Hello folks!
I’m super excited to announce our biggest update yet on the website! Let me try to unpack it a little bit.
For months, our main goal has been one: Predict future ATC coverage for any given flight. Sounds trivial? Haha, it’s not! Especially when it’s just you, flying, coding, and life is happening on the side.
Making this happen involved a lot of moving pieces:
Posing it as an ML problem — How do you optimize and predict coverage across hundreds of airports and controllers?
Collecting the right data — It’s not just reading VATSIM endpoints. That data has to be cleaned, transformed, and twisted into something our models can actually understand.
Waiting and collecting enough data — We basically spent 2 months watching the skies… patiently.
Training ML models — Not trivial either. Lots of variations, testing, tweaking, repeat.
Combining ML with our ranking system — And finally presenting it all to you in a way that’s useful (and hopefully fun). This is truly all you see, but behind the scenes there are a lot of moving pieces.
In short, for any given flight, our system can now think ahead about who will be online, who might pop back in, and how to balance your preferred routes with controller coverage.
What’s new in this release
Control Time Estimation
We predict which controllers could be in charge during your flight—and when. You can now weigh your ranking (affinity) against coverage (who’s likely online) to find that sweet spot between fun and safe handoffs.
Controller Stamina
Ever wonder if a controller will stick around long enough to see you through your arrival? Now we show you their “staying power” with clear visual indicators and coverage scores.
Comeback Odds
Offline controller? No problem. We calculate the probability they’ll return in time for your flight. It’s like having a crystal ball… only slightly more data-driven.
And don’t worry — your trusty recommendations and pre-ranking filters are still working behind the scenes to personalize your flights. For a full detail of features, please visit here or watch below 
Ready to see it in action? vatsim-dispatcher.org
Since we are still in beta, your feedback is invaluable. If you have any issues not seeing these features enabled, please let me know.
What’s coming next?
Our ML models learning to make coffee for you while you fly… okay, not yet. Now seriously:
- Notification system: Sends you recommendations for flights to do in the future. Fully configurable (what hours you want to fly, etc).
- Model improvements: Keep improving our models behind the scenes. Our ranker is in pretty good shape but our future crystal ball (new one) needs retraining because it uses ID embeddings, which are highly dependent on new data coming in (it captures habits, patterns, etc. for each ATC position). Enabling this will be a little expensive both technically and infra-wise.
Regards,
Alex