A world that remembers

Over the past year, some of you have noticed aircraft in multiplayer that behaved a little differently.

Parked at gates. Sitting on ramps. Still there after the session ended. Sometimes appearing again days later, in the same place or somewhere entirely different because someone had flown them there.

A few of you figured out that we were testing something new.

From the beginning, Infinite Flight has been about making aviation accessible anywhere. Over time, Infinite Flight Live has grown from shared skies and live traffic into a community with ATC, ranks, servers, procedures, events, and pilots who care deeply about how they fly.

This next iteration builds on that foundation.

Infinite Flight Live is becoming a persistent world where aircraft do not simply appear for a single session and vanish when it ends. They can have a location, a history, an owner, a schedule, and a reason to be flown.

Why this feels different

After flying this way during development, it changed how I would think about every session.

I no longer open Infinite Flight and start with a blank slate. I open it and the world is already there. My aircraft are where they were left. Shared fleet aircraft are waiting for their next assignment. Some are parked at hubs. Some are away from base.

Some aircraft are halfway around the world because another pilot flew them there last week.

The first question is no longer only, “Where do I want to fly?” It becomes, “What needs to happen next?”

Maybe a widebody needs to be repositioned. Maybe there is an open flight in an organization schedule. Maybe an aircraft has been sitting at an outstation and it's time to bring it home. Maybe the weather makes one route a better choice than another.

There is always a next flight, and it does not disappear when the app closes.

One of the first moments this really clicked for me involved two aircraft.

In one of our earliest test fleets, the first aircraft I added was N1TG, a 777-200ER in the Infinite Flight livery. It entered the world at Paine Field in Washington State. The second was N1XC, an A318 delivered from Toulouse.

Once our servers could support true ground persistence, I wanted to see those two aircraft meet.

I flew N1TG to Paris Charles de Gaulle, where I had left N1XC after its delivery flight. On final, I saw it. The A318, parked exactly where I left it. I landed, taxied over, and parked beside it.

Nothing dramatic happened on screen. Two aircraft were sitting next to each other at an airport.

But it felt different.

Those aircraft had history now. They were not just selections from a menu. They had been delivered, flown, parked, and remembered by this new persistent world. They would stay there until someone moved them.

That was the moment persistence stopped feeling like a system and started feeling like the next version of Live.

What persistence means

In this new Live mode, aircraft persist in the world.

They stay where they are parked. They remain associated with the fleets and organizations that operate them. When an aircraft needs to be somewhere else, it needs to be flown there.

That one rule changes a lot.

New fleet aircraft enter the world at an appropriate delivery airport. The first flight is not just another flight; it is a delivery. From there, the aircraft begins building its own history.

During testing, we watched pilots coordinate long repositioning flights, refueling stops, and multi-leg operations that would not have mattered in a non-persistent world. Aircraft could no longer be treated as disposable, in disposable sessions. Their locations mattered. Their range mattered. The route mattered. The pilots available to fly mattered.

Weather matters more too.

When conditions are challenging, the decision is not just whether you can complete the approach. It is whether this is the right aircraft, the right airport, and the right pilot for the job. Severe weather can create a real reason to reposition aircraft, delay flights, or change plans.

Early in testing, we were ferrying a group of A320s from Toulouse to their hub in New York when weather began moving into the East Coast. The aircraft were already enroute, so we had a decision to make: continue toward LaGuardia or divert, park the aircraft somewhere safer, and wait it out.

If we continued, who would fly the arrival? These were new aircraft on their first flights. Nobody wanted to be the one to put the first snag in the logbook.

That is the kind of moment persistence creates. Not because of a scripted mission, but because the persistent world keeps track of what happened.

Organizations and shared fleets

Persistence becomes even more interesting when people work together.

Organizations allow pilots to create and manage shared operations, including fleets, schedules, aircraft assignments, and permissions. A small group can run a regional operation. A large group can coordinate flights across time zones. A solo pilot can create a private organization and manage a personal fleet.

The system is flexible by design.

An organization can be a virtual airline, a private fleet, a cargo operation, a training group, or something the community invents after launch. Pilots can fly available aircraft, follow scheduled routes, and help keep the operation moving. Longer flights can be handled across time zones, with crews coordinating who takes the aircraft next.

The important part is that the aircraft belong to a world that continues beyond one session.

A flight is no longer isolated. It becomes part of an operation.

AutoPilot+ and Auto Exit

Some of the tools built for persistence are already in the app today.

AutoPilot+ and Auto Exit started as answers to a simple problem: in a world that remembers aircraft, long flights need protection. Real life interrupts, connections drop, and plans change. In a persistent world, an aircraft should not overshoot its destination or end up somewhere unintended because nobody was there at the right moment.

AutoPilot+ gives pilots and crews more time to return as arrival approaches. Auto Exit provides a cleaner way to end a session when nobody is available to continue.

We built these features for the demands of the next version of Live, but they proved useful for everyday flying too. So we brought them into the main app along the way. Persistence is already improving Infinite Flight before it fully arrives.

Building something sustainable

A persistent world needs persistent communities. As organizations grow, we need a way to support growth that remains fair and sustainable. Let's get technical.

To support persistence in Live, we are introducing Lifts.

Every Pro subscriber will receive Lifts that can be allocated to organizations. As members contribute Lifts, organizations can grow and unlock additional capacity and perks. A solo pilot can use Lifts for a personal operation. A small team can pool enough to run a focused fleet. A larger organization can grow by bringing more members together.

Organizations will be able to decide how they want to operate. Some will stay small and simple. Others will coordinate many pilots, many aircraft, and larger networks.

That flexibility is important to us.

An organization should not just be a name on a list. It should be something pilots build together. The aircraft, the schedules, the routes, and the history will all matter because the persistent world remembers them.

We will offer additional ways to purchase and acquire Lifts for pilots and organizations that want to expand further, and we will share more details as launch approaches.

A foundation for what comes next

This first version is the foundation.

Persistent aircraft make new kinds of experiences possible: dispatch tools, fleet management systems, airline-style operations, analytics, planning tools, community events, and ideas we have not thought of yet.

Over time, we plan to open APIs so third-party developers can build on top of this world. Infinite Flight has always been shaped by its community, and we expect this next chapter of Live to be no different.

We are building the infrastructure. The community will help define what grows from it.

Join the waitlist

The waitlist for the next iteration of Infinite Flight Live opens today.

Join at infiniteflight.live, or open Infinite Flight on your device and select the Live card from the mode selection dialog. Pro subscription required.

We cannot wait to see where you take your fleets first.

— Laura

I'd like to answer some of the concerns we've seen regarding our upcoming update, v18.5, and explain why we've historically been keeping release dates under wraps.

We don't communicate on the dates mostly because while we have a general idea of when we'd like to ship (every 1 to 3 months), we don't have an exact date to share simply because we don't know it.

This "release when it's ready" strategy mostly stems from the randomness of software development. Let me illustrate with a few examples that happened to us:

Back in 2012, the initial release of Infinite Flight on the App Store was delayed by more than a month. It was an issue with certification in the App Store. The app randomly crashed, only when Apple’s review team used it on their WIFI. We could not get any of our beta testers to reproduce the error, it only happened on Apple's testing environment. We sent the initial version to Apple on February 23. Back then, the review wait time was 5 to 7 days. On 2/29, we got a rejection notice. It took a lot of back and forth, often times with reviewers not responding to our messages for days, to get it to pass. Every time, we had to wait another 5 to 7 days to get reviewed, and get another rejection. That is, until 3/31/2012, when it finally passed the review process.

This was a rough start for us.

This sort of situations happened multiple times after that, sometimes because of App Store rule changes. In the past year, review times have become shorter (about a day), so those delays have had less impact after a rejection if the fixes were easy to implement. The last update we shipped (v18.4) was actually rejected, we made a fix and it was approved a day later. But sometimes, as we've been through in 2012, the fixes take longer.

Sometimes, our development environment is deprecating components we need and there often is no easy replacement. One such thing happened a couple of years ago. We were using an external library for authentication with Facebook & Google. Facebook had planned to deprecate an API call, we had been begging the external library developers to add support for it, but they couldn't do it in time, which lead us to scramble to find other solutions to still support Facebook login. This delayed the release at that time because we simply couldn't ship with a broken Facebook Authentication.

Other times, we realized late in the beta process that after flights of 20 hours or more, for example, the app may crash. That's something that takes time to test, track, reproduce, and fix, and ultimately this can delay a release in the final stages.

Those things are hard to predict. Software development is difficult to plan, especially on short release cycles like we have today on mobile.

That's why we say soon. To the best of our ability, we think it'll be soon, because all indicators point to everything being ready in the near future, bearing in mind the 1 to 3 months typical release cycle. We like to ship updates just as much as the community likes receiving them and we always do our best to ship when it's ready. Ready for us means that it's stable and is at a level of quality we feel comfortable with.

Now, about the pending update... It was in review last week and got rejected by Apple because of the way we handle user accounts and subscriptions. They realized that we asked users to create accounts before we allowed a subscription purchase and for privacy reasons, asked us to allow users to make Facebook/Google Login optional. In short, users should be able to get Infinite Flight Pro without having to share their personal information.

We've been working on making this change all weekend and feel confident that this rework will not take long. Again, we cannot share any dates for the reasons above. While we are implementing this new system to comply with the rules (Android rules are the same), they may still have a few things for us to correct when they review it.

I hope this helps clarify what is happening behind the scenes.

Thanks for your continued support and understanding :)
Happy landings
Laura