As 2020 has now drawn to a close, we'd like to reflect on the efforts of our contributors over the past year.

• Addition of 47,200 flightplans. An increase of 420% over 2019 and our highest on record by a significant margin
• Fulfillment of 6,600 flightplan requests (up 220%) with a 72% fulfillment rate and an average turnaround time of 10 hours (down from 19 hours in 2019)

We facilitated 564,000 flightplan searches (up 400%) and welcomed 5,200 new users (up 150%).

We'd like to thank all of our members for continuing to use our service and help keep it a buzzing hive of flightplan activity as we enter our 16th year of operation.

We extend a special thanks to our top contributors of 2020:

• cwl_spotter (14,200 flightplans contributed, 1,300 requests handled)
• EuroPlanner (5,200 flightplans contributed, 400 requests handled)
• naplespotter (3,200 flightplans contributed, 1,200 requests handled)
• adrianospada (2,600 flightplans contributed, 820 requests handled)
• Peteking (1,700 flightplans contributed, 1,600 requests handled)
• kimmry (1,700 flightplans contributed, 150 requests handled)
• Gregg (1,600 flightplans contributed, 210 requests handled)
• rksskalointa04a (1,400 flightplans contributed, 1 request handled)
• Poziemski (1,300 flightplans contributed, 30 requests handled)
• planespotter458 (1,200 flightplans contributed, 40 requests handled)

A full breakdown can be found on our 2020 Annual Summary

We've made some changes recently to our VATSIM/IVAO Prefile capabilities:

• VATSIM Prefile has been updated to use the latest endpoint provided by VATSIM (my.vatsim.net). This supports additional structured data fields which we inject from our flightplan Remarks, where available.
• IVAO Prefile functionality is now available by popular demand from a number of our users.

We've also been applying some upgrades to our infrastructure to make our service more secure, reliable and current. We don't anticipate this causing any issues for our users, but if you spot something isn't working as expected, or have any other feedback or suggestions, please Contact Us.

March 2020 was a record month for flightplan contributions - with 8,929 new flightplans added. This is the highest number of contributions in a single month in our 15 year history - breaking the previously held record of 8,904 in July 2006. To put it in perspective, our average growth over the past 2 years is 1,300 flightplans per month.

March also saw the highest number of flightplan requests in a single month. We received 1,457 requests of which 81% were successfully fulfilled.

We'd like to thank all of our March contributors, in particular EuroPlanner and cwl_spotter who both submitted over 3,200 flightplans each. A full breakdown can be found on our stats page:

March 2020 Stats

We are pleased to announce that with permission from SimBrief (www.simbrief.com), we've rolled out a new feature to enable the seamless export of EDI-GLA flightplans into SimBrief.

When viewing any of our flightplans, there is an new "SimBrief" button in the action panel. Clicking this will pop open a new browser window with our flightplan information pre-filled. You can then generate your briefing in the usual way. If you don't already have an active SimBrief session, you'll be prompted to log in first.

Let us know via the Contact Us form if you have any feedback or questions.

As published in the latter end of 2019, Real World Flightplan Database went through an overhaul. We're committed to making improvements to our site and fulfilling requests from our community.

Do you have a request? Or, an idea which you feel would improve our site? Please let us know, we want to hear about them!

Please submit all requests via our new 'Contact Us' page, selecting 'Suggestion or enhancement'. Provide a short brief on what you would like and how it would benefit our growing community, this could be included in one of our releases on the site. We may even contact you to get you actively involved!

In other news, we have been expanding our Flightplan Contributing Team by accepting 7 new members, they play core role in keeping the site alive. We value all of contributors, a personal thanks for your on-going commitment.

As a way of acknowledging the commitment of our contributors, and to increase transparency on the hive of activity that keeps the database thriving, we've made available a new statistics page.

Here you can view an archive of metrics broken down by month and year, spanning the 15 years the database has been operational.

Highlights for 2019:

• addition of 11,400 flightplans
• fulfillment of 3,000 flightplan requests with a 74% fulfillment rate and an average turnaround time of 19 hours

We'd like to thank all contributors in 2019, and in particular our top 10 which are listed in the 2019 Annual Summary

We've rolled out the capability to prefile our flightplans with VATSIM. Look for the 'Prefile VATSIM' button when viewing any flightplan.

This feature was suggested by one of our contributors, LawrenceA. If you have any ideas for new features or enhancements, contact the management team via the Contact Us form.

We've rolled out our first major upgrade to the Flightplan Database platform since its inception 15 years ago. This has involved a full overhaul of our back-end codebase and bringing in a modern framework, optimisations to our database to improve performance and user experience, as well as a number of bug fixes and new features not limited to:

• A 'View Source' button on flightplans which will show the full, unparsed ATS/CFMU data. This will be available for flightplans added after 29 Dec 19 when supplied by the contributor.
• Searching for flightplans by date range is now supported.
• Searching for flightplans by Remarks is now supported. This is a partial match field which can be leveraged in a number of ways - e.g. searching for an aircraft registration with 'REG/XXXXX'.
• Additional Remarks are now captured on CFMU flightplans that are submitted - e.g. PBN/, DAT/, NAV/, SUR/, PER/, TALT/. These were previously ignored.
• Composing Private Messages was often slow and painful as the recipient drop-down was overloaded with the number of users. The recipient field has been replaced with a freetext autocomplete.
• 'Remember Me' on login now has a longer session timeout period.
• Faster loading times on various pages across the site, and faster flightplan searches.
• many more

These fundamental technical changes position us well to ensure we can continue operating smoothly into the future, as our database and user base continues to grow.

We're exploring the possibility of a second phase upgrade to the front-end of the site, which involves modernising the look and feel and making it more responsive/mobile-friendly. But we need help to make this happen - so if you are a front-end UI/UX developer who is willing to donate time and expertise, please contact us via the channels below.

If you encounter any issues with the upgraded site, or have any ideas for new features or enhancements, contact the management team via the Contact Us form.