This manual is written in procedural language, and three words carry weight throughout:

1. shall — the action is mandatory. The system enforces most of them for you;
2. should — the action is recommended. Ignoring it costs money or convenience, not access;
3. may — the action is at the pilot’s discretion.

Most flight-sim tools watch you fly. SkyHub gives you a reason to. Everything beyond this page is written the way the airline writes — because in this game, the airline is the point. Welcome aboard.

This manual provides the standard operating procedures for SkyHub: Pilot’s Dark World — from procurement of a license, through the operation of the ACARS client and the Inflight Management Panel, to the completion of revenue sectors.

These procedures apply to all flight crew. No prior virtual-airline experience is assumed. No procedure in this manual requires more than a flight simulator, a Windows PC, and the will to earn the left seat.

One license unlocks Career Mode on one SkyHub account, permanently. The purchase is one-time: no subscription, no recurring charge. Every future update of the game, and the ACARS flight recorder application, are included.

On clearance of payment, a single-use license key is issued and delivered to the checkout email address. The pilot shall retain the delivery email until the key is redeemed.

The pilot shall create a crew account at skyhubairways.com/join and select a crew base. The base is home: it sets the network you fly and the weather you learn.

The pilot shall enter the key once at skyhubairways.com/license. The key binds to the first account that redeems it, permanently, and Career Mode opens on acceptance.

Before dispatch, the pilot shall sign the Flight Crew Agreement presented by the People Department.

The Rostering Department issues each month as a sheet of real sectors — flight numbers, aircraft, report times. Sectors shall be flown in sequence: continuity is checked at dispatch, and the sheet, the logbook and the ledger stay in agreement because of it.

Before each sector the pilot shall open the briefing at the OMC. The plan carries the flight number, the aeroplane and the route; fly what the sheet says.

The ACARS client runs on Windows. The account itself signs in anywhere.

There is no manual PIREP form anywhere in SkyHub, by design. A sector exists because it was flown: the ACARS client records it and files it, and the server grades what the recorder saw, not what anybody claims. Operation of the client is the subject of Chapter 4.

Installation is performed once; the client keeps itself up to date silently.

The client authenticates with a personal ACARS token — it both identifies the pilot and authorises the report, so no password is ever typed into the client.

The Inflight Management Panel is the cabin, on one console. It is a page served by the ACARS client on the pilot’s own machine, opened in whatever view the simulator offers — an MSFS toolbar window, X-Plane’s browser, the client’s own window, or an ordinary browser tab on the same PC. It never leaves that machine and carries no token.

The console is a dial: a wheel with the controls on its segments, the status of the sector drawn on its face, and a caption line that names whichever key is under the pointer. A light and a dark face are selectable from the console itself; nothing else about it changes.

The cabin answers everything the pilot does with a satisfaction score, shown live and settled into the Airmanship record at shutdown. Passengers notice what real passengers notice: belts respected, a cart that came round, a word from the flight deck, a firm arrival.

One control does more than it appears to. Boarding is the master switch for the sector: the first press commences boarding and starts the recording; the last press deboards the passengers and files the flight. Between the two it is greyed, and outside them nothing is being recorded at all. Each gate is the aeroplane’s doing rather than the console’s:

1. nothing opens while the aircraft is moving — a refused press is written into the session record with the groundspeed that caused it;
2. boarding may be commenced once, on stand, before pushback;
3. deboarding unlocks only when the aircraft is on the ground, parking brake set, engines shut down, having flown — not at touchdown, and not at the departure gate.

The seatbelt and no-smoking signs are worked from the console until the aeroplane is seen to work its own. The instant the cockpit switch moves the console hands over and becomes a readout for the rest of the sector — so a study-level add-on is flown from its own overhead panel and everything else is flown from here. No press is needed to change over.

The belts are required at or below 10,000 ft climbing and descending, through takeoff and landing, and in turbulence at any level. Ten seconds of grace are allowed inside each window; after that the episode is counted once, and each one costs 15% of cabin satisfaction, permanently. The sign left on in smooth air well above ten thousand costs 3 points — a fraction of that, and for the opposite reason: a cabin belted for no reason cannot get up, and a sign that is always on stops meaning anything.

Three carts are offered — drinks, snacks, or a hot meal — worth progressively more to the cabin. One runs at a time, in real time: about fifteen minutes in a single-aisle cabin and thirty in a twin-aisle, read from the aircraft type the simulator reports. The ring around the key is the cart’s true progress, and satisfaction is credited as the trolley works down the aisle rather than in a lump at the end.

The cart is locked below 10,000 ft and stows itself in turbulence — the ring visibly halts and resumes, and paused time is not counted against the run. A service still running below the floor on the descent, never stowed, costs 4 points.

Four routine calls are made from the console, in the cabin crew’s own recorded voices: boarding (the welcome), cruise, descent and deboarding. The first three are crew duties and are recorded as such by the client. Each one owed and never made costs 15 Airmanship on the report, and a cabin taken off unwelcomed additionally costs 6 points of satisfaction. Ambient music may be run on the ground during boarding, with a skip and its own volume; it is at the pilot’s discretion and is not graded.

The cabin does not interrupt the flight deck with a dialog box. When something has happened down the back the interphone rings — three times, thirty seconds apart — and it is the only thing on the console that blinks. Answering cuts the ring, unlocks the flight deck door, and only then do the crew speak. No decision may be taken while they are still speaking: half a report is not a briefing.

When the report is finished the console offers the answer as two keys, one word each — DIVERT or CONTINUE, GO-AROUND, DEVIATE, DESCEND, as the situation demands. The caption says what each key does; neither says which is right. A decision to divert is announced to the cabin by the console itself, five seconds later.

Three calls belong to the aeroplane being in trouble and to nothing else: emergency descent, brace and evacuate. Each is one press, each asks for confirmation before the cabin hears it, and none of them lives in a drawer.

The console carries the aircraft’s normal checklist — nine cards from BEFORE START to PARKING, raised as the sector reaches them, answered by clicking a line. Nothing on it is graded. It exists so that the pilot’s own word about what they set can be laid beside what the recorder saw, which is the only way to tell a mis-published simulator variable from a mis-flown procedure.

Four settings, none of which touch the recording: the voice pack the crew speak in, changeable before boarding only; disruptive events, from off through low and standard to high, which is how often the airline is allowed to have a bad day at the pilot’s expense; and the announcement and music volumes.

The status line above the controls is the recorder speaking plainly. A phase strip beneath it lights BRD, TAXI, T/O, CLB, CRZ, DES, LDG or ARR, and the cabin reads NOT READY, BUSY or READY beside the satisfaction meter.

Cancel arms the decision and never performs it: the controls give way to Confirm and Keep flying. An aeroplane that has already started taxiing is told to return to the ramp and shut down rather than asked to confirm. A cancelled sector is voided — there is no report and no pay.

The complete sector, gate to gate. Nothing below is typed in afterwards — every response is the system doing its part once the pilot has done theirs.

The sector begins at Step 2 and not before. Until then the client is connected to a simulator but recording nothing: the panel reads STANDBY · PRESS BOARDING. Commencing boarding starts the recording, and the block time, at that instant.

Table 4.5 is the sector as it runs when nothing happens, and most do not. Weather, turbulence and the day’s events will interrupt that flow at any point between Steps 2 and 8 — that is the game working, and how often it works is the pilot’s own setting (4.3.8).

An interruption is met in the same order every time: the interphone rings, the crew are heard out, and the console offers the decision. None of it takes the recorder off the sector, and none of it changes the two presses that open and close the flight.

Abnormal situations are outside the scope of this chapter. For abnormal procedures, refer to Chapter 6.

Every touchdown is graded by FDM into tiers, and the tier moves the money: a smooth arrival earns a premium, a firm one is remembered. Grades appear on the flight report and on the FCD leaderboards.

Pay settles to the ledger automatically at report acceptance: block time at the rank’s hourly rate, adjusted by the FDM tier. The ledger is append-only — every đồng is accounted for, forever.

Hours decide when you can be promoted. Cash decides whether you can afford it. You need both, and the game sells you neither: hours come from flying, and cash is earned, lent — or won.

Promotion to the ranks below command is by hours gate and promotion fee. Command is different: captaincy shall not be purchased and is awarded only on completion of the command training course, flown under assessment, with handling scores doing the talking.

Loans carry real interest, the shop sells what a salary can reach, and somewhere below all of it a fixer deals in favours. This manual does not document that world. When it finds you — and it will — remember two things: everything has a price, and the airline is always watching.

One flight at a time: complete or abandon the flight in progress before dispatching the next.

There is no recording. The client held on STANDBY for the duration of the flight and no track, no report and no block time exist to be filed. Nothing can be recovered and nothing should be requested from Flight Operations.

Fly the sector again, commencing boarding on stand before pushback.

The console is refusing rather than failing. Read the status line: WAITING FOR THE SIM means no frame has ever arrived and the aircraft is not yet loaded; NOT RECORDING means frames were arriving and have stopped. In both cases the cabin is inert by design — there are no passengers to work on a loading screen — and it comes back by itself when the simulator is streaming again.

Cancel and Settings remain available throughout. Nothing needs to be reopened and nothing is lost by waiting.

The aeroplane was placed rather than flown — slewed, teleported, or repositioned by the simulator — and the recording is frozen at that point. The sector cannot be filed and nothing should be requested from Flight Operations. Fly it again from the stand.

Request through [email protected] or through Paddle directly — no forms, no interrogation.

File it with the Report button, present on every portal page — build and context attach automatically, and a human reads every one.

Stuck, puzzled, or something looks wrong with the account? Write to [email protected] — include your callsign or order reference, and you will usually hear back within a day. A human reads it.

SkyHub: Pilot’s Dark World is a flight-simulation game with no affiliation to any real-world airline. Its callsign and route network are fictional. All trademarks and logos belong to their respective owners. For flight-simulation purposes only.

Blue skies — and mind the paperwork.