THE RECORDER
How a flight is recorded, from Boarding to Deboard
What starts the recording, what it keeps, what ends it, and what happens to the sector if your connection or your simulator gives out halfway.
A sector is not recorded because the simulator is running. It is recorded because you started it, and it ends because you ended it. Both of those are the same button.
This is what the recorder does between them, and what it does when something goes wrong in the middle.
Boarding starts the sector
Load the simulator at your departure stand with the client running. It connects, waits for your simulator to finish placing the aeroplane, and then does nothing at all. The Inflight Management Panel reads STANDBY, the Boarding button is lit, and no part of your flight is being kept.
Pressing Boarding starts it. That is the moment the recording begins, the clock starts and your block time starts counting — so it belongs on stand, before pushback, with the passengers still to come aboard.
This is not a formality we bolted on. This product is about a pilot managing a flight, and a pilot who has not boarded their passengers has not begun one. The button that lets them on is the button that starts the sector.
What happens if you forget
Nothing is recorded, and the sector is gone. There is no track to file, no hours, no pay and nothing to recover afterwards — not because we refuse to, but because it does not exist. The panel says STANDBY in amber for the entire flight, and the Boarding button pulses the whole time.
Pressing it late is worse than forgetting, because it costs a full sector to find out. The recording begins wherever you pressed it, and a track that does not start at the departure aerodrome is refused on receipt. Board on stand.
We chose this over a recorder that starts itself, knowing exactly what it costs, because the alternative is a flight that begins at a moment nobody decided.
What it keeps while you fly
From the press onward the client records a frame several times a second: position, altitude, speeds, attitude, gear and flap, engines, brakes and the weather around you. That track is the flight. Everything on your report is derived from it afterwards — the landing, the phase scores, the block time, the pay.
It reads your simulator and writes nothing back to it. Nothing it records depends on you doing anything except flying.
The recording has to stay dense, particularly near the ground where the scoring happens. A recording that goes quiet for long stretches is not a recording of a flight.
Pausing, and slew
Pausing is allowed, and has to be — this is a hobby flown around a life, and a long sector does not fit between dinner and bed. What licenses a pause is not its length but that the aeroplane is in the same place when the recording resumes.
Slew is different, and is refused outright. There is no amount of it that belongs in a credited sector: SkyHub pays for aircraft that were flown, not aircraft that were moved.
Deboard ends it and files it
Land, taxi in, park with the brake set and the engines shut down. The recorder does not decide the flight is over — it asks. Press Deboard and the sector is built, sent, graded and paid, and the console stays up for the turnaround so your passengers can actually get off.
The time you spend parked before you answer is not block time. The sector is trimmed back to the moment the engines stopped before anything is filed.
When the network gives out
Filing takes a few seconds and there is no queue behind it: the server grades the flight, writes the logbook entry and pays you inside the same request. If a sector is not in your logbook a moment after the client says it filed, it did not file.
That is the good case. If the network drops, a router reboots, or we are mid-deploy at the moment you park, the flight is written to disk before it is ever sent, retried on a backoff, and — if it still cannot get out — kept and sent automatically the next time you open the client. You do nothing. An hour of flying is not lost to ten seconds of network.
This is only safe because filing the same sector twice is harmless: a flight carries an identity fixed when it started, and a second copy is answered with the first one rather than paid again.
When the simulator gives out
A simulator that crashes, quits or drops its connection leaves a partial recording, and a partial recording is not a short flight — it is an unfinished one. The client can tell the difference and will not file it as a completed sector.
The flight is lost, the aeroplane stays where the sheet says it was, and the sector is still open to be flown again. That is the honest outcome, and it is better than a half-sector on a record that cannot be amended.
And the part that is not up to you
Separately from all of the above, the airline only credits flights it watched happen. While you fly, the client reports your position to us, and those reports are the evidence — recorded on our clock, not yours — that the sector took place at all.
A flight we could not see is a flight we cannot pay for. It is the strictest rule in the product, and how it works, and what it deliberately cannot do, is its own briefing.