Beyond ATC, PilotEdge, Single-Player? Now Works for You Too.
A new toggle in the search options that tells findsim.flights to stop filtering on live VATSIM coverage. Routes come back. Scoring still runs. ATC requirements stay out of the way.
⚙️ One checkbox
Open the search form, scroll to Search Options, tick “I use a different ATC tool (Beyond ATC, PilotEdge, single-player…) — skip VATSIM scoring”. That's the whole change you need to make.
Why we built this
The whole findsim.flights pitch is “flights where ATC is on duty right now,” and that was historically a hard requirement: no controllers online at your selected city, no results. Which means we were silently excluding everyone who flies with a different ATC tool.
That's a big audience. Beyond ATC has tens of thousands of MSFS users. PilotEdge runs a paid network outside VATSIM. Plenty of pilots just use the default in-sim ATC and want a route to fly, full stop. For all of those: VATSIM coverage doesn't add information, so insisting on it is just gatekeeping.
What changes when you toggle it on
- The minimum-departure-ATC and minimum-arrival-ATC selects go grey. They get a label that reads “(ignored — VATSIM scoring is off)” so you know they're not filtering anything.
- The backend nulls those filters. Routes that don't have live controllers at either end stop being excluded. So if you're searching from KSFO and nobody is online at SFO right now, you still get results.
- Scoring still runs. Other factors — weather, daylight preference, aircraft type, your airport biases, distance, duration — all still feed the rank. The ATC component just contributes 0 to the total.
- Persistence works the same. The toggle is part of the saved filters. Untick it again whenever you're on a VATSIM session.
We'll suggest it for you
If you set an ATC requirement (say, “Tower or better”) and your search returns nothing, the empty-state list now includes a specific suggestion: “If you don't use VATSIM (Beyond ATC, PilotEdge, single-player), check ‘Skip VATSIM scoring’ in advanced options instead.”
So if you didn't know the toggle existed, the app surfaces it at exactly the moment it would help.
Honest caveats
- The live ATC indicator above the search form and the ATC overlay on the globe still show real VATSIM data either way — they're informational. We're not pretending Beyond ATC controllers exist on our radar; we just stop using VATSIM as a filter.
- The flight data we surface is still the same dataset (FlightAware / OpenFlights / VATSIM history / community contributions). It's real routes, just no longer gated on a live VATSIM controller being on duty.