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New: Approach & Landing ratings, Butter Board, and shareable replay videos

Stan Anderson @stan · 1d

Every flight you log with the Hub now gets an approach and landing analysis, built from your recorded track and real runway data. Analyze final. Open any flight and tap Analyze final next to Replay. You’ll see your approach from above and from the side, against the runway centerline and a standard 3° glide path. The plane flies it back in sync on both views, and your track turns green, amber or red as you drift off. Approach score (out of 100), based on how steady you were from 1,000 ft down: Glide path Centerline Sink rate Speed Touchdown You’ll also see whether you were stabilized by 1,000 or 500 ft. Landing tab. A close-up of the runway shows where your wheels touched down against the touchdown zone, how far you were off the centerline, and your height crossing the threshold. That gives you a landing score. Landing grades on the feed: 🧈 Butter (100 fpm or less) · 👌 Smooth · 👍 Firm · 😬 Hard · 🧱 Brick Great approaches (75+) also show their score next to the grade. Tap any grade to jump straight into the analysis. Butter Landing badge. Touch down at 100 fpm or less on a flight of 10+ minutes to earn it. Nine pilots already have one! Airport leaderboards. Every airport page now has a Best approaches board and a Butter board. Your best flight into that airport counts, so pick your favourite field and go for 🥇. Export video. In Analyze final, tap Export video for a portrait clip of your approach, landing and score, ready for Reels, TikTok and Shorts. On your phone, use Safari for an MP4 you can share directly. A few honest notes: Scores come from your logged track, which records a point about every 5 seconds, so the flare itself isn’t captured. Speeds are groundspeed, so wind affects them. Runway positions come from public data and may differ slightly from your sim’s scenery. Tight, curved VFR circuits score lower by stabilized-approach standards. That’s not a bad landing, just a different style of approach. We’ll keep tuning the scoring. Tell us what feels off, or what you’d like analyzed next: takeoffs, traffic patterns, or comparing your approach against the best one into the same runway? Happy landings! 🛬

2 replies

  • BW

    Bill Wells · 19h · edited

    That's such a cool feature! Check the groundspeed grade algorithm. You may want to shorten the distance from the runway at which airspeed is graded. When flying a King Air, my arrival descent speed is 195-205 KIAS until below 10,000, then 180-190. At 6 miles or on course intercept, apply flaps 1 and reduce speed to 160kts. On glideslope capture, gear down and let airspeed bleed off. At 140kts, flaps 2. Let airspeed bleed off to Vref, typically 104kts, but anywhere from 100 - 110 KIAS. This profile keeps my airspeed above 128 +/- 14 until well within the GS cone, since I don't typically get below 140 until GS intercept. Using these numbers, I scored a measly 10 on my landing speed to KISM, when everything else was 100.

  • Stan Anderson · 12h

    We were grading speed from 1,000 ft down, so a normal bleed from glideslope capture down to Vref counted as “unstable”. Speed is now judged from 500 ft down, and a steady slowdown to your landing speed is fine. Only surging, hunting or a big late speed change costs points. Your KISM approach now scores 100 (it was 87, with a speed score of 10). 🛬 While we were in there, we also tightened the landing score: Centerline counts for more: full marks within 5 ft, nothing at 25 ft off. Touchdown point: landing early, before the aim point, now costs more than landing slightly long. Threshold crossing height (target 50 ft) is now part of the score. Your landing comes out at 75. It was soft (76 fpm), in the touchdown zone and 38 ft over the threshold, but 25 ft left of the centerline. Keep the feedback coming. Real-world profiles like yours are exactly what we need to get the scoring right.

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