What is a virtual airline?
The short answer: a community that runs an airline inside a flight simulator — with real schedules, real economics, and real consequences for how you fly.
An airline that exists because you fly it
A virtual airline (VA) is a community of flight-simulator pilots who operate a fictional airline together. The airline keeps a fleet, publishes routes and schedules, assigns ranks, and tracks every flight you file. You do the flying in your own simulator — X-Plane 12, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 or 2024 — and the airline's systems record the result: where you went, how the airframe held up, what it earned.
What separates a VA from just "flying around" is persistence. The aircraft you park tonight is where you left it tomorrow. The fuel you tankered, the maintenance the tail needs, the reputation of the company — it all carries forward. Your logbook grows the way a real pilot's does.
What a VA adds to your simulator
Purpose
Instead of picking a random route, you fly work the airline needs done — scheduled legs, charters, ferry flights — with a reason behind each one.
Progression
Hours and clean operations earn rank. Rank unlocks heavier equipment and longer routes, the same way a real career ladder works.
Community
Shared events, group flights, a Discord full of people who care about the same craft — and a bit of friendly competition on the stats board.
Consequence
A good VA makes the airplane a machine, not a toy. Wear, maintenance checks and tech logs mean how you treat the airframe matters.
The tools that make it feel real
Modern virtual airlines don't run on spreadsheets alone. A small ecosystem of services connects your simulator to the airline:
- OnAir is the company engine. It owns the fleet, the jobs, the money and the reputation. When you load passengers and cargo, OnAir is where that load — and its weight — lives.
- SimBrief is dispatch. It builds the operational flight plan: route, altitudes, winds, and the fuel calculation that answers "how much do we actually need tonight?"
- SayIntentions.AI is the radio. AI air traffic control and a cabin crew that talks to you, so the flight has voices on the other end.
- Your simulator is the sky. The VA's job is to make all of it agree with each other, whichever sim you fly.
What one leg actually looks like
- 1Pick up work assigned to you — a scheduled leg, a charter, or a ferry flight the airline needs.
- 2Load the aircraft in the company system: passengers, cargo, crew. That sets the zero-fuel weight.
- 3Dispatch files that weight to SimBrief, which returns the fuel required for the route, weather and alternates.
- 4Buy the fuel — from the airline's own tanks first, if the airport has them — and fly the leg with ATC on the radio.
- 5Park the jet. The airline records the hours, the earnings, the airframe's condition, and where the tail now sits for the next crew.
Our corner of the northern sky
Avid Air is a deliberately Canadian virtual airline, founded in Grande Prairie, Alberta and now operating from hubs in Edmonton CYEG, Vancouver CYVR and Toronto CYYZ. We fly a modern fleet — 737 MAX, 787 Dreamliners and wide-body 777s — and we're sim-agnostic: X-Plane 12 and Microsoft Flight Simulator pilots fly side by side.
We treat our aircraft like machines, with persistent airframes, maintenance checks and tech logs — and our pilots like adults, with dispatch tools that save time instead of adding paperwork. If that sounds like your kind of flying, the door is open.