About
This text was auto-translated into English.
Hello
My name is Alexander, and I'm the creator of SimFlightBoard. I made this little page to briefly tell you what this project is and why it exists.
The idea
The project was born from a wish to stretch the VATSIM philosophy a little and let people look at online flights from a "passenger" point of view — not as a huge map with thousands of enthusiastic virtual pilots, but as a large transport ecosystem that keeps running, reliably, 24/7.
Most maps and trackers, in my opinion, put all the attention on the pilots themselves. With SimFlightBoard I went the other way and tried to gather data that might interest an imaginary passenger. That's why, for example, I don't have — and never will have — names, hours flown, pilot IDs, links to VATSIM profiles, or information about what achievements they unlocked on the network. Instead, SimFlightBoard uses IATA codes for airlines and airports, flight statuses (like "check-in in progress"), and notices that a flight has landed.
SimFlightBoard doesn't present itself as a "new VATSIM tracker" or as an alternative to the sites and apps that collect network stats. No — SimFlightBoard is a additional app that, as I see it, is meant to be used together with the rest of the toolkit, not instead of it.
Style
The look of the site is also an important part of it — a way to bring in that same "vibe" I wrote about earlier. I'm not a designer, so the style is built by trial and error and keeps getting refined. When I work on it, I look at the websites of popular airports and airlines, trying to make something in that spirit and hit the right atmosphere.
The logo
I made the current logo about 10 years ago, when I was just learning web development. As a practice project I wanted to redo the Khabarovsk airport website as it looked back then. For the logo I took one of my screenshots from FS2004, traced it in Photoshop, and styled it a bit. The project didn't work out, and the logo was just sitting in my cloud storage. But now, it’s finally come in handy. It might be ugly, but it holds personal significance for me — so I have no intention of changing it.
Here's that screenshot:
AI
In times like these, I think it's important to say how I use AI in this project. And yes, this project does use AI.
Development
I use AI to some extent during the development process. It helps me refactor old code, find bugs I wouldn't have caught myself, and also helps with styling. For example: I built the ticker (announcer, the scrolling line on the board page) myself, but I just couldn't style it so it looked good and fit the rest of the site. So I asked Cursor to help with that, and it did. The flight card in the lists was also made with the help of AI.
AI is also used, to some extent, for writing texts for the website. The privacy policy was written 100% by AI, because I don't understand that stuff at all. Earlier, AI also helped me with wording for the Changelog and for some other bits of the site.
Real-time use
AI (YandexGPT) is used in real time to translate airport and city names into Russian (all original names are in English). AI is also used to change the grammatical cases of city names for the ticker.
How to support the project
If you like what I've put together here, consider supporting the project. For example, you can share it with your friends: the more people know about it, the better it is for the project, and growing interest keeps me motivated to keep going.
Alternatively, you can take a survey about the quality of the site. I read every message and look into it. Some of the comments help me a lot — for example, one user pointed out an inaccuracy in how departure time is calculated, and I fixed it. You can leave your opinion too and tell me if something isn't working right, or if something could be done better.
What's next
You may have noticed that the current version (at the time I'm writing this) is 0.5.12. That is, it isn't even version 1. In a way, this is a public beta, or just development out in the open. There's still a lot of good stuff I plan to add before version 1. You can follow the updates on the corresponding page.