 4x on laptops with integrated graphics.
  • The claims map can finally go idle: animated pins, live traffic and event countdowns no longer keep the whole map redrawing continuously when nothing is happening on screen.
  • Airport showcase viewers pause their orbit while scrolled off-screen or in a background tab, so browsing the rest of the page stays smooth and laptops stay cool.
  • Livery workshop groundwork (reopens with these included): color scrubbing and decal drags batch their heaviest work per frame, and the crash-recovery autosave writes far less often while still saving instantly when you finish a gesture or leave the page.
Update

Build at the edge—and across land you own

What's new & fixes

  • The blue airport area can now be centered right against a claim edge. Any overlap on land you do not own is cut off instead of pushing the circle back toward the middle, and the usable area recovers 20% of what that cut removed.
  • Buy an edge-adjacent cell and it automatically joins the overlapping part of this airport's buildable land, even when it is a separate claim. The airport-area center must remain in its original claim, so no more than half the circle's diameter can cross the shared edge.
  • Airport-area radii are now 900, 1,350, 1,850, 2,250 and 2,500 metres. Each level has enough diameter for its maximum-length runway and the best approach-light system available at both ends; existing level purchases expand for free.
  • Runway-generated equipment now respects the blue airport area too. PAPI, REIL, approach lights and ILS antennas cannot be added or moved past its boundary, even onto adjoining land you own. The save service and package builder enforce the same boundary as the editor.
Update

Object slots keep their fractions after reopening the builder

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: reopening an airport could leave the Objects used meter counting every placement as a full slot, even after the catalogue had loaded its quarter-slot categories. The meter now recalculates as those categories arrive and says Calculating instead of showing a false total while they load.
Update

Placed objects and object slots now tell the same story

What's new & fixes

  • Airport panels now separate the raw number of placements from weighted object slots, and owners see their full slot meter including the supporter allowance. A field can legitimately contain more placements than slots because trees, props and other scatter use only a quarter slot.
  • A build is now tied to the exact saved version that completed checkout. An unfinished or rejected checkout can still preserve your draft, but retry and direct build requests cannot compile that unsettled version.
v0.1.48

Every selected airport reaches the sim

What's new & fixes

  • Region sync now retrieves every published airport even when your selection contains more than 1,000 fields. Airports beyond the server's first page, including KPAC and LHVL, no longer disappear from search or the Community folder.
  • The companion verifies that it received a complete airport list before changing the Community folder, so an interrupted or partial server response cannot be mistaken for the full selection.
v0.1.47

Start close to home

What's new & fixes

  • A fresh companion install now starts with one sync region detected from your country and time zone instead of downloading North America and Europe together.
  • That first region is only a starting choice: open Sync regions whenever you like to add as many other regions as you want, remove some, or turn airport syncing off entirely. Existing region selections are never replaced.
Update

Landscaping reaches the simulator

What's new & fixes

  • Broad terrain-brush slopes now compile into far fewer terraform strips without flattening away their shape, so large edits no longer overwhelm the simulator's scenery layer or lose the weaker end of the brushwork.
  • Every changed terrain strip now gets an identity tied to its actual position and elevation. This prevents the simulator from reusing an older strip after later brush strokes reorder the landscape build.
Update

More room for painted stand numbers

What's new & fixes

  • The ground-text limit now grows with your buildable-area level: 60 at Airstrip, 100 at Airfield and 160 at Regional. The future International and Sprawling levels allow 240 and 320.
  • The Markings tray shows your current ground-text allowance, and each area level now lists the allowance it actually grants.
v0.1.46

Turn off every Project Airports field for a clean comparison

What's new & fixes

  • Unchecking every region now removes all installed Project Airports fields on the next sync, so you can compare the original simulator landscape with the community-built airport in place. Select the regions again and sync to restore them.
  • Shared object and livery libraries stay installed while the airports are off; they do not place airport scenery by themselves and are ready when you turn a region back on.
Update

Your paint job now survives the zoom out

What's new & fixes

  • Custom liveries used to snap back to the factory paint once the simulator switched to a distant model. Distance coverage now spans 28 airframes and 36 verified distance atlases, up from 5 airframes: most of the Cessna, Beechcraft, Citation, DHC-8 and regional fleets, plus the T-6, Goose, Corvalis, PC-12, CAP-4, SF50 and more.
  • Surface finishes ride along at distance wherever the aircraft's own distant model supports them, paired by what the model actually uses rather than file naming, which also fixes the XCub.
  • Already-published liveries are being rebuilt automatically to pick this up; nothing to do on your end.
Update

Straight rudders, honest tail fins

What's new & fixes

  • The Twin Otter's paint studio no longer shows its rudder swung hard over and its elevator drooped. Harvested display models had frozen a random animation frame into the control surfaces; they now sit neutral, so decals near the tail bake exactly where the simulator shows them.
  • Painting the Twin Otter's tail fin now raises the MIRRORED warning: this aircraft maps both sides of the fin onto the same texture area, so art placed there repeats on the far side in the simulator too. Where the sides overlap, the layer painted later wins.
  • Decals no longer bleed through the fin via interior structure, and the Other side button now explains that it copies left to right with top staying top; paint the underside directly instead.
Update

Join the Discord, earn 1,000 Aeros

Economy & balance

  • The setup guide has a ninth reward for every account, old or new: join the Project Airports Discord and connect that Discord account to earn a one-time ₳1,000. We verify both parts against the server before paying, and repeat checks can never pay twice.

What's new & fixes

  • The Discord reward stays in the lower-right guide instead of sending you to Settings. Its one button opens the server invite, then changes in place to Connect Discord; accounts already linked can check membership from that same spot.
Update

Night-proof chrome, finishes that survive distance

What's new & fixes

  • Chrome liveries keep a touch of body color at night instead of going mirror-black, so ground lights behind a chrome part (a propeller spinner, say) no longer appear to shine straight through it.
  • Surface finishes now hold at viewing distance on the 737 MAX, Extra 330, C172 and King Air instead of snapping back to the factory finish when the simulator switches to a distant model. The XCub follows after its next texture harvest.
  • Already-published liveries pick both fixes up the next time they are published.
Update

New land claims need one real flight

What's new & fixes

  • New land claims now verify against actual simming: record one MSFS 2024 flight (a couple of minutes, with the companion app running) within 7 days of claiming, or the claim releases and the land opens back up. One flight ever is enough - accounts that have already flown are verified the moment they claim.
  • Every claim made before today is grandfathered in and needs nothing.
  • If a claim is waiting on its flight, the claims panel shows the deadline, and we send a friendly heads-up email two days in plus a final reminder the day before.
Update

Aircraft models move behind ownership

What's new & fixes

  • Full-quality aircraft models are no longer publicly downloadable. Public pages (the homepage, airport showcases, live traffic, builder previews) now use lighter display models; the Livery Workshop's paint studio fetches the real mesh through a short-lived, account-bound link.
  • The paint studio now serves an aircraft's full model only to accounts whose simulator install actually has it. The desktop companion detects your hangar automatically (including streamed and marketplace aircraft such as the A320neo) - run it once while signed in and everything you own unlocks.
  • Everyone with an existing account is grandfathered in: the Livery Workshop works exactly as before for you, with nothing to do. The ownership checks apply to accounts created from today onward.
  • The New Livery picker shows which flyable aircraft were detected in your simulator, and explains how to link your install if none were.
Update

Terrain stays put

What's new & fixes

  • Extra ground areas no longer level themselves to the runway field elevation when they sit on clearly higher or lower ground - past a small gap they keep their own ground and the edge grades across. A new per-area Ground level control (Auto, Level with field, Keep own ground) lets you override the choice either way.
  • Runway strips no longer snap between a curved and a dead-straight profile from one build to the next. When the terrain-following curve exceeds the grade limits it is now eased toward a safe grade instead of flipped, and the builder shows a note on strips the limit touches.
  • Rebuilding an airport without touching it no longer shifts its terrain. Elevation lookups stick to one terrain dataset per build, the sim-calibration fit is bounded so a bad batch of readings cannot dig a deep pit, and saved heights are only re-surveyed when the geometry actually moved.
  • The builder's 3D terrain preview matches the build more closely: it applies the same grade limits, the same area adjacency rule and the same calibration the build worker uses, and it no longer shows stale tiles or lone spikes inside leveled pads.
  • The terrain smoothing brush no longer raises phantom hills when a stroke crosses the edge of a leveled pad.
  • Field and runway heights no longer change on reopening the builder. Where each height was surveyed is now saved with the design, and a manually set or MSFS-measured height is never silently replaced - if the ground moved under it, the builder flags it and offers a re-survey.
  • Slider drags and typed number edits now undo as one step instead of dozens.
Update

Reviewing the cart no longer saves your airport

What's new & fixes

  • The builder's Review cart button now does exactly that: it opens the live cost estimate without saving the design or buying anything. Cancel it and the airport on the server stays untouched.
  • Only the explicit Save or Save & pay button inside the cart commits the design. A failed or abandoned checkout can no longer make an unpaid area level look permanently owned after a reload.
Update

One paint follows every compatible aircraft setup

What's new & fixes

  • A Cessna 172 paint made from the IFD passenger model now appears on the Classic, IFD and G1000 versions, including their passenger, cargo, float, ski, skydive, aerial-ad and tow setups. They share one exterior frame, so the avionics or job inside the aircraft no longer hides its paint.
  • The same fix covers the 737 MAX passenger and BBJ versions, every XCub setup, both Opticas, the Beaver wheel/float and cabin/radio combinations, and the PC-12 passenger, VIP, cargo and medical versions.
  • Already-published paints on those aircraft are queued for a safe in-place rebuild. Their existing version stays available until the broader package is ready.
Update

Beacons are priced as beacons

Economy & balance

  • The library beacon towers were filed as light fixtures, so a fully working rotating beacon cost ₳400 and a quarter of an object slot - against ₳2,500 for the parametric Rotating beacon that does the same job. Beacons are now their own kind of thing: ₳900 to ₳2,500 by size, and a full object slot, like the control tower they stand beside.
  • The stock 36 m Rotating Beacon Tower is ₳2,500, the SNK lattice towers ₳1,800 to ₳2,000, the 15 m airport beacon tower ₳1,600, the LED masts ₳1,200 and the mini tower ₳900. The parametric Rotating beacon is unchanged at ₳2,500.
  • Nobody is charged the difference. If you already own one it stays yours at what you paid, and refunds still pay out of what you actually spent.

What's new & fixes

  • Beacons keep their place on the Lighting shelf, and still glow in the builder's night preview. Small beacon lenses and markers are unaffected - they were always fixtures and stay quarter-slot lights.
Update

Releasing a claim tells you when it fails

What's new & fixes

  • An airport that someone had reported could not be released at all. The release freed the airport while the report still pointed at it, and the database refused the whole thing. Reports now keep their own record of which airport they were about, so releasing works and the report survives for moderators to act on.
  • A release that could not go through left the confirm box sitting there with no explanation, which read as a dead button. The reason now appears in the box itself, and the Release claim button retries.
  • An expired session was the usual cause and now says so: reload, sign in again, then release. Connection failures also report instead of leaving the box stuck on Checking what you'll get back.
Update

Apron choices now say what they actually build

What's new & fixes

  • GA ramp, Parking apron and Cargo apron sounded like three operational tools, but they only picked a surface — and the last two produced exactly the same concrete. The apron tray now offers one honest choice for every working material: asphalt, tarmac, concrete, grass, gravel and dirt.
  • Existing saved tool choices carry over to the matching material. In particular, the old Cargo apron remains concrete rather than changing underneath an unfinished design.
v0.1.45

Flyable paints stay visible after sync

What's new & fixes

  • The companion now keeps the LIVERY package type when it combines Workshop paints into the Project Airports SimObjects package. The old SCENERY label kept valid flyable paints out of the aircraft livery picker.
  • Existing combined installs repair that package label on the next sync without downloading the paint files again.
Update

Move the aircraft itself in the Livery Workshop

What's new & fixes

  • New Pose tool at the bottom of the tool dock (or press G): handles appear on the aircraft, three arrows to slide it left/right, up/down and fore/aft, three rings to yaw, pitch and roll it. Hold Shift while turning to snap to 15 degrees.
  • Prefer numbers to dragging? The Pose workspace opens beside the dock with a slider for each of the six axes, and each one spans exactly the travel the room allows, so a slider never fights you back to a smaller value.
  • Belly raises the aircraft as high as the room allows, Bank tips it over to reach the underside of a wing, and Park puts it back on its spot. The pose is a viewing aid only: it is never saved to the livery, never shows up in the published package, and every decal you place while posed lands exactly where you put it.
  • The hangar is respected: a wingtip stops at the wall and a bank is trimmed to what the roof leaves, so nothing is ever shoved through the building. The Studio Floor has no ceiling if you want to roll all the way over.
  • The aircraft also parks a little above the floor now instead of flat on it, so the belly and gear bays read properly without touching anything.
Update

The setup guide bows out once you are set up

What's new & fixes

  • The floating setup checklist retires itself as soon as all its steps are done, instead of sitting over the Workshop and builder controls forever. It can also be dismissed by hand at any point, finished or not, from the small x on the bubble.
  • If you want it back, Settings has a Show the guide button that reopens the checklist.
  • The claim counter on the map now reads plainly as the number of claims you own. The per-account cap it used to show is high enough that nobody was going to reach it, and putting it on screen only invented a ceiling to think about.
Update

Published liveries can be revised without starting over

What's new & fixes

  • A published paint is no longer locked forever. Open it in the Livery Workshop, make the correction, and use Publish update; the replacement keeps the same livery, catalogue item, airport placements and subscriber list.
  • The version people already have stays live while the update is screened and compiled. If the replacement is rejected or its build fails, the old paint stays available and the Workshop tells you what to fix.
v0.1.44

Choose which community paints enter your sim

What's new & fixes

  • Your own published liveries still install automatically. Region sync now lists the published community paints separately, so you can add the exact ones you want to fly or opt into every published paint.
  • Choosing one paint now installs that livery alone. It no longer pulls in every other paint by the same creator, and turning a choice off removes its files on the next safe sync.
  • Flyable paints keep the SimObjects patch loading rule after the companion combines packages. Existing combined installs repair their generated manifest on the next sync without redownloading the aircraft files.
  • The shared-package sync now checks the server's full visible count before removing anything, so a large livery collection cannot be mistaken for a complete but shorter list.
Update

Leaving the Livery Workshop no longer lands you on a missing page

What's new & fixes

  • The Portal link in the top-left of the Livery Workshop, and the two links offered when the paint booth cannot open or when you arrive on a phone, all pointed at /portal. There is no page at that address, so backing out of the Workshop showed a 404 instead of your portal.
  • All three now go to the portal home, and /portal itself redirects there rather than dead-ending, so any old bookmark or link pointing at it also arrives somewhere sensible.
Update

The build queue stalled for nine hours, and everyone who was around got 2,500 Aeros

Economy & balance

  • 2,500 Aeros to each of the 210 players who were on the platform while the build queue was broken: 525,000 in total. It is already in your wallet, and there is a note in your notifications explaining it.
  • The bar for being paid was deliberately low. Signing in, saving a design, queuing a build or earning anything between 19:00 UTC on the 28th and 07:00 UTC on the 29th all counted, on the grounds that a stalled queue spoils an evening whether or not you were the one waiting on it.

What's new & fixes

  • The machine that compiles airports was pulled off the queue for aircraft data harvesting, and the fleet drained to nothing. A build queued at 19:29 UTC did not start for eight hours and seventeen minutes. Normal is about one minute. The backlog cleared through the night and the queue was back to normal by 04:08 UTC.
  • Nothing was lost and nothing needed re-queuing. Every job that was waiting did eventually build, which is why the waits shrink steadily through the night rather than ending in failures.
  • What the harvesting was for: the high-detail flyable airframes, so the Livery Workshop can paint the aeroplane you actually fly instead of only the parked one on your apron. Nine are in the Workshop now, the A320neo and A321 among them.
Update

The belly of the A320 family can actually be painted now

What's new & fixes

  • Picking Belly fairing from the Parts list on an A319, A320 or A321 only ever coloured about a fifth of it. The rest of the belly sat there in factory white no matter what you did. Four of the five pieces that make up that part are laid out in a second tile of the texture sheet, and the Workshop was painting them off the edge of the canvas instead of onto the aircraft.
  • Brush strokes and decals had the same blind spot on those surfaces. You could draw on the belly, watch it look fine, publish, and find nothing there in the sim. Both now land where you put them.
  • The 3D view was showing you the truth of the old behaviour rather than the new one, so it now samples the paint sheet the same way the sim does. What you see in the Workshop is what gets compiled.
Update

Deleting one patch of foliage no longer takes the whole field with it

What's new & fixes

  • Removing a patch of vegetation could wipe every other patch you'd painted with the same plant at the same density, anywhere on your field. Foliage is stored one zone per plant-and-density combination, so every blob you paint with the same settings goes into the same zone - and Delete removed the zone. Paint a few trees tonight, decide you don't want them there, delete them, and days of planting went with them. Reported on Discord.
  • Clicking foliage now selects the patch under your cursor, and only that patch lights up. Delete removes that one blob and leaves the rest alone. The panel says which patch you're on (Patch 3 of 12), its size and its cost, with the total for all patches underneath.
  • If you do want the lot gone there's a Remove all N patches button that names the number and asks first.
  • Duplicating foliage copies the patch you selected instead of cloning every patch of that plant across the field - which was also charging you for the copies.
  • Hitting the 64-zone foliage limit used to silently drop your oldest zones to make room. The new stroke is refused instead, and the message tells you what to do about it.
  • Nothing you spent is lost when foliage is removed. Vegetation you've bought stays banked to your account, so repainting the same coverage costs nothing - and anything bought in the last 24 hours is refunded in full automatically.
Update

Ground height, height adjustment and runway elevation now stay where you put them

What's new & fixes

  • Typing a number into any builder slider now takes effect as you type. Every slider has a number box next to it, and that box only applied your number when you clicked away from it - so you could type 89 into Ground leveling, see 89 sitting there, save, and get 100 back on the next refresh. The tell was the handle: it stayed where the old value was while the box showed the new one. This affected every slider in the builder, not just the elevation ones, and it is the real reason values seemed to 'revert' after saving. Reported on Discord with before and after screenshots.
  • Height adjustment could not be put back to auto. Once you had saved a nudge, sliding it back to zero re-saved the old number instead, so the same value returned every time you opened the editor - which is why it kept coming back as -10 m. Set it to auto now and it clears for good. Reported on Discord.
  • The ground height you typed in, or measured in MSFS, was thrown away on reopen. The editor checked where that height had been measured against the wrong point on your field, decided the airport had moved, and re-sampled terrain data over your own value every single time. It now keeps what you set, and only re-measures when you actually move the buildable area.
  • A runway's own elevation is read back from your saved airport instead of starting blank and being replaced by a fresh terrain sample. The panel also remembers where that height came from - you, MSFS, or terrain data - so a height you set by hand still reads as yours.
  • Changing ground leveling or height adjustment in the Elevation panel now marks the airport unsaved, so leaving the page warns you instead of quietly dropping the change.
  • Height adjustment now reads in feet, like every other height in the builder. It was the only one quoted in metres, sitting directly under a ground height and a build height in feet, which made it look like a different kind of number. Metres are still shown alongside, and still what gets saved.
Update

Paved surfaces come with your area level - and we refunded every material fee

Economy & balance

  • Material unlock fees are gone. Asphalt, tarmac and concrete no longer cost a separate 10,000 or 25,000 to unlock - your buildable-area level includes them. Level 1 covers grass, dirt and gravel, Level 2 adds asphalt and tarmac, Level 3 adds concrete. A first paved runway used to mean the level plus a fee plus the pavement; now it's the level plus the pavement.
  • Every material fee we ever charged has been refunded: 1,264,000 Aeros back to 202 players. If you paid one, it's already in your wallet and the surface stays unlocked.
  • Anything you've already unlocked stays yours for good, even at a level that wouldn't include it today. Nobody loses a surface they paid for.

What's new & fixes

  • The builder said Level 2 unlocked paved surfaces. It didn't - paving also charged a separate material fee, and the level never actually controlled surfaces at all. Both the text and the code were wrong, and people saved for weeks for an upgrade that wasn't the thing standing in their way. Reported on Discord. Now the level really is the gate, and it's enforced everywhere.
  • Locked surfaces now say which level includes them instead of showing a price, in the surface picker, the runway templates and the Materials panel. Saving tells you the level to grow to rather than failing with a cryptic error.
  • The apron styles in the left panel now carry the same lock. GA ramp, Parking apron and Cargo apron are paved, so at Level 1 they looked no different from the free grass and gravel ones, and the first sign they were gated came when you went to save. Each one now shows a padlock and the level that includes it, and picking one says so straight away. Reported on Discord.
  • The level buttons now list what the next level actually gives you before you buy it, generated from the real limits rather than written by hand, so they can't drift from what the game enforces.
  • Paving is still billed by area, and that's now stated up front: asphalt is 0.25 per m² on a runway, 0.15 on a taxiway, 0.10 on an apron. A narrower runway genuinely costs less.
Update

The Livery Workshop opens straight into the hangar

What's new & fixes

  • The Workshop now opens straight into the 3D paint booth - no webpage first. A floating menu lists your liveries in the scene, and picking one rolls the jet out without a page load.
  • Paint at your own airport: the booth is now a real hangar staged at your own field, your runway out the door, with satellite imagery all around. Place a Hangar Reno Open or a QG Hangar Upperclass XS in the builder and it becomes your paint booth, or borrow a featured community field.
  • New Parts tab paints named panels - left side, right side, tail fin and more - and cheatline bands wrap both fuselage sides at matched height.
  • Decals grew a proper gizmo: drag the on-jet marker to move, corner handle to resize, top handle to rotate, arrow keys to nudge, plus exact numeric fields for size, rotation and opacity.
  • A flat-texture inspector shows the exact texture your paint bakes to, with a before and after compare, so nothing ships sight unseen.
  • Labeled tools with hotkeys, per-tool cursors, a status line that always says what a click will do, a camera HUD with one-key views, and a first-run tour that walks you to your first painted panel.
Update

Free landmark slots come back when you remove the landmark

What's new & fixes

  • Removing a landmark you placed with a free supporter slot now hands the slot back, as long as it's within the same 24 hours a paid object would refund in. Before, the slot stayed spent forever: the landmark cost no Aeros, so nothing was refunded and the count of free landmarks never went back up. Reported on Discord, and the slots already lost this way have been returned.
  • The Wallet no longer lets you destroy a banked free landmark for nothing. Past its 24 hours there's no spend to give back, so it simply stays in your pool - re-place it anywhere, any time, for free.
  • Buying a landmark straight from the catalogue honours the free slot too. It was charging full price and spending the slot, which was worse than not having the perk.
Update

The Livery Workshop

Economy & balance

  • A custom livery costs exactly what the airframe's other paint options cost - painting it yourself earns you the bragging rights, not a discount.

What's new & fixes

  • Supporters get the Livery Workshop at /portal/workshop: paint any A320-family airframe over its clean white base, right in the browser.
  • The paint kit: fill whole parts with color, drop decals and shapes, add text, or upload your own images and place them anywhere on the airframe.
  • Keep it decent: liveries you publish install for you automatically and are available for other pilots to select in the companion. Anything that does not belong there can be pulled.
  • Finished liveries appear in your builder catalog as paint options only you can place. Your design, your fields, nobody else's.
  • Published liveries compile automatically. Other pilots can install an individual community paint or opt into the full published collection from the companion.
  • Each supporter can keep up to 10 liveries. Delete one to free the slot.
Update

Contour lines

What's new & fixes

  • The Terrain tool has a Contour lines toggle: iso-height lines drawn over the surface your build will actually produce, with a heavier index line every fifth. Leveled ground reads as a contour-free blank, crowded lines mean relief your leveling keeps, and the dense band around a pad's rim is its graded embankment - the quickest way to spot uneven ground while leveling. Works in the flat top-down view too, follows every terrain edit live, and the preference sticks.
Update

Deleting an object now says where the money went

What's new & fixes

  • Removing a placed object tells you on the spot what happens to your Aeros: bought within the last 24 hours means a 100% refund at your next save, anything older stays banked in your account - re-placing a banked object is free, and the Wallet can still cash it out at 50%. The refund rules haven't changed; the builder just stopped keeping them a secret until after you saved.
Update

More airports on fire

What's new & fixes

  • The fire pin used to mark a flat top 1% of airports by visits, which at today's catalogue size lit up all of three or four pins on the whole planet. The badge count now grows with the game: around a dozen airports burn today, a couple dozen at a thousand airports, and the share of airports on fire keeps shrinking as we grow, so the badge stays something to chase. An airport still needs at least one recorded visit to burn.
  • Burning airports now show their exact standing: the map card says #1 most visited, #7 most visited, and so on, instead of quoting a percentage. Go take someone's spot.
  • The #1 most visited airport on the planet burns gold. One airport, one golden flame - come and claim it.
  • Staff airports are out of the running: anything owned by an admin is excluded from the most-visited set entirely. The leaderboard is yours, not ours.
  • Every continent now has at least one airport on fire. The busiest field on each landmass gets a flame even if it did not make the global cut, and its pin stays visible when you zoom the map all the way out, so no part of the world looks dead. Those airports still show their honest worldwide rank on the card, plus a Top in Africa (or Asia, or South America) note explaining why they are lit. Four continents lit up the moment this shipped.
Update

The editor terrain is now build-truth, and leveling got real controls

What's new & fixes

  • The 3D terrain in the builder now shows exactly what the build terraforms into MSFS - the same heights, the same blends, the same graded skirts, from the same survey data the build worker uses. Typing a field or runway elevation moves the ground on screen while you watch, and a new "Earth moved" readout under the Ground leveling slider shows the real cut and fill on a slope before you commit to it.
  • A new Elevation panel in the right rail shows the height your airport actually builds at (height adjustment and all), the leveling and height sliders, and every runway's own height with what governs it - click a runway there to jump to it.
  • Ground areas now choose their own leveling: follow the airport slider (the default), level by their own percentage, or Natural - excluded from leveling entirely. A Natural area keeps its untouched terrain even inside your boundary, so you can finally punch a hole through the leveling (ring-shaped field, wild centre).
  • Runways can be forced dead flat with "Always keep this strip level" - a level strip on an otherwise rolling field. Below full leveling, unforced runways curve gently with the land instead of sitting on an invisible table, and the runway panel now says which behaviour applies.
  • Airport lights (runway edges, taxiway blues, apron rings) now sit on the terrain in the 3D preview instead of hovering on a flat plane - most visible on sloped fields below 100% leveling.
Update

The fire pins actually look like fire

What's new & fixes

  • The burning pin that marks the most-visited airports on the explore map has been redrawn from scratch. The old flame was a blurry orange blob twitching at eight frames a second; the new one is a real layered flame, dark rim to white-hot core, that rises off the pin and ripples upward, shedding little licks and sparks as it burns. Same meaning, top 1% visited, just no longer an eyesore.
Update

Fences you can actually afford

Economy & balance

  • Fencing has been cut by roughly four times. Security mesh goes from 7 Aeros a metre to 1.60, farm wire from 4 to 0.80, covered wood from 9 to 2, black iron from 10 to 2.40. Fences were the last thing in the game still priced before the 1,000-Aeros-is-a-day anchor, and it showed: a 3.6 km boundary round a small field cost 25,000 Aeros, more than the runway it surrounded.
  • Long runs now get cheaper as they go. The first kilometre of a style bills at full price, the next three kilometres at 60%, everything past four kilometres at 35% - the same volume curve that large planted areas use. A 3.6 km perimeter is now about 4,100 Aeros, and a 12 km international boundary about 9,000 instead of 84,000.
  • The discount is per airport, so every field you build earns its own cheap first kilometre.
  • Gates cost 150-300 Aeros (was 500-1,000). They are roadside furniture on a fence you already paid for, not hero pieces - a hangar is 2,000.
  • The running total while you draw, and the price on a selected fence, both show what the run will actually cost on top of the fencing already on that field.
  • If you already fenced at the old prices, we refunded the difference. Your fences stay exactly where they are; the Aeros are back in your wallet. This is a bigger correction than the usual tuning pass, so it did not feel right to let it land only on the people who had not bought yet.
Update

Landmarks no longer use object slots

Economy & balance

  • Landmarks are now slot-free, matching what the Field Manual promised all along. Supporters told us they were sitting on their two free landmarks because placing one ate a full object slot - now no landmark does, free or paid. Their pacing is their price; what they add is invested value, not cap pressure.
  • The builder's slot meter, the armed-object preview, and the save all agree: a landmark shows as slot-free before you place it, and placed landmarks are listed under the meter without counting against the cap.
  • If your airport was sitting at its object cap with landmarks placed, you just got slots back.
Update

The great catalogue repricing

Economy & balance

  • Every object in the catalogue has been repriced against one anchor: 1,000 Aeros is one day of play. Big things now cost like big things and small things like small things - the 800-Aero mega terminals and 1,700-Aero signs are gone (those two are now about 20,000 and 120).
  • How: a size-and-stature formula priced all 33,000 objects first, then everything expensive, popular, or suspicious - about 1,600 items - got a visual review, and 332 prices were corrected by eye. Blank or placeholder-grade models got cut, genuinely monumental buildings got raised.
  • Terminals can now reach 25,000 Aeros (was 15,000), so a city-block mega hub is the multi-week aspiration it deserves to be. Hand-priced world icons still top out at 70,000.
  • Windsocks now cost 300-400 Aeros (was 400-500). Every field needs one, and the one functional item everyone places should not cost half a day of flying.
  • Barrels, crates, stickers and other small props that had inherited big-building prices from the packs they shipped in now cost pocket change.
  • Nothing you already own changes: placed objects keep the price you paid, and refunds still return what you actually spent.
Update

Taxiway edge lights, fixed

What's new & fixes

  • Taxi lights no longer bunch up on curves. The sim used to place the bulbs itself, anchored to the segments a curve is built from, so a rounded corner came out with roughly ten times the lights of the straight next to it. We place them ourselves now, evenly, every 20 m - the same through a curve as down a straight.
  • No more lights stranded in the middle of the pavement. Where a taxiway crosses another taxiway or runs onto a runway, its edge lights now stop at the pavement and pick up on the far side, the way a real airport does.
  • What the editor shows at night is now what gets built. The night preview and the package are generated by the same code, bulb for bulb, instead of the preview being an educated guess at what the sim would do.
  • Taxiway corners are the width you asked for. The painted pavement used to narrow by up to 30% at a sharp corner, which is what pushed edge lights out onto the grass. Rebuild an airport to pick this up.
  • Green centreline lights are unchanged - those are painted with the centreline, not placed as fixtures.
Update

Taxi signs are the size the sim actually builds them

What's new & fixes

  • Taxi signs in the editor are now the size MSFS really builds them. A sign board is laid out in fixed-width symbol cells, so it gets wider with every character - a nine-symbol board is 4.7 m of metal at the largest size. The editor drew them at roughly half that, which is why a row of signs that looked neatly spaced on screen came out in the sim as one smeared bar with the middle sign swallowed whole.
  • The sign panel tells you how wide the board runs, and warns you when it is going to land on the sign next to it.
  • A new "Fit to spacing" button drops a colliding row to the largest size that clears, in one click. It resizes the whole row together so a banner stays one consistent size, and it never moves anything you placed - your layout is usually fine, it is the size that does not fit.
  • The size slider will not hand you a board that overlaps its neighbour any more, and says what the largest size that fits is.
  • Airports already built with overlapping signs repair themselves on their next build: the generator steps colliding signs down to a size that fits and tells you it did, so you do not have to go hunting for them.
  • Sign lettering matches the sim. Real airport signs are lettered in the Highway Gothic alphabet, and so are the sim's - the editor was drawing bold Arial, which is why the text never looked quite right.
Update

A grace window on land purchases

Economy & balance

  • Paid land now refunds in full if you release the claim within 24 hours of buying it, as long as you haven't requested a build there. Grabbed the wrong cell, or spotted a better one right after claiming? Release it and the full price comes straight back.
  • One-time launch amnesty: because nobody who bought land before today ever had this window, every paid claim with no build requested qualifies for the full refund for 24 hours from this update going live. Affected owners have a notification with the exact deadline.
  • After the window (or once you've built), the old rule stands: releasing salvages part of your material spend but never the land cost. Land stays the thing worth committing to - and selling claims to other players is coming with the Auction House.

What's new & fixes

  • The release dialog now itemises exactly what comes back: materials salvage, the land refund if you're inside the grace window, and a plain note when the land cost won't be returned - instead of you finding out after the fact.
  • The claim panel says all of this before you buy, not after.
  • Notifications grew a home: a bell in the portal top bar keeps your recent notifications, so a toast you dismissed (or never saw) is no longer gone forever. New ones show a count on the bell.
  • The pop-up toasts themselves are bigger and slide in, instead of quietly materialising in the corner.
Update

The cart now matches what you are charged

Economy & balance

  • Refunded 59,000 Aeros across 14 airports where a material unlock fee bought something that was never used. Unlock fees used to be taken before the save was priced, so a save that then came up short left the fee spent. You keep the unlocked material.
  • Saves are now all or nothing: unlocking a material happens inside the same charge as the rest of the save, so a save you cannot afford changes nothing and costs nothing.
  • The airport stats sign is free again. It is a Supporters Kit item and should never have cost Aeros; a pricing slip on 21 July put it back to Ⓐ110. Everyone charged since has been refunded automatically and keeps their sign.

What's new & fixes

  • The cart now shows money coming back, not just money going out. Removing an object you bought within the last 24 hours lists what it pays back, and the balance line accounts for it. The refund still arrives after the charge clears, so it cannot make an unaffordable save look affordable.
  • What a save did is now readable. Charges, refunds and failures appear in a banner over the map instead of small grey text squeezed between the toolbar buttons, where it was invisible on narrow screens - including the message explaining why a save did not go through.
  • Fixed the cart quoting less than the save actually charged. Objects, lighting and other placements are an account-wide pool, but each copy can only stand in one place - copies already in use at your other airports were being counted as covering a placement, so the total jumped at checkout ('Saved, but the charge failed: Insufficient Aeros').
  • Fixed the missing material unlock line. A free starter surface (the dirt runway you begin with) no longer reads as if you had paid for that material, so using dirt on a taxiway, apron or extra ground area shows its Ⓐ1,000 unlock in the cart instead of failing after the save with 'couldn't unlock Ground · Dirt'.
  • Fixed the first runway of a free starter surface being quoted above its price: the free allotment (6,000 m² dirt runway, 7,000 m² grass taxiway, 9,000 m² grass apron) now shows in the cart before your first save, not only after it.
Update

Taxiway and parking markings are back

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed a ground-layer bug that could hide every yellow taxiway centerline, painted parking T, hold-short bar and ground marking under an apron. Surface layers still stack in the order you choose, but markings now stay naturally above the pavement.
  • The nine airport packages built with the affected layer setting are being rebuilt automatically. You do not need to move an apron, change its layer or rebuild by hand.
v0.1.43

Discord status all session long

What's new & fixes

  • Your Discord activity now shows the whole time the companion is running, not just while MSFS is up: 'In the hangar' with your live airport count between flights, then 'In MSFS 2024' and 'Flying in MSFS 2024' with a timer once you're in the sim.
  • Same switch as before under Flight tracking ('Show flight status on Discord') if you'd rather not broadcast.
v0.1.42

Your flight status on Discord

What's new & fixes

  • The companion now shows a Discord activity while MSFS 2024 is running: 'In MSFS 2024' on the ground, 'Flying in MSFS 2024' with a flight timer once a flight starts, how many of your custom airports are live, and a 'Build your own airport' button on your profile for anyone who views it.
  • On by default, and only active while the sim runs - the companion sitting in your tray never broadcasts anything. Turn it off under Flight tracking ('Show flight status on Discord'). Talks only to the Discord app on your own PC.
Update

One leveling slider for the whole airport

What's new & fixes

  • Extra ground areas no longer have their own leveling slider - every area follows the Terrain tool's Ground leveling slider, so one control means one thing everywhere. Areas touching your main field level with the field; detached patches still level where they sit; each area keeps its own Height adjustment nudge.
  • Fixed the 'reversed' area behavior this confusion caused: an area could sit as a plateau at 100% leveling yet look perfectly flat at 0% - a leftover typed-in elevation from the old per-area elevation box was overriding the new touching-areas-level-with-the-field rule. Stored fixed elevations now only apply to detached areas.
  • Clicking your main ground cover with the Select tool now opens the Ground tool (its settings panel) instead of dead-clicking - extra areas already selected like aprons, and the primary field shouldn't behave differently.
Update

Terrain preview: reliable on load, no more phantom plateaus

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: opening an airport with leveling at 100% could show un-flattened terrain until you wiggled the slider - the preview sometimes computed before the terrain tiles finished loading and then cached the empty result. It now detects the blind build and retries automatically until the real heights are in.
  • Ground areas that TOUCH your main field now level with the field instead of flattening to their own hilltop or hollow - no more grass mesas or trenches butted against a flat airfield. This applies in the editor preview and in the compiled airport alike; detached areas on remote ground still keep their own elevation, and manually-typed elevations always win.
  • Smoothed away the jagged saw-tooth edges the preview drew along diagonal boundaries of leveled areas.
Update

Terrain gets its own tool — and 6,000 sculpt points

What's new & fixes

  • Terrain shaping moved out of the crowded Ground tray into its own Terrain tool (press L, mountain icon in the build bar). Everything that shapes the land lives there now: the four sculpt brushes with a points meter, brush size, the Ground leveling slider and the whole-airport Height adjustment. A brush is armed the moment you open the tool; Esc drops back to Select.
  • The sculpt budget jumps from 1,600 to 6,000 points (~60 hectares of solid coverage). What the sim actually pays for is terraform polygons, not your points - so at compile time, neighbouring points at matching heights now merge into single strips (a plateau raised with a wide brush becomes a handful of polygons instead of hundreds), points inside a leveled field keep riding the existing leveling cells for free, and a hard polygon budget backstops the package either way - the build warns if sculpting ever exceeds it instead of silently trimming.
Update

Ground layers: control what paints over what

What's new & fixes

  • Every painted ground surface — aprons, taxiway pavement, ground areas and boat ramps — now sits in one layer stack, Photoshop-style. A new Ground layers panel on the right rail lists the whole stack top-first; click a row to select that shape on the map, use the arrows to reorder. The selected shape's own panel shows its position too, with move up/down/front/back buttons.
  • Layers work across types: put a ground area over an apron, tuck a taxiway under a ground area, or stack shapes to build logos and compound ground art — whatever sits higher in the stack paints on top, in the editor and in MSFS.
  • The runway holds a fixed line in the stack. Shapes above it cover the runway (as pavement in the sim always has); shapes moved below it show the runway through them where they overlap — so a taxiway can pass under the runway at one crossing and over it at another (split the taxiway in two and layer each half).
  • The editor preview now paints ground surfaces in the exact order the sim will — before this, the preview drew runways over aprons while the sim did the opposite. Existing airports are untouched: the default order is exactly what always compiled.
  • Ground text is layerable too: painted text and its background panels get their own marking stack (they always paint above pavement — that's how the sim renders markings). Reorder from the text's panel or the Markings & text section of the Ground layers panel — so logo builders control which panel sits behind which letters.
Update

Airport codes now cap at 6 characters so nav systems accept them

What's new & fixes

  • Airport codes are now 3 to 6 characters (down from 7). In-sim nav devices - the G1000 MFD and others - only accept idents up to 6 characters, so a 7-character code would show on the map but couldn't be typed into a flight plan.
  • If you had a 7-character code, we dropped its last character (nudging it if that clashed with another airport or a real-world code) and sent you an in-app note with the new code. It picks up on your next build; you can pick any other free 6-character code in the builder whenever you like.
Update

Put the ruler down: alignment guides + one-click Straighten

What's new & fixes

  • Dragging a corner of an apron, taxiway, fence, ground area or the ground-cover boundary now snaps it into alignment with the shape's own corners — drop it near the line through its neighbours and it clicks perfectly straight, keep pulling along a straight run and it stays dead straight, or line it up square (along the runway grid) with any other corner of the same shape. A dashed magenta guide line shows exactly what you're lining up with while it's snapping, so you can see the alignment instead of eyeballing it against a ruler held to the monitor.
  • The same guides work while drawing: lay down a long edge and each new corner offers to continue it perfectly straight.
  • New Straighten edges button on the apron, taxiway, fence, ground area and ground-cover panels: one click snaps almost-straight runs of corners exactly onto their line — hand-drag wobble vanishes, deliberate corners and real curves are left alone. The button tells you how many corners it would move, and greys out when everything's already true.
  • Hold Ctrl while dragging a corner to lock the edge to 15° angles (drawing already had this; now edits do too). Shift still means freehand — no snapping at all.
Update

Fixed: vanishing hangars, tower and floodlights

What's new & fixes

  • If a hangar, the control tower or a floodlight recently disappeared from your airport (or from an airport you visited), that's fixed. A packaging bug in the last few library-building updates made several rebuilt buildings overwrite each other's model file inside the shared objects package, so only one of them survived on any given PC — the small lower-class hangar, the M and XS upper-class hangars, the airport tower and both floodlights could go invisible depending on install order.
  • All six buildings have been republished and your companion app repairs this automatically on its next sync (it runs when MSFS closes, or overnight). The buildings are back the next time you start the sim after that sync — no need to rebuild your airport or touch anything.
  • Heads-up if you peek inside the Community folder: rebuilt buildings no longer get their own folder under projectairports-objects\scenery — their models now live in a shared scenery\ml\ folder with per-building file names. A package folder "disappearing" from there after an update is normal now.
Update

Terrain sculpting: RollerCoaster Tycoon feel, way less lag, 4× the points

What's new & fixes

  • Sculpting now works like RCT's land tool: press the ground and drag up or down and it steps a meter at a time — chunky, predictable, and live. A plain click steps +1 m, Alt-click (or Ctrl-click) steps −1 m, and holding Shift gives smooth fine control for final trims. An on-map hint bar teaches the gesture and turns into a live height readout (+3.2 m) while you drag.
  • The lag is gone: a brush stroke now recomputes only the patch of terrain you touched and reloads just those few map tiles, instead of rebuilding the entire 3D terrain on every wiggle. Editing anything else at your airport no longer re-renders the terrain at all unless the ground actually changed.
  • Keyboard: [ and ] (or Alt+scroll) resize the brush, keys 1-4 switch between Raise/lower, Smooth, Flatten and Erase, Esc drops back to the normal Ground handles - and clicking the active mode again turns it off.
  • Your sculpted points now stay visible (and editable) whenever the Ground tool is open, the Remove-all button no longer hides when no brush is armed, pressing outside the buildable circle tells you why nothing happened, and the sculpt budget is up from 400 to 1,600 points.
  • The one place sculpting doesn't apply is the runway strip itself (it's forced level so you can't accidentally break your own runway) - that zone now shows as a red dashed area while a sculpt brush is armed, and pressing it tells you the strip stays level instead of silently doing nothing.
  • In-sim fidelity: sculpted airports now compile their leveling grid at the sculpt lattice's own 10 m detail (where the field is small enough to afford it), so mounds and dips built inside a leveled field survive into MSFS instead of being averaged away by coarse cells.
  • Smooth and Flatten are instant now. Flatten sets the ground to the height where you pressed in a single pass - press to pick the height, paint to spread a level shelf at exactly that height. Smooth irons out real terrain bumps, not just your own sculpting, so it finally does something on untouched ground. Both used to creep toward their result by reading the on-screen terrain, which trails the brush by half a second - they now compute against the terrain model directly.
Update

The editor's terrain now shows what you'll actually get — and you can sculpt it

What's new & fixes

  • The 3D world in the airport editor now renders your terraforming live. Set the ground leveling slider and the terrain under your boundary visibly flattens; raise or lower the field and the ground moves with it; at full leveling the runway strip levels its own pad too. No more building on humps in the editor that the build later irons out — what you see in 3D is the shape the build will make, and objects sit on the previewed surface at the heights they'll have in the sim.
  • New: Terrain sculpting in the Ground tool. Press on the ground in Adjust mode and drag up or down to raise mounds or cut hollows — RCT-style — with Smooth, Level, and Erase brushes alongside, a brush-size slider, and full undo. Your sculpts terraform into MSFS on the next build using the same proven ground-leveling machinery, up to 400 sculpted points per airport, clamped to ±25 m and always inside your buildable area.
  • Sculpting works on natural ground, on partially leveled fields, and even inside a fully flattened pad; the runway strip itself always stays level so you can't sculpt your own runway unusable. Edits fade into the surrounding terrain over a distance that scales with how much earth you moved, exactly like the field-edge grading.
Update

100% ground leveling actually levels now

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: with ground leveling at 100%, the sim was silently ignoring the flatten and leaving the field as raw hillside — only the runway strip itself sat level, while taxiways and aprons climbed whatever terrain was under them. Airports on flat land never showed it; hilly ones did, badly. Rebuild your airport to pick up the fix.
  • New: a Height adjustment control in the Ground tool. If your built field sits proud of the surrounding land or sinks into it, nudge the whole airport — ground, runway and all — up or down in meters from the automatic height. Each extra ground area has the same control for its own pad, replacing the old type-the-elevation-in-feet box.
  • The edge of a fully leveled field now grades into the surrounding terrain over a distance that scales with how much earth was moved — up to 300 m for deep hillside cuts — instead of a fixed narrow band. No more crater walls and hard-angled creases where a pad meets a hill; the deeper the cut or fill, the longer and gentler the slope.
Update

Parked planes look like planes on the map

What's new & fixes

  • Aircraft and liveries placed in the editor now render as their real 3D models on the claims map, public airport pages, and the homepage tour. They previously drew as a giant gray box that never went away, no matter how far you zoomed in.
v0.1.40

Your flying makes the terrain better

What's new & fixes

  • The companion now quietly measures the sim's real terrain height whenever you fly low (below ~2,500 ft) near a claimed airport — no setup, no prompts, nothing to click. It's the same altitude data it already tracks, put to a second use.
  • Those measurements calibrate the ground-leveling system: with the slider anywhere between natural and flat, rebuilds snap the field onto the terrain your sim actually renders instead of a public elevation database's slightly-off copy of it. The more an airport gets flown — yours or anyone's — the better its next rebuild sits.
  • Only untouched terrain around a field is used; readings over already-leveled ground are ignored automatically.
Update

Ground leveling that follows the land

What's new & fixes

  • The ground leveling slider between 0 and 100% no longer stamps random-looking bumps into your field. The partial-leveling surface is now smoothed before it's blended toward your field elevation, so a half-leveled field reads as gently ironed terrain — the real slope survives, the elevation-data noise doesn't.
  • The leveled surface now runs all the way to your ground boundary and feathers wide into the surrounding terrain there. Previously it could stop up to a full cell short of the edge, leaving raised lips and sunken rims around the perimeter — the most-reported symptom.
  • Existing airports pick this up on their next rebuild. Fully flat (100%) and fully natural (0%) fields are unchanged.
Update

Your trees are safe now (and cheaper)

Economy & balance

  • All foliage biomes cost 20% less per 100 m².
  • Big forests got a volume discount on top: the first 5,000 m² of a biome bills at full price, the next 10,000 m² at 60%, everything beyond at 35%. Painting shill's 2.5-hectare woodland again would now cost under half of what it did.
  • The discount tracks your account's pool of each biome, so ten small paints cost exactly what one big one does.

What's new & fixes

  • The bald ring is dead: building a ground area no longer shaves the world's trees outside your boundary. The exclusion now stops at the edge you actually paid for — reported by Radnaitomi, shill and 1L2P, diagnosed within the hour.
  • Prefer the clearing? A new "Clear trees beyond the boundary" toggle in the Ground tray brings the old wide-band behavior back per airport — handy for keeping trees off your final approach.
  • Existing airports pick the fix up on their next rebuild — the world's own trees then return around your field on their own.
  • shill: your hand-replanted 12,400₳ forest at EPSHI has been removed and refunded in full — the autogen trees it stood in for are coming back for free.
v0.1.39

Neofly, but sturdier

What's new & fixes

  • Your airports now keep the same identity inside Neofly's database across every update we make — previously each refresh re-registered them, which could quietly confuse a career that referenced the old entry. If Neofly ever misbehaved after our automatic update, this was the likely culprit; it's fixed.
  • The automatic merge is far more careful around Neofly installs and updates: it waits for Neofly's files to fully settle before touching them, and it never overwrites its safety backup with a file it hasn't first verified.
  • Neofly installed somewhere unusual (Steam, another drive)? The companion's Neofly section no longer hides itself — it now offers "Locate navdata.sqlite…" so you can point it at your install and get your airports into Neofly's missions.
  • Reminder: none of this needs MSFS running, and no manual NavDataReader/Merger steps — the companion does the whole merge itself. Just have Neofly closed when it runs.
Update

Project backlog

What's new & fixes

  • You asked in Discord, we went through the whole thread. The backlog, cleared:
  • Water runways don't eat a runway slot anymore — splash down as often as you like.
  • Taxi signs and ground text finally have a Duplicate button. Copy to your heart's content.
  • There's a UTC clock in the app now, so no more midnight timezone maths before the daily reset.
  • Black ground text paints black in the sim instead of flipping white. The sim just needed a stern word.
  • New 'revert to vanilla' switch: yank an airport out of the sim without deleting it, then pop it back whenever.
  • The Workers object stopped taking the whole editor down with it. Rude of it, honestly.
  • Loads more apps count toward your concurrent bonus — FS Kingpin, ChasePlane, Sky4Sim, FSLTL, FlightEvents, ELEVATEX, REX Atmos Core, SimFly and friends.
  • Detection got less fussy too: it spots Pro/Plus/+ editions without us chasing the exact program name.
  • Bonus round: new Discord channels for building, hardware, media and group-flight voice. Come hang out.
  • Keep the ideas coming — this list only got long because you did.
v0.1.38

More of your apps count toward the bonus

What's new & fixes

  • The companion now recognises a lot more of the tools you fly with — FS Kingpin, ChasePlane, Sky4Sim, FSLTL, FlightEvents, ELEVATEX, REX Atmos Core, ActiveSky and SimFly among them — so running them alongside the sim counts toward your concurrent-app bonus.
  • Detection is more forgiving too: it now matches an app even when its program name shifts between editions (Pro/Plus/+ variants, spacing differences), so new tools light up without waiting on an app update.
  • Requested by builders on Discord — keep the suggestions coming, and tell us any app that still isn't detected along with its Task Manager name.
Update

Build status stamps you can read

What's new & fixes

  • The build-status stamp on your airport cards was a see-through tint sitting on the aerial render - over green terrain, "queued" and "built" all but vanished. The stamps are now solid ink-bordered chips that read on any backdrop.
  • "Running" is now labelled "building". More than one of you read "running" as "up and running", synced, and launched the sim mid-build - the stamp now says what's actually happening. Your airport is ready when it says "built".
v0.1.37

Neofly stays fixed

What's new & fixes

  • When Neofly updates itself it wipes its airport database - the companion now notices the file change the moment it happens and puts your airports back within minutes of Neofly closing, instead of waiting for the next sync. No more "the morning after, everything disappeared".
  • Your own airports now reach YOUR Neofly even if you keep them unlisted on the site - the app identifies itself when fetching mission data, so "unlisted" no longer quietly means "not in my Neofly".
  • When one of your airports can't be a Neofly mission target at all (no runway or helipad yet), the app now names it in the Neofly status line and says why, instead of silently skipping it.
  • Fixed a corner case where the companion could clear its own airports out of Neofly if it couldn't read the local install list - it now leaves Neofly alone and retries instead.
v0.1.36

The wallet explains itself

What's new & fixes

  • The app's Exploring line now splits its total into "New airports" (your tour) and "Visitors to yours" (owner income) - shown as one number, a busy field's owner income read like the tour paying out more than the full-tour 1,000.
  • When some of today's arrivals paid Ⓐ0, the app now says so - and why - instead of leaving a "5/5 airports but only Ⓐ100" puzzle.
  • The landing toast stops guessing: it now distinguishes "paid on approach" (the fly-in credited the visit seconds before touchdown), "already visited today", "daily tour complete", and "getting here was faster than flying".
Update

Airport visits: clearer numbers, straighter answers

Economy & balance

  • Nothing about what visits pay has changed - but after this morning's reports we dug through every unpaid visit of the last two days, and they all had the same cause: arriving by teleport or slew inside one running flight. That's the anti-cheat working as intended - a hop the server clocks at several thousand knots pays no visitor bonus and no owner income. Flying in, or repositioning through the world map (which starts a fresh flight), pays as normal. This is now spelled out in the Field Manual.
  • One genuine bug in that anti-cheat is fixed: two Project Airports fields sitting close enough to share one low pass could trip it, so the second field of the pair paid nothing. Neighbouring fields now judge the hop over the full tracking window and pay correctly.

What's new & fixes

  • The website wallet's Exploring section shows the same split ("New airports" / "Visitors to yours") and now notes when some of today's arrivals paid Ⓐ0 and why.
Update

The catalogue more than doubled overnight

What's new & fixes

  • The Hangar Catalogue grew from around ten thousand placeable objects to nearly twenty-five thousand. The new arrivals: the bespoke buildings from ninety-plus of the sim's handcrafted airports (terminals, towers, hangars and all their clutter), the worldwide gliderport structures, oil-rig platforms, helipads, and the sim's full modern vehicle fleet - buses, minibuses, motorbikes, harvesters and de-ice trucks in every colour they ship in.
  • Static aircraft are here: 343 parked planes and helicopters - airliners, GA props, gliders and helis, many with several airline liveries each - ready to dress your ramps and tie-downs. Find them on the new aircraft shelf.
  • Nearly every object in the store now has a proper studio thumbnail and a spin-around 3D preview, so you can see exactly what you're buying before you spend a single Aero.
  • One import from outside the sim too: a Skoda Octavia RS to park next to the Kodiaq (model by D.U. on Sketchfab, CC-BY).
Update

Single-digit runway numbers keep their leading zero

What's new & fixes

  • A runway numbered below 10 - say the 07 end of an 07/25 strip - was painted in the sim as a bare "7", even though the builder preview showed "07". The compiled airport now ships the zero-padded number, so the paint on the tarmac matches the preview. Already-built airports pick this up the next time they rebuild.
Update

Flight income no longer tapers off during the day

Economy & balance

  • Per-minute flight earnings used to shrink the longer you flew in a single day - starting at the full rate and easing down toward half after a full day in the air. That made the on-screen rate a moving target: the same setup could read Ⓐ4/min early on and Ⓐ3/min after a long session, which looked like a nerf when nothing had actually changed. The taper is gone. Flight income is now a flat rate all day - your flight multiplier times the base rate, first minute to last. The daily paycheck cap is unchanged.
Update

Cars. Lots of cars.

What's new & fixes

  • The catalogue's vehicle shelf just grew from a handful of cars to the sim's whole garage: every parked car, SUV, sport car, truck, camper and van in MSFS's own prop library, in every colour it ships in - plus the branded car pack (Skoda Kodiaq, Audi Q7, Land Rover Discovery, Porsche Cayman, Tesla Model 3 and friends) that was hiding on the landmarks shelf, now filed under vehicles where you'd actually look for it.
  • Filling a car park no longer means placing cars one at a time: there are ready-made parked-car rows and full lots - lines of 7, 16 or 32 cars, packs from 4 up to 250 cars, even a stocked dealer lot - each placed (and priced) as a single object.
  • Parked car lines used to show up in the editor as a flat purple rectangle; you had to build and load the sim to see what you'd bought. They now render as the actual row of cars in the editor, on your airport's public page and on the claims map, like every other 3D object.
Update

The snap grid now follows your runway

What's new & fixes

  • The builder's snap grid lines up with your airport instead of the compass. It's anchored to the first runway you placed and rotated to its heading, so taxiways, aprons, stands and objects dropped onto it sit square with the runway - no more eyeballing whether that hangar row is actually parallel to the strip. Two brighter lines cross at the runway's center so you can see the alignment at a glance.
  • The grid finally has a spacing control: with the grid on, click the number next to the grid button to step through 5, 10, 25, 50 and 100 m. Tight spacing for lining up objects, wide for blocking out the big shapes.
  • Grid on/off and spacing now stick between visits, like your other tool settings. Hold Shift to place something off-grid, same as always.
v0.1.35

Airports that were frozen in time are unstuck

What's new & fixes

  • If your airport stopped changing in the sim - new buildings never turned up, markings stayed put, the stats sign sat on an old count - the companion now fixes it on the next sync. An older copy of your airport had been left behind in your Community folder, and MSFS was loading that one instead of the current one. Sync was telling you the truth when it said everything was up to date; it just wasn't the copy the sim was reading.
  • Those leftover folders are now cleared out on every sync, so a stale copy can't outrank your real airport again. Only old Project Airports folders are removed - scenery and add-ons you installed yourself are never touched.
  • Nothing to do on your end: update, sync once, and load the airport.
Update

Live build status, and a gentler build queue

What's new & fixes

  • Press Build & sync and the popup now tracks your build live - queued with your place in line and a rough wait, then "building", then "built & live" (or the reason it failed) - all without refreshing the page.
  • The editor's Build button shows the same at a glance: a little status chip while a build is queued or compiling, so you always know whether one is already running.
  • Builds are now limited to one every 5 minutes per person. Rapid-fire submissions were stacking up several builds at once and slowing the queue for everyone; the button now counts down to when you can start the next one.
Update

Neofly learns your airports on its own

What's new & fixes

  • Fly Neofly? The companion app now adds every Project Airports field you have installed straight into Neofly's mission database - they show up as departure and destination airports for jobs, with runway lengths, surfaces, fuel and helipads all filled in. No navdatareader, no NeoflyNavdataMerger, no running the sim to extract scenery: it just happens after each sync.
  • When Neofly updates itself it resets its airport database; the companion notices and quietly puts your airports back. It keeps a backup of Neofly's original database next to the real one (navdata.sqlite.pa-backup), never writes while Neofly is open, and airports you uninstall or unpublish clean themselves out of the mission list.
  • It's on automatically when a Neofly install is detected - the Region sync card grows a Neofly section where you can see what's merged or switch it off.
Update

The Airports page has pictures again

What's new & fixes

  • Every published airport now has an approach view on the Airports page - a tilted aerial looking down the main runway. Renders had quietly stopped generating, so most fields were sitting there as blank cards; every published airport has been re-rendered.
  • The render shows the whole field, not a distant speck: your hangars, terminals, control tower, taxi signs, windsocks, flags, approach antennas, perimeter fences and painted trees are all in the picture now, framed so nothing you built gets cropped off the edge.
  • Your own MSFS screenshots no longer stand in for the approach view on the directory. They belong to your airport's own page, where they get shown properly instead of being cropped into a thumbnail.
Update

The airport stats sign stops eating names, and counts visits

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed the stats sign cutting text off mid-letter - visitor names like CowTown, SINCE dates, and airport titles could stop dead partway through a word depending on where they sat on the panel. Same fix everywhere the sign face shows up: the builder preview, the catalogue, and the sign compiled into the sim.
  • The sign's big number is now VISITS instead of landings, matching how arriving pays. Since visit counting only just started, every sign begins near zero and climbs from here - your landing history isn't lost, it's just not what the sign counts anymore. Recent arrivals still show pilots who landed before the change, and the sign now refreshes when someone visits, not only when someone lands.
  • Long names now shrink to fit their column on the sign instead of running off the edge.
  • Sign lettering got proper kerning, so the type sits the way the typeface intended.
  • The catalogue picture for the stats sign was still showing the sign's original design - it now matches what actually gets placed at your field.
v0.1.34

Choose where the companion installs

What's new & fixes

  • The installer now asks where to put the app instead of silently dropping it in AppData. If you keep your sim add-ons on a separate drive, you can install it there.
  • It also asks whether to install for just you or for everyone on the PC. "Just me" stays the default and still needs no administrator prompt.
  • The default folder is unchanged (C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Local\Programs\Project Airports), and updating an existing install keeps it exactly where it is - updates still apply silently in the background, with no setup wizard and nothing to click.
v0.1.33

Go somewhere new: visiting airports now pays, and the tracker stops dropping out

Economy & balance

  • The first five different Project Airports fields you visit each day now pay a bonus, and it grows with each one: 100₳, 150₳, 200₳, 250₳, 300₳. Fly the full tour and that's 1,000₳ - roughly double what a free day used to be worth. It has to be a field a player built and published - real-world and default MSFS airports don't pay - and your own airport counts as one of the five.
  • That bonus does NOT count against your daily cap. Neither does the income you earn from pilots visiting your airport. The cap now only limits flying and idle time, so exploring is the one thing that can lift your ceiling - which is the point.
  • You no longer have to land. You're counted as visiting the moment you're inside the airport's boundary below 100 ft - that's the whole airport area, not just the runway, so you don't have to line up with anything. A low pass or a go-around counts the same as a full stop.
  • Landings themselves no longer pay directly - arriving is what pays now, wheels down or not. Your lifetime landing count and the first-landing milestone are unchanged.
  • One bonus per airport per day, so circuits at your home field pay flight income but not a second bonus. For the same reason, an airport owner is now paid once per visitor per day rather than once per landing.
  • Building a bigger field now keeps paying. Visit income used to be 1% of your airport's invested value capped at 250₳, which meant it stopped growing at 22,500₳ invested - a sum you pass quickly, after which a 22.5k strip and a 250k showpiece paid their owners exactly the same. It now follows a curve that keeps rising until roughly 98,000₳ invested, topping out at 400₳ a visitor.
  • What a visitor pays you, by what you've put into the field: a bare strip 25₳, 5,000₳ invested → 110₳, 22,500₳ → 205₳, 50,000₳ → 293₳, ~98,000₳ and up → 400₳. Still up to 20 paid visitors a day, and still on top of your daily cap.

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed the big one: the tracker would quietly stop crediting you roughly an hour into a session, and only an app restart brought it back. Your login token refreshes every hour, and the app was mistaking that refresh for a new sign-in - which tore down the flight it was tracking. Points stopped, landings were thrown away, and the app went on saying "Flying - tracking" the whole time. That's fixed, and it was the cause of most "my points stopped" reports.
  • The tracker now repairs itself. If it ever loses its flight session mid-flight - a dropped connection, a server blip, anything - it opens a new one and carries on, instead of silently earning nothing for the rest of the flight.
  • A landing that can't be submitted right away is now held and retried instead of being discarded.
  • A SimConnect connection that wedges while you're paused or in a menu is now detected and reconnected. Previously it could sit there dead until you restarted the app.
  • The app now tells you when tracking has actually stopped, instead of claiming everything is fine. If it can't reach Project Airports it says so.
Update

The foliage preview shows the density you painted

What's new & fixes

  • Painting foliage at 100% and then growing the area made the preview look thinner and thinner, as if the density were dropping. It wasn't: the builder can only draw so many 3D models at once, and it was spreading that fixed number across whatever you painted. Your airport always built at the density you chose - only the preview was lying.
  • The preview now holds the spacing you painted no matter how big the zone gets. Once a zone is large enough to exhaust the model budget, the stand-ins scale up to cover the same ground instead of thinning out.
  • Growing a zone no longer reshuffles the foliage already in it. Trees stay exactly where they were and new ones fill in the new ground, so brushing adds rather than re-rolls - and the preview no longer reloads the whole forest on every stroke.
  • A newly painted area used to come in sparse because zones painted earlier had eaten the model budget. It's now shared out by how much each zone needs.
Update

Small patches of foliage cost what they should

Economy & balance

  • Foliage is now priced per 100 m² painted instead of per 1,000 m². The rate per square metre is unchanged - a biome that cost 600₳ per 1,000 m² is now 60₳ per 100 m², so a big forest costs exactly what it did before.
  • Foliage you already own has been restated in the new unit, so you keep every square metre you paid for. Nothing to reclaim, nothing to re-buy.

What's new & fixes

  • Painting a small patch of foliage overcharged you. Foliage is sold in whole units, and a unit used to be 1,000 m² - so a single dab of the 5 m brush, about 25 m², rounded up to a full unit and charged the full price. That's fixed: the unit is now 100 m², and the same dab costs a tenth of what it did.
  • Painting one biome at several densities also used to round up once per density. All of a biome's paint is now added together before rounding, so you're charged for the ground you covered, once.
  • Large areas are unaffected - they were always billed at the correct rate.
Update

Ground cover stays inside your airport area

What's new & fixes

  • Ground cover is the natural surface laid around whatever you place, and it extends past your features by the ground margin. If you built near the edge of your airport area, that margin could reach out over the boundary - and over your claim - and paint terrain on land that isn't yours.
  • It now stops at your airport area, following the edge of the circle instead of being cut back to a straight line, so you keep every metre of cover you're entitled to right up to the boundary.
  • Airports already built this way keep the terrain they painted until you rebuild them. Rebuild to clear it.
  • A runway can also no longer be dragged so that part of it sits over the boundary. It used to let you, and then the build refused it.
  • Previously only a ground boundary you drew by hand was held inside your airport area; the one generated for you wasn't.
Update

The queue tells you when builds are on hold

What's new & fixes

  • When the build servers are down - either because we're working on them or because they've dropped out - the queue badge in the top bar turns amber and says On hold. Click it and it tells you plainly what's happening.
  • Nothing is lost when builds are on hold. Your airports keep saving exactly as normal, and anything you queue starts building by itself the moment the servers are back. Keep building.
  • Previously the queue just showed a wait time that quietly stopped being true.
Update

You can delete your own account

What's new & fixes

  • Settings has a Delete account section. It closes your account and erases everything on it - your airports, your land claims, your Aeros and objects, your flight history. You have to tick a box and type DELETE MY ACCOUNT, and it shows you your real numbers first, because none of it can be brought back afterwards.
  • Deleting frees your land: every cell you had claimed goes straight back on the map for someone else to take.
  • Supporters: your perks go with the account and cannot be restored, not even by signing up again with the same email. If you are a supporter and you're only trying to leave, email us first - we would rather talk.
  • Previously the only way to delete an account was to email and wait for us to do it by hand.
Update

Logos: place a creator's platform, fund their airport

Economy & balance

  • A creator's logo platform costs 1,000 Aeros to place, and every single Aero of that goes to the creator it belongs to, as income. Nothing is skimmed. If you like what someone is building, putting their logo on your apron now helps pay for their next runway.
  • Creators place their own platform for free, and earn nothing from it - no self-dealing. The Project Airports house logo is free for everyone.
  • Because the money goes straight to the creator, a placed logo platform is not refundable. It stays in your pool though: move it or re-place it anywhere, any time, for free.

What's new & fixes

  • The Logos shelf is now in everyone's catalogue. It used to be visible only to the handful of people who owned a logo platform, which meant almost nobody knew creator logos existed - the exact opposite of the point.
  • Catalogue previews always show an object's current art. A creator who re-baked their logo could still be shown the platform they replaced, because the preview was cached under a URL that never changed.
Update

Airport codes: unique, real-world-safe, up to 7 characters

What's new & fixes

  • Airport codes can no longer match a real-world airport's code (ICAO, GPS or local - we check against the full OurAirports dataset of ~100k). Pick KJFK and your field would fight the real JFK inside MSFS; now the builder simply won't let it happen. Existing airports using a real code were moved to a close variant and their owners notified.
  • Codes are unique across the whole network - first come, first served - and can be 3-7 letters/numbers now. The builder checks availability live as you type.
  • Airports show up in MSFS under exactly the code you typed, with a ' | PA' tag on the airport NAME so community fields are still recognizable on the world map. Takes effect on your next build.
  • A word filter keeps slurs and profanity out of airport codes, including the l33t-spelled kind.
  • If this morning's 5-character limit shortened your code, check your notifications: original 6-7 character codes were restored automatically where possible.
v0.1.32

Playing nice with SPAD.neXt and friends

What's new & fixes

  • For pilots whose OTHER SimConnect apps (SPAD.neXt, panel software) had their events stall while the companion ran, flushing only when it exited: airport decorations now spawn in much gentler bursts (6 per tick instead of 20). Creating objects runs on the sim's shared SimConnect dispatch, and hammering it can starve every other connected app.
  • New 'Inject airport decorations' checkbox on the Flight tracking card: switch decoration spawning off entirely without giving up flight tracking and earning. If another SimConnect app misbehaves while the companion runs, untick it and tell us - that isolates the cause for us.
  • Fixed the companion getting permanently stuck on 'Waiting for MSFS…' until restart when a malformed or non-IPv4 SimConnect.cfg sits in your home folder (common with SPAD.neXt/FSUIPC remote setups) - the SimConnect connection attempt could hang forever; it now times out and retries properly.
v0.1.31

Flight tracking you can trust + a near-live claims map

Economy & balance

  • Landings that should have counted now do. The one-per-second sample that catches your wheels touching often reads roughly zero vertical speed, and the server refused to pay anything not strictly descending - so perfectly normal landings were randomly 'logged' instead of counted. Client and server now agree, and the companion reports the descent rate from the last airborne moment.
  • Long flights pay their full distance bonus again. A brief SimConnect hiccup mid-flight used to silently restart your flight session, wiping the flight's starting point and accrued time - which could shrink a long-haul payout to nothing. The companion now rides out drops for up to 10 minutes and resumes the SAME session.
  • A landing that can't reach the server right away (network blip, PC shut down) now retries against the right flight: it remembers its own session and touchdown time, cannot be double-paid, and no longer gets stuck retrying forever.
  • The companion now shows what a landing actually paid - including 'daily cap reached' when the landing counted but your daily earn cap was already full, instead of it looking like a silent failure.

What's new & fixes

  • Live traffic on the claims map is near-live now: planes render about 15-25 seconds behind the sim instead of a minute or more. Same smooth replay of your real flight path, much less delay - on /explore and on public airport pages.
  • Flight tracking tolerates busy SimConnect setups (SPAD.neXt, panels, streaming overlays) much better: the stale-data watchdog waits 90 seconds instead of 20 before declaring the connection wedged, and a reconnect resumes your flight instead of starting a throwaway session - so active time, your boost, map visibility and landing credit all survive the blip.
Update

Extra ground areas + apron polish

Economy & balance

  • Extra ground areas bill by size as ground material - the cheapest per-m² material there is (grass is free to unlock; dirt/gravel use the material fee you may have already paid elsewhere). Your main ground cover stays completely free.

What's new & fixes

  • You can now draw EXTRA ground areas - separate patches of cleared ground anywhere in your buildable area, not just the one field around your runway. Skip across a road, or build a detached corner of your claim without stringing aprons together. Find the button in the Ground tool. How many you can have grows with your buildable-area level: 2 at level 1, up to 8 at the top.
  • Each extra area has fully independent settings: its own surface (grass/dirt/gravel), its own ground leveling, corner rounding and edge blend - including per-corner curve overrides, just like the main boundary. A detached area on a hillside levels to ITS OWN terrain height, not the main field's, so no craters and no floating plateaus.
  • Extra areas get everything the main field gets: photogrammetry cleanup underneath, trees/buildings/rocks excluded inside, runways cut out so painted strips still show through, and they render on the claims map.
  • Aprons: new free 'Painted edge line' option - a solid painted boundary line around the apron perimeter, like real-world apron markings. Sits next to Perimeter lights.
  • Aprons now remember your last used settings the way taxiways learned to: the surface and checkboxes from the last apron you placed OR edited are what the next one starts with.
  • Fixed the Ground tool's Edge blend slider showing out of range on fresh airports (new claims start at 12 m but the slider stopped at 10), and the rounding/blend sliders now reset to the new-airport look instead of a harder-edged one.
v0.1.30

Companion: sync got dramatically faster

What's new & fixes

  • Syncing airports to your Community folder is now several times faster. The companion downloads a few packages at once while it installs, fetches its download links in one batch instead of one at a time, and rebuilds the folder bookkeeping MSFS reads once per sync instead of once per airport - that last one alone was most of the wait once you had a lot of airports installed.
  • When an airport gets rebuilt (a supporter sign updating its stats, for example), the companion now writes only the files that actually changed instead of rewriting the whole airport package - easier on your disk and much quicker.
  • Installing no longer freezes the companion: the heavy disk work moved off the main thread, so the dashboard and tray stay responsive during a big sync.
  • Nothing about what lands in your Community folder changed - same packages, same checksums, same self-repair when something on disk goes missing or gets corrupted.
Update

The airport stats sign is free

Economy & balance

  • The live airport stats sign now costs nothing to place. It is a Supporters Kit item - supporter status is the price, and charging ₳2,000 on top of that was never the intent.
  • Everyone who already bought one has been refunded in full, automatically. You keep the sign; the Aeros are back in your wallet.
Update

The taxiway tool grew up

What's new & fixes

  • You can now add nodes to a placed taxiway: select it and drag the hollow dot in the middle of any segment. It splits the segment right there, so adding a curve to an existing taxiway is one gesture instead of a full redraw. Aprons and fences got the same midpoint handles - and fence nodes are now draggable at all, which they never were.
  • Grab a selected taxiway's pavement (not a handle) and drag to move the whole thing in one piece - its hold-short bars and the taxi signs standing beside it ride along, and the same is true when you move taxiways as a Ctrl-selected group. Works for aprons and fences too.
  • The taxiway tool now remembers your last-used settings. Place or restyle a taxiway and the next one starts from that same surface, width, corner radius, centerline and lighting - it no longer snaps back to whatever your first taxiway used, and it survives a reload. Apron, fence, boat-ramp and parking presets are remembered the same way.
  • New Saved pieces shelf in the taxiway tray: select any section of your layout - one taxiway or a whole Ctrl-selected junction - and hit Save as piece. It keeps its exact curves, surfaces and lighting, you can rename it on the shelf, and one click stamps it back down anywhere: this airport or your next one.
  • Connecting a stand to the taxiway network is finally visible: every auto-connected parking spot shows its planned yellow lead-in as a dashed preview line in the builder, so you can see the link (or fix a missing one) before you build. Stands angled off their taxiway now get a smooth curved lead-in in the sim instead of a hard diagonal line.
  • The painted white T on GA, fuel and cargo stands now steps aside automatically when the stand has a yellow lead-in - the sim draws its own T-bar at the end of the lead-in, so you'd get two of them, ours in the wrong spot. A new White T setting (Auto / Always / Never) and a T position slider put the marking exactly where your aircraft actually stops.
  • Gate and cargo stand outlines are now a choice: the classic dashed box, a proper envelope that tapers to the nose, or none at all.
Update

A failed build now tells you why

What's new & fixes

  • When a build fails because of something in your design, your airport card now says what's wrong - in plain words, naming the actual fault - and points you at the builder to fix it. Before, all you got was a Retry button, and retrying a design problem just fails again the same way.
  • When the failure is on our end instead - our compiler, our upload, our build machine - the card says so plainly and offers a Retry, which is the one case where retrying actually helps.
Update

A too-long taxi sign no longer kills your build

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: a taxi sign whose text ran past the 17-symbol limit made the whole airport fail to build, with nothing to tell you which sign was at fault. MSFS caps a sign face at 17 symbols; the builder only enforced that per row of the sign, so a sign split across two rows could sail past the cap and then take the entire build down with it.
  • The sign editor now counts against the whole sign, not each row of it: the counter above the preview tracks every symbol, and when you reach 17 it turns amber, says the sign is full, and tells you why (a boxed location spends 2 of its symbols on the brackets). At that point the text boxes stop taking characters and the arrow and Add segment buttons grey out - so you can see the ceiling instead of hitting it.
  • If a sign somehow still comes in over the limit, the build no longer aborts - it trims the longest row to fit and carries on, so one sign can never cost you an airport.
Update

The builder works on your phone now

What's new & fixes

  • The airport builder got a real mobile layout. The two side panels that used to bury the map now live in a bottom drawer with a Tool tab and an Airport tab - the map is finally the star of the show on a phone.
  • The tool bar fits on screen: tools scroll sideways, undo/redo stay pinned, and snapping/grid/tutorial tuck into a ⋯ menu. No more menus drifting around as you pan.
  • Touch editing actually works: drag runway ends, taxiway nodes, apron corners and rotate knobs with a finger - none of that responded to touch before. Handles are bigger and snapping is more forgiving on touch screens too.
  • Placing objects on a phone uses a new confirm pin: tap the map to drop a ghost marker, drag it exactly where you want, then hit Place. No more hangars landing wherever your fingertip guessed.
  • The object catalogue goes full-screen on phones, with the category shelves as a chip row up top (previously you could only search) and the sort picker along for the ride.
  • Drawing taxiways, aprons and fences on mobile shows floating Finish/Cancel buttons, foliage paints with a finger stroke, and favorites hearts are always visible on touch screens.
Update

ILS: half price, your frequency, your glidepath

Economy & balance

  • The ILS precision approach package drops from ₳150,000 to ₳75,000 per runway end. It's core airport equipment, not a landmark - the price now says so. PAPI stays at ₳12,500.

What's new & fixes

  • Your ILS is now protected against radio interference. The frequency picker greys out any channel already in use within 150 km - by a real-world ILS from the sim's nav database (4,270 stations worldwide) or by another builder's airport - and new purchases steer clear automatically. MSFS tunes the nearest station on a shared frequency, so without this a pilot on a long final could capture the wrong localizer.
  • The ILS is yours to tune from the runway panel: pick any free channel in the real 108.10-111.95 band, set your own Morse identifier (an "I" plus 2-3 characters - IJST, anyone?), and dial the glideslope angle from 2.5° to 4.0°. Standard is 3.0°; go steeper for short fields or dramatic terrain. The PAPI on an ILS end always matches your chosen angle, so the lights and the needles never disagree.
Update

The object catalogue got a full overhaul

What's new & fixes

  • New shelves that make sense: Hangars & Terminals up front, an Airport Ops shelf for towers, fire stations and fuel, Nature & Wildlife in one place, and aircraft, boats and animals each get proper sub-sections (airliners vs props vs gliders, ferries vs fishing boats, safari vs farm animals).
  • Sorted by what builders actually use: the catalogue now opens on "Most placed" - live counts of every object placed across all airports - and every card shows how many airports an object appears at.
  • Search that finds things: results are ranked (name matches first), and it searches tags and sub-categories too, not just names.
  • Hover previews went from 20-50 MB downloads to ~1 MB optimized models - spinning a hangar no longer means watching a loading bar. The grid also renders only what's on screen, so big shelves scroll smoothly.
  • Crisper thumbnails across the board - the washed-out sim-provided art has been re-rendered in 3D studio style.
  • Quality of life: heart an object to pin it to your new Favorites shelf, a New arrivals shelf tracks fresh catalogue additions, and cards tell you when you already own unplaced copies (placing those is free).
  • Hundreds of cryptic names are gone: "Asobo PassiveAircraft A320 CEO (A320_CEO_AIRASIA)" is now "Airbus A320 - Air Asia", ships and animals got real names too.
  • The admin catalogue picked up the same upgrades: placed-count sorting, tag search and the sharper thumbnails.
Update

GlassOut is now a detected companion app

What's new & fixes

  • Community suggestion: GlassOut, the pop-out display manager for home cockpits, now counts as a detected companion app (hardware category) and feeds your income-tier multiplier like the rest. The detection list updates server-side, so the companion picks it up on its next catalog refresh - no update needed. Thanks JoseEduardo!
Update

Delete = refund: 24-hour refunds are now automatic

Economy & balance

  • You no longer need to find the refund button. Delete an object in the builder within 24 hours of buying it and the full price comes back to your Wallet automatically when you save - the save message shows exactly how much. Objects older than 24 hours keep working as before: removing them banks the instance for free re-placement, and the Wallet's 50% cash-out is still there when you're done with something for good.
Update

Fixed: duplicate stand numbers no longer break your build

What's new & fixes

  • If two parking spots ended up with the same name and number (say, two "Parking 11"s), MSFS refused to compile the whole airport and every build failed with a cryptic error. Builds now renumber the extra spot automatically so they always go through, the editor warns you right on the Number field when two stands collide, and the Duplicate button skips past taken numbers instead of creating the clash.
Update

Try anything risk-free: 24-hour full refunds on objects

Economy & balance

  • Objects, vegetation and equipment now refund at 100% of what you paid for 24 hours after buying - place something, check it in the sim, and if it's not right, remove it and refund it from your Wallet for every Aero back. After 24 hours the standing 50% refund applies as before. The Wallet's refund buttons quote the real amount either way.
  • Launch amnesty: everything you already own counts as bought today, so any unused instance in your pool refunds at 100% for the next 24 hours. If something you placed never looked right, now's the moment to cash it out in full.
v0.1.29

Companion: app detection that actually detects

What's new & fixes

  • Several add-on apps were never detected because our process-name guesses were wrong. Thanks to your Task Manager reports: OnAir Company, Lorby Axis and Ohs (2024), GSX (couatl64_MSFS2024), MobiFlight's MFConnector and the SimBrief Downloader are all recognized now. The list updates server-side, so this works without reinstalling - the companion picks it up on its next catalog refresh.
  • If SimConnect silently dropped mid-flight, the companion kept showing "Flying - tracking" while your flight time froze. It now notices a dead connection within ~20 seconds, reconnects on its own, and picks the session back up.
  • The companion's income-tier table showed slightly stale multipliers (1.4/1.8/2.4); it now matches what the server actually pays (1.5/2.0/2.5).
Update

Ground leveling: the slider now means what it says

What's new & fixes

  • Partial ground leveling was quietly refusing to touch any spot that needed more than ~6 m of grading, so on a hilly field the high side stayed at full natural height while the rest leveled - 84% didn't look like 84%. That cap is gone: the whole ground area now keeps exactly the fraction of relief you set, edge to edge.
  • The runway now follows the slider too. It used to stay a rigid flat plane no matter the setting; at partial leveling it now curves gently with the graded ground around it - real strips aren't billiard tables. At 100% it's still perfectly flat, and at natural it drapes the terrain as before. Rebuild and re-sync to see it.
Update

Airport lighting: light up the night

Economy & balance

  • Lighting is equipment, not decor: no object slots, banks when removed, refunds at 50%. Prices: runway edge ₳7,500 and centerline ₳10,000 per runway; REIL ₳2,500, ODALS ₳7,500, MALSR ₳20,000 and ALSF-2 ₳40,000 per runway end; taxiway lighting ₳1,500 per taxiway; apron perimeter ₳2,000 per apron; rotating beacon ₳2,500.

What's new & fixes

  • Your airport can now be lit like the real thing. From the runway panel, buy white edge lights with green threshold bars, centerline lights (paved runways), REIL threshold strobes per end, and a menu of real approach light systems per end: ODALS flashers for small strips, the CAT I MALSR (already bundled with every ILS), and the full ALSF-2 CAT II/III array with red side rows and touchdown-zone lights. The sim renders it all natively from dusk to dawn.
  • Taxiways get the classic blue edge lights and green centerline lights for a flat price per taxiway - with a one-click "Light all taxiways" button - and aprons can ring their outline with blue perimeter lights. Vehicle service routes stay dark, as they should.
  • A working rotating beacon joins the decor catalogue's Lighting shelf: set the mast height, pick airport / seaplane / heliport colours, and the light genuinely rotates over your field at night. The SNK beacon towers and marina light poles now live in the same shelf.
  • And you don't need to launch the sim to see any of it: a new moon button in the builder flips on Night preview - the map goes dark and every light you've bought glows in place, chasing approach strobes, flashing beacon and all.
Update

Fixed: ground leveling was flattening far outside your field

What's new & fixes

  • Ground leveling was spilling way past your ground boundary - a cliff-top airport could flatten the sea below it up to field elevation. The culprit was a sim-side airport flatten whose reach MSFS decides on its own; it's now off for good. Leveling only touches the ground area you shaped in the Ground tool, plus a tight pad around any runway that sits outside it, so strips always sit flush. Rebuild and re-sync to pick up the fix - the over-flattened terrain around your field will come back.
Update

ILS approaches and PAPI lights

Economy & balance

  • PAPI lights are ₳12,500 per runway end. The ILS package is ₳150,000 per runway end and includes that end's PAPI. Both are equipment, not decor - they use no object slots, and removed installations bank for reuse or refund at 50% like other equipment.

What's new & fixes

  • Runways can now carry real approach aids, bought per runway end from the runway panel in the builder. PAPI lights give any strip of 500 m or more the classic four-light red/white visual glidepath. The ILS precision approach package equips a paved runway of 1,000 m or more with a full CAT I setup: localizer, 3° glideslope, DME, MALSR approach lighting with sequenced strobes, precision runway markings and edge lights - PAPI included.
  • Every ILS is assigned its own frequency and Morse identifier, shown in the builder and on your airport's public page. In the sim, tune it on NAV1 like any real-world ILS: the localizer and glideslope drive your instruments and autopilot approach mode down to minimums, day or night, in any weather.
  • All the placement engineering is automatic and follows real siting standards - localizer antenna past the far end, glideslope abeam the touchdown zone, beam width tailored to your runway length, a 50 ft threshold crossing height. Move or re-point the runway and the whole installation re-sites itself on the next build.
  • The hardware is visible, too. In the sim, ILS runways get the physical antenna props placed automatically - the localizer array past the roll-out end and the red-and-white glideslope mast beside the touchdown zone. And the builder now previews everything in 3D: PAPI boxes, localizer array and glideslope mast appear on the runway the moment you buy them (they show on your public airport page and the claim map as well).
Update

Over 100 hangars and field buildings join the decor catalogue

What's new & fixes

  • A big library of hangars is now in the builder's decor catalogue - 108 hangars in all: T-hangars, metal and corrugated-steel hangars, open-front and closed sheds, and scalable large hangars in a range of colours and door styles. Browse the Hangars category or search "hangar".
  • It comes with 15 more airport buildings too - fuel tanks, airport shops and other general field structures - for 123 new objects total. Everything is priced by size and refundable like the rest of your decor. These render with their original textures and paintwork in-sim.
Update

Stray rocks no longer scatter across your airport

What's new & fixes

  • MSFS 2024 was scattering mossy boulders and rocks across airport grounds and aprons - clutter nobody placed. It came from the sim's new procedural ground system, which drops rocks as a separate layer from grass and trees, so our existing vegetation and object clearing never touched them. Built airports now suppress that rock layer across the whole field, out to the edge of your buildable area. Existing airports pick up the fix the next time they're rebuilt.
Update

Cheaper fences and density-priced foliage

Economy & balance

  • Fencing a big perimeter was punishingly expensive, so we cut the per-foot cost of every fence line by roughly half. It also now scales with the fence: farm wire, the smallest, is the cheapest by a clear margin (₳4/m), then security mesh (₳7/m), covered wood (₳9/m) and formal black iron (₳10/m). A 2 km perimeter that used to run ₳20k-44k is now ₳8k-20k.
  • Gates stay a real investment but came back about 15%: iron gate ₳600→₳500, car-park gate ₳750→₳600, wide vehicle gate ₳1,200→₳1,000, barrier arm ₳900→₳750.
  • Foliage brush now bills by density. Painting sparse ground cover costs a fraction of packing it in - a patch at 30% density costs about 30% of what the same area costs at full 100% density. The Density slider drives both how thick the flora looks and what you pay, so light landscaping over a big area is finally affordable.
Update

Seaplane docks, piers and boats join the decor catalogue

What's new & fixes

  • 33 new seaplane-base objects are in the builder's decor catalogue - search "seaplane" or "dock". You get modular marina piers (wooden and weathered), floating docks and a fuel dock, two seaplane hangars, fishing boats, a Coast Guard cutter, a rowboat, plus mooring poles, lifebuoys, anchors, a fishing chair and dock lights.
  • The marina piers are a kit: drop every section of a set at one spot and they assemble into a full pier. Everything is priced by size and refundable like the rest of your decor.
Update

Visit income that scales: your airport is now a real business

Economy & balance

  • Visit income got a serious raise. When another pilot logs a counted landing at your published airport, you now earn Ⓐ25 base (up from Ⓐ15) plus 1% of your airport's invested value, capped at Ⓐ250 per visit (up from Ⓐ40). The old cap topped out at just Ⓐ2,500 invested - past your first hour of building, extra investment added nothing. Now every Aero you put into your field keeps raising what each visitor is worth, up to Ⓐ22,500 invested.
  • At the top end a single visitor pays you more than their landing pays them - building the destination is the business. Caps and anti-abuse rules are unchanged: 20 paid visits a day, visits only count on real, counted landings by other players, and everything still fills your one daily earnings bar.
v0.1.28

The daily earnings bar, everywhere

What's new & fixes

  • Your wallet now leads with a Today bar - a single progress bar toward your daily cap, split by where the Aeros came from (flying, landings, visitors, idle). It shows how much of today's earning you've used at a glance, instead of a wall of separate numbers.
  • On the website, the Wallet moved out of the left nav and into the balance pill in the top-right: click it for a quick popover with the Today bar and your spendable balance, plus a link to the full wallet breakdown. One less menu item, and your balance is always one click from the details.
  • The companion app (0.1.28) shows the same Today bar on its Wallet card, and its 'earning today' status light now counts landings and visitors too - not just flight and idle time - so it matches the website. Update is automatic.
Update

Simpler earning: your day is now one number

Economy & balance

  • Earning is now a single daily paycheck. You can bank up to Ⓐ1,000 a day (Ⓐ2,500 for Supporters) from any mix of flying, landings, hosting visitors, and idling - and your Wallet has a new Today bar that fills up as you earn, coloured by where the Aeros came from. When it's full, that's your day; nothing is lost. This was always the real limit; the old page just buried it under a stack of per-minute caps that added up to far more than you could ever actually earn.
  • The separate 60-minute 'companion app variety bonus' is gone - it's folded into the flight multiplier, which already rewarded the same thing (running ATC, nav, career apps while you fly) much more. To make up for it, the multiplier now uses cleaner steps you can do in your head: 1× / 1.5× / 2× / 2.5× / 3× / 4× (it used to be 1× / 1.4× / 1.8× / 2.4× / 3× / 4×), a small buff at the lower tiers.
  • Nothing else changed: same base rates, same landing formula, same daily cap, same $1 = 1,000 Aeros. This is purely about making the rules readable.

What's new & fixes

  • The Earning Aeros wiki page and the Wallet were rewritten around the daily paycheck: one activity table, a worked example, and the exact math for those who want it - instead of a grid of minute-based caps that never actually bound.
v0.1.27

Companion 0.1.27: no more floating windsocks

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: a windsock or flag could appear twice at an airport - one correctly on the ground and a duplicate floating high above it - after a flight loaded or you flew somewhere new. When the sim briefly dropped to a loading screen, the companion forgot the decor it had already placed and spawned a second copy on top, and that fresh copy could be dropped before the ground had finished loading, so it hung in the air. The companion now clears its old decor cleanly on every load, so there's only ever one copy, placed on the ground. The companion auto-updates to 0.1.27; restart your flight once to clear any duplicates already floating.
  • Small props like windsocks and flags now only appear once you're close to the airport, instead of from several kilometres out. They were never visible from that far anyway, and spawning them early was what let them end up floating. Large scenery like parked aircraft still appears from a distance so it doesn't pop in under you.
Update

Refund the trees: unused objects and vegetation now give Aeros back

Economy & balance

  • You can now refund unused objects and painted vegetation. Removing something already returned it to your account pool to re-place for free - but until now there was no way to turn that unused pool back into Aeros. Open your Wallet: any object or foliage preset with unused (unplaced) copies shows a Refund button that pays back 50% of what you paid for them.
  • This is retroactive: everything you've ever removed is still sitting in your pool, so those past instances are refundable right now at 50% - nothing was lost, it was just waiting to be reclaimed.
  • The unused-material refund in the builder went up from 25% to 50%, to match.

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: trees, shrubs and objects you placed and then removed weren't giving any Aeros back, and the charge never showed under Materials (foliage bills on the object rail, not the material rail) - so it looked like the credits just vanished. They were banked in your account pool the whole time; now the Wallet lets you see that unused pool and refund it at 50%. If you were hit hard by this, we've also credited affected accounts directly.
v0.1.26

Companion 0.1.26: update notice stays put

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: when an update was ready, the notice bar at the top would scroll out of sight the moment you scrolled down - you had to go all the way back to the top to see it. It now pins to the top alongside the header, so it stays visible wherever you are on the page.
v0.1.25

Companion 0.1.25: live traffic that actually glides

What's new & fixes

  • Live aircraft on the claim map now move smoothly along their real flight path instead of guessing ahead and jerking back into place every 30 seconds. The companion now streams a detailed position trail while you fly, and the map replays it about a minute behind - so what you see is exact recorded motion, not a prediction. Turns, climbs and the plane's heading all track properly now, and the selected flight's trail sits neatly behind it. This costs nothing extra on the server and doesn't touch your Aeros earning - it's purely how the map draws you. Update to 0.1.25 (it's automatic) so other pilots see your flight glide too; older companions still show up, just less smoothly.
v0.1.24

Companion 0.1.24: no more stacked windsocks

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: wind-answering windsocks and flags could show up doubled in the sim - a second one stacked just above the first - after a flight loaded or you teleported. The companion was briefly reading a garbage position during the load and re-spawning the decor without clearing the first copy. It now ignores those bad readings. The companion auto-updates to 0.1.24; restart your flight once to clear any duplicates already spawned.
  • Fixed: painted ground text (taxiway lettering) came out enormous in the sim - it was being sized as a raw multiplier instead of a height. It now renders at a sane size, and taxiway signs stopped drawing a redundant back-to-back twin. Rebuild and re-sync to pick these up.
  • Fixed: on gravel and grass fields, hold-short lines, parking-stand markings and ground text could be missing entirely - the airport's reference elevation had drifted below the runway, so the paint rendered underground. The datum is now snapped to the runway. Rebuild and re-sync to see them.
Update

Ground leveling: no more dips under your field

What's new & fixes

  • The Ground tool has a new 'Ground leveling' slider that controls how much the terrain under your field is evened out. At 'Flat' (the default) the whole ground-cover area is graded level to your field elevation, so taxiways roll smooth and hangars sit flat anywhere on the field - no more dips or hills you have to work around. Slide toward 'natural' to let the real terrain shape show through.
  • In-between settings grade the gentle ground and automatically leave steep slopes alone, so a hillside field eases into shape instead of turning into a cliff-edged slab. Leveling only affects your editable ground boundary - never the surrounding land or a neighbour's claim. Rebuild and re-sync for it to take effect in MSFS.
Update

Parking spots: AI-aircraft toggle + cleaner fuel pads

What's new & fixes

  • Every parking spot now has an 'Allow AI aircraft' toggle in its property card. It's on by default (nothing changes for existing airports), but switch it off on any stand and the sim's AI, live and ambient traffic will never park or spawn there again. You can still taxi in and start flights from a reserved stand yourself - it just stays clear of other aircraft.
  • Fuel Pad stands no longer drop a stock MSFS fuel pump/station on your apron. A Fuel Pad is now just a clean spawnable fuel spot with your painted fuel marking - and you can still refuel there. Want the 3D fuel object back? There's a new '3D fuel model' checkbox on any Fuel-type spot. Rebuild and re-sync for either change to take effect in MSFS.
Update

Painted trees really are slot-free now

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed: saving could fail with 'charge failed: object-slots' even when the Objects used meter showed you well under your limit. Painted vegetation (the Foliage brush) is slot-free - as the meter and the manual have always said - but the server was quietly counting each painted unit as a quarter slot, so a forest you painted could push a save over the cap. It no longer does. Paint away.
Update

Helipads you can spawn at, and catalogue price fixes

Economy & balance

  • Helipads are now real destinations: place any helipad from the catalogue and your next build compiles an invisible spawn pad on top of it - it shows up as a spawnable helipad on the MSFS world map. They're priced like hangars now (~1,200-2,600) to match.
  • Windsocks and flags are premium set-dressing: they answer the actual wind in the sim, so they now cost 400-500 Aeros instead of pocket change. Feel special, are special.
  • Rocks, props, brush, animals, and people & signs roughly doubled from yesterday's floor - decorating stays affordable, but a herd of cows is a real purchase (300 each).
Update

The Field Manual: a full guide to everything

What's new & fixes

  • There's now a complete handbook at projectairports.com/wiki - the Field Manual. Thirty pages of step-by-step tutorials with real screenshots: your first airport end to end, every builder tool (runways, taxiways, ground cover, decor, foliage, parking & signage), how syncing into MSFS actually works, and a full plain-language reference for the Aeros economy with every rate and price.
  • Find it via 'Manual' in the site menu and portal nav, or 'Field Manual' in the footer. It has its own search (press / on any manual page), and every page cross-links to the next thing you'll want to know.
  • It's written to be read out of order - land on 'Troubleshooting' from Discord or skim 'Earning Aeros' for the exact landing formula without reading anything else first.
Update

Catalogue prices tuned to the new economy

Economy & balance

  • Scatter decor got cheaper across the board - most trees now run 60-100 Aeros (capped at 400, down from 1,800 for a big one), rocks and props similar, animals 150, flags 60, people from 60. Decorating your field is meant to be an everyday pleasure, not a splurge.
  • Static aircraft dropped from ~3,200 to ~1,800 - a parked showpiece now costs a bit less than the hangar behind it. Boats 800, balloons 900.
  • World landmarks are priced for this world now: the Eiffel Tower is 70,000 Aeros (was 350,000), the Statue of Liberty 60,000, famous stadiums and castles 8,000-20,000. Still trophies - no longer fiction.
  • Hero buildings (hangars, terminals, towers) keep their prices - they pace your airport's growth alongside the area levels. Nothing in the catalogue went up, and everything you already own stays yours.
Update

The Aeros economy gets its dollar anchor

Economy & balance

  • Earning is rebalanced around a simple anchor: 1,000 Aeros is worth about $1. Rates are roughly a tenth of what they were - idle credit now tops out at 120 a day, flight income starts at 1/min (still multiplied up to 4x by your connected sim apps), counted landings pay up to 150, and hosting visitors pays up to 40 each. The free daily earn cap is now 1,000; supporters earn up to 2,500 a day.
  • Everything you already banked is untouched, and prices didn't go up - material unlocks actually got cheaper (dirt & gravel 1,000, asphalt & tarmac 10,000, concrete 25,000). Paving itself still costs per square meter.
  • Onboarding rewards now grow as you go - the later steps (first flight, first landing, ten objects) pay the most, so finishing the checklist is worth it.
  • The first-150-signups founding bonus stays: new accounts still start with 10,000 Aeros while it lasts.
  • The Auction House is closed for now while the economy settles at the new scale. No listings were live; your claims, airports and Aeros are unaffected.

What's new & fixes

  • Anti-abuse hardening behind the scenes: idle time is now verified against the clock like flight time already was, a counted landing must match where your sim actually was moments earlier, and object slot limits are enforced server-side.
Update

Cheaper airport upgrades and a clearer builder panel

Economy & balance

  • Growing your buildable area is far cheaper and easier to read. Instead of a formula that ballooned with size, each level now has a plain price: Airfield 15,000 and Regional 40,000 Aeros. Levels 4 and 5 (International and Sprawling) are coming soon - larger areas with real terminals, much bigger buildings and hundreds of object slots.
  • Airports you already grew keep their size and everything you've paid for - the new prices only affect future upgrades.

What's new & fixes

  • The builder's right-hand panel is rebuilt. The old three tabs are gone: your buildable area sits at the top with a clear list of what each level unlocks (runways, surfaces, object slots) and the price of the next one, then Materials and Objects-used fold open below.
  • Your object-slot tracker is now always visible in the panel instead of hiding on the Objects tool. It shows a bar that fills a quarter at a time, so the small scatter items (trees, rocks, props) you place actually show up, with a plain count of full objects vs quarter-slot decor. Painted foliage still doesn't use object slots.
  • The Save button is now 'Save & view cart': it saves your layout on the spot, then opens the cart so you can review costs and decide to build or keep editing.
Update

Find airports by name, and heart your favorites

What's new & fixes

  • The claim map search now finds player airports: type a name or ident and matching airports appear at the top of the results, above places - pick one and the map flies you straight to it.
  • Click any claimed airport and you can now heart it. Your favorites live in the search bar: click the empty search box and your hearted airports are right there, one click from jumping back.
Update

Softer, rounder airport fields

What's new & fixes

  • Your ground cover no longer ends in razor-straight lines and sharp corners. Every corner of the boundary - hand-drawn or automatic - is now rounded into a smooth curve, and the edge fades gently into the surrounding terrain instead of stopping dead. Two new sliders in the Ground tool (Corner rounding and Edge blend) control both; the defaults apply to existing airports automatically on their next build.
  • Fine-tune any single corner: click it in the Ground tool and a per-corner slider appears - sweep it wide, tighten it, or set it fully sharp where the boundary needs to hug a road. Corners with their own curve get an amber ring, and the editor now draws the true rounded curve with a dashed guide through your control corners plus a soft halo previewing the edge blend.
  • The claim map and your public airport page show the same treatment: the field blends into the satellite imagery with a soft, natural edge instead of a hard green polygon.
  • In the sim, the grass dissolves into the photo scenery through an organic, torn edge - and since vegetation already grows back gradually near the boundary, the field now reads like a real maintained clearing rather than a decal.
Update

No more powerlines or phantom traffic on your airport

What's new & fixes

  • Powerlines no longer generate on top of your airport. MSFS places pylons and wires from its own world data, and they were poking straight through aprons and buildings - your package now removes them across the whole buildable area.
  • Cars stop driving through your field. Painting over a road hid the asphalt but the sim kept spawning traffic on the invisible road underneath - the road network itself (and its street lights and parked-car areas) is now excluded from your airport grounds.
  • Both fixes apply automatically the next time your airport builds - no changes needed in the editor.
Update

Parking spots: smarter taxiway connections and group moves

What's new & fixes

  • Parking spots now connect to your taxi network from the rear of the stand, the way aircraft actually taxi in - nose-first. The old logic searched in every direction and could run the lead-in line to a taxiway in front of the spot, as if you were meant to reverse in.
  • By default the lead-in is a straight line directly behind the stand to the first taxiway it crosses. Untick the new 'Straight back only' box on a spot to allow an angled connection to the nearest taxiway behind it - but never ahead of the wing line.
  • Multi-select now moves parking spots: Ctrl+click several spots (or Ctrl+drag a box over them) and drag any one to move the whole group together. Taxi signs and ground text join group select too, and Duplicate stamps out a selected row of stands with fresh stand numbers.
Update

Flags of the world - 306 of them

What's new & fixes

  • A new Flags shelf in the Hangar Catalogue with 306 flags on poles: every country, all 50 US states (plus DC and San Francisco), and organization flags like the UN, EU, NATO, the Red Cross and the Olympic rings. Browse them by Countries, US States or Organizations (₳120 each, quarter object slot).
  • Like the windsocks, these are living sim objects: placed at your published airport they spawn in MSFS through the companion app and their cloth waves in the real wind. The flag pack installs automatically on the companion's next sync.
  • Every flag has a full 3D preview - hover to spin it in the store, and see it flying on your field in the editor's 3D view.
Update

Wind-animated windsocks in the catalogue

What's new & fixes

  • Ten new windsocks in the Hangar Catalogue (Props & Details shelf): red, orange, white, red & white, and orange & white - each in a plain and a lit variant (₳100-110). Place them anywhere in the airport editor like any other object; they weigh a quarter object slot.
  • These are living sim objects, not static scenery: in MSFS they respond to the actual wind - direction and speed - and the lit variants glow at night. They spawn near your published airport through the companion app, which also installs the required object pack automatically on its next sync.
  • Full 3D preview in the store and editor: hover a windsock to spin it, and see it standing on your field in the 3D view.
Update

Real 3D terrain everywhere, for everyone

What's new & fixes

  • The whole platform now renders on real 3D terrain - mountains, valleys, coastlines - free for everyone. Your placed buildings, foliage and live traffic stand on the real ground instead of a flat plane.
  • The airport editor opens in 3D terrain by default: see exactly how your field sits against the hills while you build. A Terrain toggle switches back to the flat drafting view any time, and your preference is remembered.
  • The claims map gets terrain too: zoom in anywhere past city scale and the world turns 3D - explore other builders' fields in their real landscape. Public airport pages have it on every shared link.
  • Map search got snappier: place lookups in the claims map now go straight from your browser to the geocoder while you type, instead of round-tripping through our server first.
Update

Ground navigation: parking spots, hold shorts, taxi signs and ground text

What's new & fixes

  • New Nav tool in the airport editor with four ground-navigation elements, all compiled natively into your MSFS 2024 package - every player sees them, no companion needed.
  • Parking spots: place GA ramps, cargo stands, fuel pads, gates and helicopter stands. They are spawnable from the MSFS world map, get painted stand circles, tee marks and numbers, and auto-connect to your nearest taxiway so ATC can taxi you to and from the stand.
  • Hold short points: click a taxiway to drop a holding position (runway, ILS or taxiway-intersection variant), or hit Auto-detect to place them at every taxiway/runway crossing at a realistic holding distance - complete with the red-and-white holding position signs.
  • Ground text: write painted text on the ground anywhere on your field. Font size, text colour and background colour are editable; defaults are taxiway-yellow letters on a transparent background so the pavement shows through.
  • Illuminated taxiway signs: build real MSFS guidance signs with a segment editor - yellow direction segments with arrows, black location panels, red runway panels - with a live preview of the sign face. Signs light up at night in the sim.
  • All four show on the claims map and public airport pages: painted stand markings, hold-short bars, readable sign faces and your ground text in its real colours and size.
Update

No more 'Data Not Available' tiles up close

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed the gray 'Data Not Available' squares that appeared when you zoomed in close on the satellite map - in the airport editor, on the claims map, and on public airport tours. The old basemap simply ran out at street level outside big metro areas. The map now uses high-resolution satellite imagery with worldwide coverage all the way to the deepest zoom, so you see actual ground all the way in.
v0.1.21

Flight tracking now starts every time

What's new & fixes

  • Fixed a first-launch bug where the companion could sit idle and never track your flight time or landings if you signed in before starting MSFS. It wasn't retrying the connection to the sim, so nothing you flew counted until you toggled tracking off and on or restarted the app. It now keeps trying to connect and starts tracking the moment MSFS is up.
Update

The big economy update: fly more, build more

Economy & balance

  • Airport owners now earn visit income: every counted landing at your field pays you 75 Aeros plus 1% of your airport's investment (up to 200 per visit, 20 paid visits a day). Running a destination finally pays.
  • Idle earning now runs around the clock: leave the companion open and bank up to 1,440 Aeros a day (was capped at 2 hours). Active flying has no daily wall at all now - fly as long as you like; the per-minute rate just eases toward half over a full day, so the first hours pay the most.
  • Object slots rebased and reweighted onto a five-step curve by airport size: 10 at a starter airstrip, rising to 200 at a sprawling field - and scatter decor like trees, rocks, and clutter only counts a quarter slot, so plant away. Supporters get double at every step, and there's a live slot meter in the Objects tray.
  • Landmarks are now priced by real-world stature, uncapped: minor POIs got cheaper, and the wonders cost like wonders - the Pyramids of Giza top the shelf at 500,000 Aeros, the Burj Khalifa 400,000, the Eiffel Tower 350,000. 237 world icons hand-priced; everything else scales with true size. Supporters get any two landmarks free, their pick, at any price.
  • Paving is cheaper: one unlock now buys a material for runways, taxiways AND aprons together (a fully-asphalt field: 45,000 down to 18,000 in unlock fees). Grass is free to unlock everywhere. Airports that already paid a per-feature unlock got the rest of that material free.
  • Three new onboarding rewards teach the earn loop: first credited flight (+1,000), first counted landing (+500), and ten objects placed (+750).
  • Free pilots can bank up to 10,000 Aeros a day from flying, idling, and landings combined - your welcome grant and onboarding rewards are on top, they don't count against it. Supporters have no daily earning ceiling.
  • Anti-abuse: counted landings now cap at 30 a day across all airports, and the wallet hard-rejects overdrafts at the ledger.

What's new & fixes

  • The journey checklist grew three steps to match the new rewards: fly with the companion open, land at a Project Airports field, and decorate your own.
  • Starter airports can now place the classic 1,000 m GA runway (length cap was 800 m).
  • The wallet activity feed now labels every entry properly - visit income, companion-app bonuses, welcome grants, and onboarding rewards included.
  • New live slot meter in the Objects tray shows how much of your airport's object budget you've used.
Update

The Supporters Kit, priority builds, and a queue you can see

Economy & balance

  • Supporters now place their first two world landmarks free - the landmark shelf itself stays open to everyone at normal prices.

What's new & fixes

  • New Supporters Kit shelf in the object catalogue: the air-racing gate set and the live airport stats sign are now supporter exclusives. Everyone can browse them; supporters can place them. (If you placed the stats sign before today, it stays yours.)
  • Supporter builds now jump to the front of the build queue.
  • New in the portal bar: a live build-queue pill next to your wallet - see how many builds are ahead of you and a rough ETA (about a minute per build), or how busy the queue is before you hit Build.
  • Supporters' object limit is now actually doubled at every level - this was promised on the supporter page but never wired up. Sorry about that, it's real now.
  • The supporter page now lists the full, real perk set: 25K Aeros, priority builds, 2x objects, the Supporters Kit, and two free landmarks.
v0.1.19

Builds install themselves

What's new & fixes

  • When one of your airports finishes building, the companion now syncs it into MSFS automatically - right away if the sim is closed, or the moment you close it if you're mid-flight. No more launching MSFS and realizing you forgot to sync.
  • Works for rebuilds too, not just new airports. If you've paused syncing in Settings, the companion keeps respecting that.
Update

Hide airports you don't want, report ones that cross a line

What's new & fixes

  • Your world, your rules: click any airport on the claim map and choose Hide for me - it disappears from your map and stops syncing into your sim. Only affects you, and you can unhide anytime from Settings.
  • See something that doesn't belong? There's now a Report button on airports (claim map) and pilots (flight cards). Reports go straight to us and every one gets looked at.
Update

Creator leaderboard + airport stats signs

What's new & fixes

  • New public Creator Leaderboard (linked from For Content Creators): the top three creators get a podium with live rotating views of the airports flying their logo, plus placement counts and the most-landed-at fields for every creator. Logo platforms are one per airport, and the catalogue now shows how many airports each platform is placed at worldwide.
  • New in the catalogue (Markings): the Airport Stats Sign - an 8m billboard that shows your airport's real landing count and the callsigns of the last pilots to land there. The sign refreshes itself nightly, and one can stand at each airport.
Update

Share your airport with anyone

What's new & fixes

  • Every published airport now has its own public page you can send to anyone - no account needed to view it. It's a live 3D tour of your field: satellite imagery, your real runways and taxiways, your placed buildings and vegetation, with a slow orbit camera visitors can grab and look around with.
  • Live traffic shows up on your page too: anyone flying near your field with the companion app connected appears as a moving plane - zoom in and it's a 3D aircraft on approach.
  • Find the yellow Share button on your airport card in the builder portal - it copies your link. Pasting it into Discord unfurls into a card drawn from your actual airport layout.
  • Your page is on by default for published airports (it shows only what the claims map already shows other players, credited to your callsign). The eye button next to Share unlists it any time.
v0.1.17

Live traffic on the claim map

What's new & fixes

  • The claim map now shows every pilot who's flying with the companion app connected - live, flightradar-style. Planes move along their real heading and speed between telemetry updates, and a counter at the top of the map flies you to the next active flight.
  • Click a plane to open its flight card: pilot callsign, aircraft, altitude, ground speed, heading, and time in the air - plus a breadcrumb trail of where you've watched it fly and a Follow button that keeps the camera on it.
  • Zoom in and planes become real 3D aircraft at their actual altitude, matched to the closest model we have for what's being flown (747s, DC-9s, DC-3s, gliders, light GA and more).
  • The companion app now reports altitude, heading, speed and your aircraft type alongside position while you fly (it already reported position). This needs the latest companion version - older versions keep earning as before, their planes just show without altitude or aircraft type.
Update

Content creators: stamp your airport

What's new & fixes

  • New for content creators: upload your logo in Settings and we build it into a concrete platform - a real MSFS model, exclusive to you, free to place at your airports, and visible from altitude so viewers spot it on approach. Creators also get a Content Creator role in Discord. Want in? See the new For Content Creators page linked in the footer.
  • Under the hood this shipped a full custom-object pipeline: models can now be imported, converted to MSFS format, and synced to every player's sim automatically - expect more unique objects in the catalogue beyond the stock MSFS library.
Update

Your airport, live in the sim

What's new & fixes

  • The companion app now pops a notification the moment one of your airports finishes building and goes live in MSFS 2024 - no more checking back to see if it's done.
  • Refreshed the supporter page with a look at what the in-sim supporter kit unlocks (25,000 Aeros, double the placeable objects, air-racing pylons, and scaled world landmarks) plus a roadmap of what your support funds next.
Update

Your name is yours now

What's new & fixes

  • Privacy fix: the name shown on your claims and listings used to default to the front of your email address. It never does anymore - new pilots start with a random callsign, and you pick the public name other players see. We never show your email or real name to anyone.
  • Existing accounts whose name was still the email-derived default were switched to a callsign; if you'd already set your own name, it's untouched. Set or change yours anytime in Settings.
  • Added a quick first-run setup: choose your pilot name, the regions you fly, an optional profile picture, and your email preferences. Your map now opens centered on your first region.
  • Tightened what the map and auction house send to your browser - other players' account IDs and private profile fields are no longer included in the data behind the page.
Update

Demo polish

What's new & fixes

  • The try-it demo now starts you with 75,000 Aeros so there's more room to play. Its Save button funnels to a free-account prompt just like Build does - saving and building are the parts that need an account.
Update

A proper editor tutorial

What's new & fixes

  • Reworked the first-run editor tutorial. It now starts by having you position your build area (it explains the blue circle starts in the middle of your claim but can go anywhere, and waits for you to drop it where you want), then walks you through each tool one at a time - runway, taxiways, aprons, objects, foliage and ground. For each it points out the options panel and then has you actually place one.
  • Placing a runway is all that's required; every tool after that is optional with a one-click Skip this, so you can breeze past anything you don't want. The ground-cover step focuses on how to reshape the coverage by hand.
  • Fixed the tutorial's 'pick a style' steps: choosing a runway style, surface, object or biome now advances the tour as you'd expect, instead of leaving you stuck on the card.
  • Retired the old 'Add your first runway' card that popped up every time the editor loaded. The guided tutorial is now the single path, and it remembers where you were - reload mid-tutorial and it picks up on the same step instead of restarting. Once you've finished it, the graduation-cap button asks before resetting and starting you over from scratch.
  • Polished the tutorial overlay: the intro card dims the map instead of hiding it, and the dim lifts while you're placing the build area so you can see where you're dropping it.
  • The setup checklist no longer pops up over the editor - the builder has its own tutorial, so the portal guide stays out of the way while you're designing.
Update

See the finished airports

What's new & fixes

  • Added a before/after slider to the homepage. Pick a community field and drag the divider to wipe between the browser editor and the same airport flying in MSFS 2024.
  • Fixed the imagery toggle in the airport editor (and the live demo): switching the satellite source used to wipe your runways, taxiways and everything else off the map until you reloaded. The basemap now swaps cleanly and your whole layout stays put.
Update

Catalogue pricing makes sense now

Economy & balance

  • Reworked how every catalogue object is priced. Prices used to be one flat number per category, and most categories defaulted incorrectly - so a giant control tower could cost a fifth of a small shed. Objects are now priced on their actual size (footprint and height), how prized they are, and how detailed the model is - so a hangar costs more than a sign, a richly-built hangar costs more than a plain one of the same size, and a skyscraper or world landmark costs more than a hangar.
  • Repriced the whole catalogue in one pass. Buildable centerpieces now feel substantial - hangars around ₳2,000, control towers and fire stations a bit more, terminals and world landmarks the priciest. Small dressing (signs, cones, clutter) stays cheap.
v0.1.5

Update prompts, supporting the project, and a tidier app

What's new & fixes

  • When an update is ready, the app now drops a bar down from the top with a one-click Restart to install it - no more wondering if you're on the latest version.
  • Added a Support the project card. Any donation gets you the Donator role in our Discord, and the in-sim supporter kit unlocks double placeable objects per level, the air-racing pylon kits, and two world landmarks to place at your field.
  • Reworked the Concurrent Apps panel. Supported apps are now grouped by what they do - ATC, navigation, weather, and so on - so you can see at a glance which categories are counting toward your income tier. Other flight sims no longer show up in the list.
  • Picking regions is now a single button: choose the continents you want in a popup instead of scrolling a long list.
  • Eased off the heavy drop-shadows so the app reads more calmly, and fixed your email showing in the wrong font up in the corner.
Update

Economy fixes

Economy & balance

  • Fixed two bugs that let some players earn Aeros faster than intended - one from active flight time, one from running several apps at once. Earn rates now match the published numbers.
  • Idle and active income are now capped per day, so a single marathon session can't run away with the economy.
v0.1.4

A whole new look

What's new & fixes

  • The desktop app got a full redesign to match the website - the aeronautical-chart style, cleaner type, and a proper Project Airports icon instead of the placeholder.