Challenges

A challenge is an airport we have marked as hard work. Fly the difficult part of it on a scored leg and the bonus lands in that leg's points, every time you do it, on whatever kind of roster you are flying.

Where the list is

Challenges is under Performance in the nav. It is a list of cards, one per airport, and each card carries:

• the ICAO code and the name we have given the challenge, for example LOWI and Innsbruck Valley;
• a line on what makes it awkward;
• what it is worth;
• an Achieved ribbon, once you have done it.

The list is ours, not yours. You cannot add an airport, and the list changes as we add them, so it is worth a look before you build a day.

How the bonus is awarded

Every challenge is set for arrivals, departures or both. The bonus goes to the leg that does the matching movement.

• An arrivals challenge pays the leg that lands there. Departing from the same airport earns nothing.
• A departures challenge pays the leg that leaves from there.
• A both challenge pays either way.

It is paid when the leg closes, with the rest of that leg's points, and it appears in the breakdown by name, as Challenging Airport Bonus.

The first time you do one

The first time you complete a given challenge the app tells you, with a notification naming the challenge, the points and which movement earned them. The card picks up its Achieved ribbon at the same time.

The ribbon is a record of having done it, not a lock. The bonus keeps paying out long after the ribbon appears.

Four more things worth knowing

• It pays every time. It is not a one off. Fly the same arrival next week and you collect it again.
• A leg can collect two. One challenging airport at each end of a leg, with the directions set the right way round, pays both.
• The tier bonus applies to it. On Hard or Extreme the tier bonus is a percentage of everything positive on the leg, and a challenge bonus is positive, so a challenge is worth more at a harder tier.
• It does not care how you got there. A roster you built by hand, a generated schedule, an event or a Simple Flight all score the same.

Planning for one

Challenges reward routing, so look at the list before you build rather than after.

• Put the airport on the right end of the leg. A challenge set for arrivals needs to be the ARR ICAO.
• A chain gets you two: arrive at a challenging airport on one leg, and if it is set for both, leave it on the next one.
• Check the aircraft actually belongs there. Nothing in the scoring stops you taking a widebody into a short strip, but the landing and comfort penalties will cost you more than the bonus pays.
• A challenging airport inside an event or a generated schedule pays exactly the same, so it is worth reading an event's legs for one.

Watch out: Abandon deletes every bonus earned on that roster, and a challenge bonus is one of them. If that roster held the only time you had ever flown the challenge, the Achieved ribbon goes with it. Fly the day out if you possibly can.

If something goes wrong

You flew there and got nothing. Check the direction. An arrivals challenge pays nothing for a departure, and the card does not spell the direction out, so the safe move is to both arrive and depart on the same day.

The leg never scored at all. Points are worked out when a leg closes. If the leg is still open, or in blocks was never detected, nothing has been awarded yet. Close it from the Roster screen.

The Achieved ribbon has gone. The roster that earned it was abandoned, which takes the award back. Fly the challenge again.

The screen says No challenges right now. None are configured at the moment. New ones are announced on Discord.

The bonus is smaller than the card said. It is not. What changed is the rest of the leg: the number on the card is the challenge on its own, and the breakdown shows it beside everything else you earned and lost.

This feature is currently disabled. The Challenges screen has been switched off on our side. The bonus itself is scored by the points engine, not by the screen.