Flag a Flight, Suggest a Fix, Add a Route
Community feedback is now wired into every flight card, and your one-route contributions go live for everyone in minutes.
🎉 What's New
Two thumb buttons on every flight card: a green one to confirm the data's right, a red one to flag it. Picking the red one lets you pin down what's wrong — wrong airline, wrong origin, wrong destination, wrong aircraft type, doesn't exist — and suggest the correct value. And the single-route form on /contribute/route/add writes straight into the live search database.
Why we needed this
findsim.flights pulls flight data from a stack of sources — OpenFlights, VATSIM live + bookings, OpenSky, FlightAware, Wikipedia, EuroControl. They don't always agree. ADS-B trackers sometimes mistag a regional hop as the wrong city pair. Airline ICAO codes get scrambled when a feeder is mis-labelled. Aircraft type guesses go stale when a route gets re-equipped.
For a long time the only recourse was to email us. Now the fix is two clicks from the flight in your search results.
Reporting a wrong flight
On every flight card you'll now see a small red flag button. Click it, and the report modal asks you to pick a reason from a structured list instead of free-form prose. The categories cover what we've actually seen in the data:
- Flight doesn't exist — phantom flights from old OpenSky data or seasonal routes that have been retired
- Wrong aircraft type — a B738 listed as a B739, that kind of thing. The modal then asks you for the correct ICAO type code.
- Wrong airline / airline name — codeshares, mergers, feeder relabelling. Suggest the right ICAO airline code.
- Wrong origin airport — common when ADS-B confuses a nearby field. Suggest the actual ICAO.
- Wrong destination airport — same story, but on arrival.
- Wrong departure time / schedule — for flights pulled from VATSIM bookings that have since been rescheduled.
- Route is discontinued — the airline pulled it.
- Other — a free-text catch-all for anything else.
Pick a structured reason and the free-text box becomes optional. Pick “Other” and we ask for a short description. Either way, your report gets stored against the flight along with the suggested correction (if any), and the flight itself gets a potentially-invalid tag in our database. That tag does two things: it shows a small amber alert icon on the flight card so other users know community feedback has flagged it, and our ranking algorithm de-prioritises it in future search results.
Confirming a flight
The companion to the flag is a green thumbs-up. Click it after a flight you've actually flown — VATSIM, real-world reference, SimBrief cross-check, whatever — and pick how you verified:
- I've flown this route
- It matches a real-world schedule I checked
- Verified via SimBrief / flight planning tool
- Other
Every confirmation bumps a counter on the flight. Once the counter is above zero, a star with the count shows on the card — so when you're browsing results, you can spot at a glance the routes other pilots have vouched for.
The community-corrected data badge
On the homepage we lean hard on the fact that our routes are community-corrected — meaning real pilots flag wrong stuff, and community confirmations boost trusted entries. The flag and thumbs-up are the actual mechanism behind that promise.
Adding a single route — live in minutes
For one-off contributions there's now a quick form at /contribute/route/add. Fill in airline ICAO, aircraft type, origin, destination, optional duration / distance / notes — submit. Your contribution is immediately visible to every other user's flight search. There is no moderation queue, no “pending review” limbo, no curator-approval bottleneck.
Why the trust? Because every submission is tagged with your VATSIM user ID, and if anyone abuses that we can remove all of their submissions in one query. The community-corrections flow above also catches honest mistakes — if your “DAL101 KJFK→EHAM A359” is actually a B763, the next pilot who tries it can flag it and suggest the fix.
The form does basic validation client- and server-side — ICAO codes have to be the right shape (2–3 chars for airline, 2–4 for aircraft, exactly 4 for origin/destination), and we won't insert duplicates of routes that already exist for the same airline + aircraft + city pair. If you've got a whole spreadsheet of routes, the existing CSV uploader on /contribute is still the way to go for bulk imports.
What this means for everyone
Three concrete improvements you should notice over the next few weeks:
- Fewer phantom routes. ADS-B mistags get flagged and demoted in rankings.
- Better aircraft / airline accuracy. Wrong-aircraft and wrong-airline-name reports come with concrete suggested replacements that our team and (later) automated triage can apply at scale.
- A way to add the route you know exists but we don't. Charter ops, seasonal services, regional connections — if you know about it, you can put it in.
This is the foundation for a few things coming next: a moderator dashboard so triaging the reported flights doesn't need direct DB access, an ranking adjustment that learns from positive feedback over time, and eventually full route corrections (replace this flight with the suggested one) rather than just tagging.