Orbx has recently updated Volanta to version 1.8, bringing many bug fixes and a “Teams” feature where users can create their own teams with statistics, a leaderboard, and a distinct icon color on the map.

Volanta 1.8 brings image cropping, an enhanced airport view with clearer navigation, extra flight tooltips, squawk, and vertical speed display, emergency flights are highlighted on the map, new aircraft icons, an improved search experience, and enhancements to the party system, with doubled message length, in-session unread message counter, and more. The “parties” are now temporary and automatically disband after 72 hours, being replaced by the “Teams,” which are permanent groups of up to 10 members with custom statistics, leaderboard (flight time, flown distance, landing rates), and a distinct coloring on the map to differentiate between teams, friends, and other users. The changelog for the update follows below:

Enhancements

• Teams! Users can create teams, invite other users, set an icon and banner and change the color team members show up with on the map. Users can see statistics and leaderboards as well as chat with their fellow team members.
• Added image cropping to aircraft image uploads.
• Viewing an airport on the map now filters departing and arriving flights from that airport.
• Added altitude to flight tooltips.
• Added squawk and vertical speed display to flights.
• Flights squawking an emergency number now show up red on the map.
• Numerous performance improvements on the map.
• New aircraft icons for the BAe Hawk, T-6 Texan, C152, SR22
• Improved the search experience by preferring exact matches for usernames and airport codes.
• Numerous improvements to parties: added a button to scroll to the bottom, an in-session unread message counter, line breaks (with SHIFT + ENTER) and doubled message length.
• Parties are now temporary and are automatically disbanded 72 hours after creation. Use teams to party permanently! Existing parties are not affected, only newly created ones.

Fixes

• Fixed some airports requiring too much zooming to be visible on the map.
• Fixed some buttons no longer having borders.
• Fixed “Back” button on the aircraft page going in circles when a flight is opened form it.
• Fixed ATC route showing the wrong airport on the map when the SID had a four letter identifier.
• Fixed long chat messages for parties flowing off the screen.
• Fixed party chat not always scrolling to bottom when opened.
• Fixed aircraft list not updating immediately when an aircraft is deleted.
• Flights are now timed out after 60 minutes (up from 15 minutes).
• Fixed purge flights not always working.
• Added tooltip to load latest save button on aircraft pages.
• Fixed intermittent “couldn’t connect to server error” when uploading screenshots.
• Fixed the number of screenshots available to free users not always resetting to 3 for multiple flights in the same session.
• Clarified the behavior of the “save below 5000 ft” checkbox in the autosave settings.
• Disabled US sectional charts for now as the service we were using is no longer available, we’ll be working on bringing it back in the future.

‍

Volanta can be downloaded for free on their official website. A Premium membership is available for roughly $4.14 a month, unlocking real-world schedules, flight parties, a mobile app, customized stream overlays, flight replay, remote pause, cloud-based autosaves*, aircraft persistence*, unlimited 4K cloud screenshots, time sync**, and a premium badge & status.

Stay tuned to Threshold for more flight simulation news!

* FSX, P3D, and MSFS

** FSX, P3D