Map layers The buttons above the Flight Tracking map let you add extra information to it: other aircraft, airspace, airports, navaids, approaches and live weather radar. Everything starts switched off, and CAVAcars remembers what you turn on for next time. Button What it adds Traffic Other aircraft near you, from up to five sources Layers Aeronautical data: airspace, airports and runways, heliports, navaids, waypoints and approaches Radar Real-world precipitation radar A button turns blue when at least one of its options is on. Click Traffic or Layers to open a panel of switches; click anywhere else to close it. You can click almost anything drawn on the map (an aircraft, an airport, a navaid, an airspace) to see its details. Traffic Each source has its own switch and its own marker colour, so you can tell at a glance where an aircraft came from. Source Colour What it shows Setup needed VA traffic Pink Other Canada Air Virtual pilots flying nearby None SayIntentions.AI Blue Traffic from SayIntentions.AI Add your SayIntentions.AI API key on your CAV profile. Until you do, the panel shows an Open profile settings button instead of a switch. Sim traffic Green AI and multiplayer aircraft your simulator already knows about None VATSIM Amber Pilots online on the VATSIM network None IVAO Purple Pilots online on the IVAO network None Traffic only appears once you're connected to your sim and loaded into a flight, because it's filtered to what's around your aircraft. Layers The Layers panel has two parts: where the data comes from (the sources at the top), and what to draw (the layer switches below them). Sources Source Colour What it is OpenAIP (real world) Light blue Real-world airspace, airports, navaids and VFR reporting points from OpenAIP . Works with every simulator. MSFS sim data Lime green Your simulator's own navigation database: the runways, approaches, navaids and waypoints the sim's FMS and ATC actually use. Microsoft Flight Simulator only ; the switch is greyed out with FSX, Prepar3D and X-Plane. Turn on one source or both. Points and lines are coloured by source, and each popup says where the item came from. The sim's data and the real world won't always agree (for example, if your sim's navdata is older or newer than the current real-world cycle), so having both on is a handy way to spot differences. Below each source, the panel shows its status: Connected , Loading while data is still arriving, or a short message if something went wrong. If OpenAIP can't be reached for a moment, the map keeps showing what it already loaded. Layer switches Layer On by default From What you get Airspace Yes OpenAIP Airspace outlines, coloured by type (see below). The popup shows the type, class, lower and upper limits, and whether it's activated by NOTAM or on demand. Airports & runways Yes Both OpenAIP: every airport and airfield in view, with runways, surface, elevation and frequencies in the popup. MSFS: your departure and arrival airports only, with their runways drawn to scale and their runways, approaches, SIDs and STARs listed in the popup. Heliports No OpenAIP Heliports, kept separate so they don't clutter the map. Needs Airports & runways switched on. Navaids Yes Both VORs, NDBs and DMEs, with frequency and channel in the popup. Waypoints & reporting points No Both OpenAIP: VFR reporting points, with compulsory ones marked. MSFS: the waypoints your sim has loaded around your aircraft. Approaches Yes MSFS The approach procedures for your flight's departure and arrival airports, drawn as lines with their fixes in the popup. Because the layer switches are shared, turning a layer off hides it for both sources. Nothing appears until a source is switched on, so on a fresh install you'll need to turn on OpenAIP or MSFS sim data first. Zoom levels To keep the map readable (and to avoid downloading half a continent's worth of data), layers only load once you're zoomed in far enough: Airspace, airports and navaids appear once you've zoomed in to roughly a regional view, a few hundred miles across. If you're zoomed out too far, the panel says Zoom in to see airspace, airports and navaids . Waypoints and reporting points need you to zoom in a couple of steps further. Idents (the labels next to airports and navaids) only show once you're zoomed in that far too, so they don't pile on top of each other. Your departure and arrival from MSFS sim data, and their approaches, load straight away, whatever the zoom. Airspace colours Colour Airspace Red Prohibited Orange Restricted Yellow Danger Purple Other special-use areas to be careful around Blue Controlled airspace: control zones and Class A to D Teal Class E Grey Class F and G, and anything else A short colour key appears in the Layers panel while the Airspace layer is on. Radar The Radar button overlays real-world precipitation radar from RainViewer . The radar image is refreshed roughly every 10 minutes and CAVAcars picks up the newest one automatically. It shows real-world weather. It only matches what you see out the window if your simulator is using live weather. RainViewer's free radar has limited detail, so it looks blocky when you zoom in close. Also on the map Your planned route: if your latest SimBrief plan is for the flight you're tracking (same departure and arrival), the map draws its route fix by fix instead of a straight great-circle line. See Planning with SimBrief . Map style: the background map follows the Map Style you picked on your CAV profile on the website.