Flight tracking
Getting into a tracked flight
CAVacars 2 watches for your aircraft to appear in the simulator world. When it does:
- If you were on the Home screen, you'll get a 10-second banner offering to jump straight to Flight Tracking.
- If a dispatched flight departs from wherever you've spawned, tracking arms itself automatically with a 60-second countdown before it starts, giving you time to finish your before-start flow first. You can click Start now to skip the wait, or Cancel to not track this flight.
- If more than one of your dispatched flights departs from the same airport, you'll be asked which one to track instead of it guessing.
While tracking
Once active, CAVacars 2 sends position updates to the server automatically and shows your progress (distance and time remaining) right on the tracking screen. The bar under the map shows the flight you're tracking and how many updates have been sent, with File PIREP, Stop and Cancel flight buttons.
The buttons above the map
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Log | Shows the Flight Log panel: events recorded during the flight, your own comments, and the Auto-file switch. See Filing your PIREP. |
| Profile | Shows the vertical profile panel: a chart of your altitude and airspeed over the flight so far. |
| Follow | Keeps the map centred on your aircraft. Dragging the map away turns it off; it turns itself back on when your aircraft is near the middle again. |
| Traffic, Layers, Radar | Other aircraft, airspace and navigation data, and weather radar. See Map layers. |
| Pause at TOD | Pauses the sim before your top of descent (see below). Only shown while a flight is being tracked. |
| Recover | Puts your aircraft back where it was after a sim crash (see below). Only shown when it's needed. |
| Pause / Resume | Pauses or resumes the simulator. |
While the sim is paused, the map is dimmed with a large SIM PAUSED label and a button to resume.
Pause at top of descent
Turn this on and CAVacars 2 pauses the simulator a little before your computed top-of-descent point, based on a rough 3° descent profile. It's handy if you tend to get distracted and fly through your TOD. When it pauses, you'll hear a two-tone cabin chime, and the bar under the map says Paused at top of descent with a Resume button.
Click Pause at TOD to set how early it pauses:
- Lead by distance: pause a set number of nautical miles before TOD.
- Lead by time: pause a set number of minutes before TOD, based on your current ground speed.
Adjust the value if it's pausing too early or too late for your taste.
Stopping or cancelling a flight
- Stop stops tracking but keeps the flight open, so you can resume it for the next 12 hours.
- Cancel flight throws the tracked flight and its log away, and it can't be resumed. You're then asked whether to keep the dispatch to fly later or delete it. You can also cancel a tracked flight from the Dispatched tab, which helps if the app or sim crashed and you don't want to resume.
Interruptions and resuming
If you close the app, crash, or otherwise get interrupted mid-flight, CAVacars 2 keeps your tracked flight open on the server for 12 hours. Next time you launch the app and get back in the world, you'll be offered Resume (pick up where you left off, log and all) or Discard.
If tracking is active when you try to close the app, you'll get a warning first. Quit Anyway ends the app immediately (still resumable within the 12-hour window above) rather than properly ending the flight.
If you resume more than half a mile from where tracking last saw you, the flight log notes how far away you were. That PIREP then goes to staff for review instead of being approved automatically. This can also happen when CAVacars 2 restarts mid-flight to install an update, which is why Windows updates wait for you to click Apply.
Recovering after a sim crash
If your simulator crashes mid-flight and you restart it somewhere else, a Recover button appears above the map once your aircraft is more than 10 nm from its last tracked position. Click it and confirm, and CAVacars 2 moves your aircraft back to that position, altitude and heading.
- You'll need to restore fuel, gear, flaps and trim yourself.
- Recover works with Microsoft Flight Simulator only.
- The recovery is noted in your flight log.