Update 0.71.0: Fly Without a Roster

Version 0.71.0 is out. If OTT is already installed you may well be running it without having done anything, because the way updates arrive changed in this release too. More on that below.

The headline is this: you no longer need a roster to use OnTime Turnaround.

Flying with nothing scheduled

Plenty of flying does not start with a schedule. You load the sim, pick an airport you fancy, and go. Until now OTT sat that one out.

From 0.71.0, if you have no active roster and you release the brakes and start to taxi from a parked stand, OTT quietly opens a single leg for you, departing the nearest airport. When you stop at the other end with the engines off and the parking brake set, it closes the leg at whatever airport you have parked at and files it in your logbook as an auto flight, named for the route you actually flew.

What it is doing is keeping a record. The leg lands in your logbook with its times, its route and its landing, so a free flight is no longer a flight that never happened. Points stay where they have always been, on rostered flying, because that is where the day you were given is the thing being measured.

Two things worth knowing. It is on by default, and there is a switch for it in Settings if you would rather it stayed quiet. And it will never push an active roster out of the way: if you have a day loaded, your day wins.

Updates that stay out of your way

The update banner is gone. Updates now download in the background and install themselves when you close the app, so for most people the first sign of a new version will be this list of changes appearing when OTT next opens.

If a build is waiting when you launch, OTT installs it before it opens, behind a small Updating window, and then starts up on the new version. If that check or the download is slow it gives up and opens normally rather than making you wait, and installs on the way out instead.

It will not interrupt a flight. The Restart Now button in Settings is disabled from the moment you go off blocks until you are back on blocks at the other end.

The map stays where you put it

Switching over to Roster used to throw away whatever you had the live map looking at. Now the map stays exactly where it was, and your selection clears cleanly when you move between tabs. Clicking an airport on the map also opens that airport now, rather than leaving an aircraft you had selected earlier sitting open in front of it.

Fixed in this release

• A brief network drop could sign you out in the middle of a roster. Two token refreshes were racing each other and the loser killed the session. Only a genuinely rejected token ends a session now. Timeouts, server errors and dropped connections do not.
• Jumping your aircraft to another airport no longer gets logged as a flight. Teleports are confirmed by speed and how long you sit still, so a change of scenery stays a change of scenery.
• Show all flights in the logbook now draws every flight, instead of the first page of them.
• If you lose the sim mid-flight, the arrival that follows is ignored rather than recorded as the end of your leg.
• Taxi times you have set yourself are kept when you import from SimBrief.

Keep them coming

Almost everything in that fixes list came from someone telling us about it, most of it within days of launch. If something in OTT is not behaving, or there is a way you fly that OTT still does not account for, the Discord is where it gets picked up.