April 2026 Updates: Time of Day Filters, Weather Options & Scenery Links

Time of Day Preferences

You can now tell findsim.flights whether you prefer to fly during the day, at night, or have no preference — separately for your departure and arrival airports.

Daylight Sliders

The new daylight preference sliders work on a scale from -40 (strongly prefer night) to +40 (strongly prefer day), with 0 being neutral. The scoring system uses real sunrise/sunset data for each airport's location and the flight's departure time to calculate how well a flight matches your preference.

• Origin daylight factor — controls whether you want to depart in daylight or darkness
• Destination daylight factor — controls whether you want to arrive in daylight or darkness
• Both sliders are independent, so you can set "depart at night, arrive at dawn" if that's your style
• A value of 0 means the scoring algorithm ignores daylight entirely for that airport

This is particularly useful for scenic routes where golden-hour lighting makes a big difference, or for pilots who prefer the challenge of night operations with full ATC coverage.

Expanded Weather Filters

Weather filtering has been significantly expanded. You can now fine-tune your preferences across six weather dimensions for both origin and destination airports.

Weather Condition Filter

Set a minimum weather category for your departure or arrival airport:

• VFR — Visual Flight Rules (clear skies, good visibility)
• MVFR — Marginal VFR (slightly reduced conditions)
• IFR — Instrument Flight Rules (low visibility, clouds)
• ANY — No restriction (default)

Detailed Weather Preference Sliders

Each of the following factors can be set from -1 (avoid) to +1 (prefer), with 0 being neutral:

• 🌬️ Wind — prefer calm or breezy conditions
• 💨 Gusts — prefer steady or gusty winds
• 👁️ Visibility — prefer clear or hazy conditions
• ☁️ Ceiling — prefer high or low cloud bases
• 🌫️ Fog — prefer clear or foggy conditions
• 🌧️ Rain — prefer dry or rainy weather
• ❄️ Snow — prefer snow-free or snowy conditions
• ⛈️ Thunderstorms — prefer calm or stormy weather

These preferences are applied independently to origin and destination airports, giving you precise control over the conditions you want to fly in. The scoring algorithm uses live METAR data to evaluate each flight against your preferences.

Scenery Suggestions via FSAddonCompare

When you hover over an airport code in your flight results, you'll now see a scenery addon suggestion for that airport — powered by FSAddonCompare.

How It Works

• Hover over any origin or destination airport code in your results
• A popover appears showing the top-rated MSFS 2020/2024 scenery addon for that airport
• You'll see the addon name, developer, star rating, and price (with sale badges when applicable)
• Click the addon name or price to go directly to the store listing
• Both airports are looked up in a single efficient API call — no extra loading time

Transparency

We're a partner of FSAddonCompare, which means we have API access to their scenery database. However, we earn no commission from any purchases made through these links. The suggestions are shown purely to help you find quality scenery for the airports you're flying to.

For Logged-In Users

If you're logged in, the same hover popover also shows your airport bias controls — so you can adjust your preference for an airport and see scenery suggestions all in one place. Not logged in? You'll still see scenery suggestions whenever an addon is available for that airport.

🚀 What's Next?

We're continuing to improve the flight discovery experience. On the roadmap:

• More scenery sources and addon categories
• Saved filter presets so you can switch between your favourite setups instantly
• Improved mobile experience for the filter panel
• Additional flight data sources and scoring improvements