Everything FLARE does, in one place.

Section 2 · Desktop application

A small WPF / .NET 10 app for MSFS 2024.

A standalone Windows window — not a sim add-on. Talks to MSFS 2024 over Microsoft's SimConnect SDK, runs in user space, no kernel hooks, ~150 MB of working-set RAM on top of MSFS. Two jobs: capture and grade landings, and (optionally) sync them to your customer portal.

The window is designed to live on a second monitor — it never competes with MSFS for cockpit real estate, so your EFB, panels, and views inside the sim stay untouched. It shows live data while you're on final and pops a full debrief card at touchdown that stays open through rollout.

Landing capture & scoring

Every touchdown is detected automatically — no button to press. For each landing, FLARE captures:

Each landing is graded A+ → F. Sub-scores cover descent rate, G-force, centreline accuracy, touchdown-zone position, approach stability, sideslip, with a bounce penalty. Thresholds adjust by aircraft type — a 737 isn't expected to land like a Cessna. Full breakdown in landing scoring and the aircraft profiles catalog below.

Runway detection (four-tier)

FLARE figures out which runway you landed on through a four-tier fallback so missing MSFS data doesn't silently turn into a free score:

1. MSFS ATC SimVars — the happy path when ATC has assigned you a specific runway.
2. The simulator's own runway data — when ATC stays silent, FLARE asks MSFS directly for the runway geometry at the airport you're approaching and matches your touchdown to it. Because this is the runway exactly as the sim renders it, centerline and touchdown distances stay accurate even at airports where public map data disagrees with MSFS scenery.
3. GPS lookup against bundled navdata — failing both, FLARE looks up the runway by your touchdown coordinates against a bundled OurAirports SQLite database — ~70,000 airports, ~50,000 runway ends, CC0 public-domain data shipped inside the installer.
4. Not detected — when everything misses (fictional MSFS sceneries, genuine off-airport landings), centerline and touchdown zone are excluded from the weighted total rather than awarded a free 100. Honest grades over inflated ones.

The landing popup adds a small (via GPS) badge after the runway label when tier 3 was used, so you always know whether the runway was identified from MSFS or from coordinates. Parallel-runway suffixes (15L vs 15R) come from MSFS when it shares them and from the navdata otherwise — so a touchdown that MSFS reports as just "15" gets disambiguated to the correct side.

The bundled airport database auto-refreshes in the background once per 24 hours from a signed Cloudflare R2 endpoint. No action needed on your part — and no internet connection needed in flight; the lookup runs against the local copy.

Non-runway surfaces

When you land at a heliport, seaplane base, or grass strip, the popup shows a context chip ("Heliport landing", "Water landing", "Grass strip"). Useful when a fixed-wing touching down at the wrong surface type would otherwise look like a normal landing in the logbook.

Local logbook & export

Every landing — including ones captured before you signed in — lives in a SQLite database under %LOCALAPPDATA%\FLARE. Sort and filter by aircraft, airport, grade, date range. Export the current selection to CSV or JSON in one click. The local database is the source of truth and is never deleted by FLARE itself; uninstalling leaves it intact.

Sync to the customer portal

When you're signed in to the desktop app, each captured landing is uploaded to your private customer portal. The sync is one-way (desktop → server) and pushes one batch per landing.

To turn sync off entirely: Portal → Settings → Account → Sync landings to web portal → toggle off. Takes effect immediately. Existing synced landings stay on the server until you delete them.

Section 3 · Landing scoring & grading

How FLARE grades a landing.

FLARE's grading isn't a vibes-based system. Every threshold maps to an industry standard from the FAA, EASA, the Flight Safety Foundation, or aircraft manufacturers' Flight Crew Operating Manuals. The tables below are the universal fallback used for unrecognised aircraft — for everything in our catalog (default MSFS + the major payware), the same shape of curves is applied with airframe-specific numbers (see aircraft scoring profiles below).

Composite formula

Every landing produces a 0–100 score computed in three stages:

raw      = Σ (component × weight)  −  bounce_penalty  −  tail_strike_penalty
adjusted = raw × wind_difficulty_factor
final    = clamp(adjusted, 0, 100)

Six component scores feed the weighted sum, with two penalties and one multiplier shaping the final number:

The final score maps to a letter grade:

1. Descent rate at touchdown (30%)

What we measure: the aircraft's vertical speed in feet per minute at the moment the wheels touch the runway, sampled from MSFS via SimConnect's VERTICAL_SPEED variable.

Why it's the heaviest weight: sink rate at touchdown is the single most reliable indicator of a soft landing. Boeing 737 maintenance manuals trigger a hard-landing inspection at touchdown rates from roughly 360 fpm at MTOW to 540 fpm at lighter weights. For light aircraft, even a "firm" Cessna touchdown is rarely more than 200 fpm.

2. G-force at touchdown (20%)

What we measure: peak vertical load factor at touchdown (SimConnect G_FORCE), expressed as a multiple of normal gravity (1.0 G = level flight). Negative-G touchdowns are clipped to 1.0 G — FLARE doesn't reward "less than no impact."

Why it's separate from descent rate: two landings with the same touchdown fpm can produce very different impact loads depending on aircraft mass, gear stroke, and how progressively the pilot let the weight settle on the wheels. G-force captures what the airframe actually felt. A smooth airliner landing usually registers 1.1–1.3 G; structural inspection thresholds sit around 2.0–2.6 G for transport aircraft.

3. Centerline deviation (15%)

What we measure: lateral offset (in metres) between the aircraft's main-gear contact point and the runway's painted centerline at touchdown. Computed from the aircraft's geographic position and the runway threshold + heading published in MSFS's facility data.

Why it matters: the FAA's airman certification standards explicitly require landings "with the airplane's longitudinal axis aligned with and over the runway centerline." A 5-metre offset on a typical 30 m wide runway puts you visibly off-center; 10 m starts threatening edge lights on narrower airstrips.

If MSFS doesn't publish runway geometry, FLARE first looks the runway up by GPS against its bundled OurAirports database (70,000+ airports). If even that misses — fictional scenery or off-airport landings — centerline is excluded from the weighted total rather than awarded a free 100. Your grade reflects only what was actually measurable. See Runway detection for the full chain.

4. Touchdown zone accuracy (15%)

What we measure: longitudinal distance (in metres) from the runway threshold to the touchdown point.

Why it matters: the FAA defines the official Touchdown Zone as the first 3,000 ft (914 m) of paved runway for runways ≥ 4,200 ft long, or the first one-third for shorter runways. Landing past the TDZ progressively shortens the available stopping distance — runway excursions on landing are statistically the most common loss-of-control accident type.

For aircraft in the catalog the TDZ window adapts to the airframe — a 737's ideal window is 240–600 m, a Cessna 152's is 50–200 m. Per-category tables live in the aircraft profiles section.

5. Approach stability (10%)

What we measure: two pass/fail gates, taken once as the aircraft descends through 500 ft AGL and again at 300 ft AGL. At each gate FLARE checks four criteria in parallel:

• On speed — IAS within ±10% of Vref (or ±10 kt, whichever is larger). For unrecognised aircraft the fallback is ±15 kt of the running approach average.
• Bank under control — bank angle < 5°
• Stable rate of descent — vertical speed within ±200 fpm of the running approach average
• On glideslope — flight-path angle within ±1° (jets, default) or ±1.5° (GA / tailwheel) of the standard 3° glideslope

Both gates need all four criteria true to count as "stable":

Why this matters more than its weight suggests: Flight Safety Foundation analysis of approach-and-landing accidents found unstabilised approaches as a contributing factor in roughly two-thirds of cases. Most carriers' SOPs mandate a go-around if the aircraft isn't stabilised by 1,000 ft AGL in IMC or 500 ft AGL in VMC. We've calibrated FLARE's gates against the latter.

6. Sideslip and bank at touchdown (10%)

What we measure: the absolute sideslip angle (β) and absolute bank angle (φ) at the touchdown event. Each component is scored independently then combined as 0.6 × sideslip + 0.4 × bank.

Why it matters: a sideslip or bank at touchdown puts asymmetric load on the gear — one main wheel takes more than its share. The FAA's preferred crosswind landing technique is to fly the approach in a crab and transition to a wing-down sideslip in the flare, with the longitudinal axis aligned with the runway by touchdown.

7. Bounce penalty (−10 per bounce)

What we measure: a "bounce" is a ground → air → ground transition within 5 seconds of the previous ground contact. Each bounce subtracts 10 points from the composite score (the score is then floored at 0).

How we detect them: after the initial touchdown event, FLARE watches the SimConnect SIM_ON_GROUND flag. A re-contact after a brief airborne moment is logged as a bounce, with the peak G-force during the airborne phase recorded. The window resets on each new contact, so a sequence of three bounces within seconds of each other all count.

Why a bounce is more than aesthetic: bounces indicate excess energy at touchdown — usually too much approach speed, an early flare that bled altitude before settling, or a momentary porpoise. The FAA's recommended response after a single bounce is to maintain landing attitude and let the aircraft settle; after the second bounce the standard recommendation is a go-around.

8. Wind difficulty multiplier

Crosswind landings ask more of the pilot than calm-air landings, so a clean touchdown in a 25 kt crosswind earns a small bonus. The bonus is a multiplier applied to the raw composite score, and the final score still clamps to 100 — so a strong crosswind can lift a B → A but never turns an F into an A.

Why a multiplier and not a raw bonus? A bonus that adds points scales weirdly when other components score well — a 99 base can't go above 100, so the bonus disappears. A multiplier respects the existing balance of the score: a sloppy 50 in a strong crosswind still doesn't become an A.

9. Tail-strike penalty

Each aircraft has a published maximum safe pitch attitude on touchdown — the angle at which the tail of the airframe will contact the runway before the main gear. For the Boeing 737-800 it's 9.5°; for the Airbus A320 it's 13.5°; for the very-long 757-300 it's just 7.5°. When FLARE detects a touchdown pitch at or above the per-aircraft threshold, the landing earns a −25 point penalty on the composite score plus a "Tail strike risk" warning badge on the landing detail page.

For helicopters, eVTOLs, and aircraft with no published threshold, the check is skipped entirely. Per-aircraft pitch limits are listed in the catalog below.

Worked examples

Four landings, same engine, very different stories. All numbers traced through the formula above.

Honest caveats

FLARE's grading is grounded in real standards but a sim is not a cockpit. A few things to know:

• Per-aircraft thresholds are the default. The tables on this page describe the universal fallback used for unrecognised aircraft. For everything in the catalog (default MSFS + the major payware) FLARE applies airframe-specific thresholds — see aircraft scoring profiles.
• SimConnect data quality varies. MSFS publishes the touchdown event at the simulator's frame boundary (typically 30–60 fps), so recorded vertical speed can be ±5–10 fpm off the actual instantaneous value. Centerline and TDZ data depend on accurate runway geometry — third-party scenery sometimes fudges this.
• Calibrated against VFR / training standards, not airline SOPs. If you're flying an airliner intentionally to commercial-cockpit standards, expect to score in the A range routinely.
• The grading rewards consistency. A single A+ landing is great. Ten landings in a row averaging A is the real signal of skill — and that's what your portal stats track.
• Honest scoring beats inflated scoring. When runway data is missing (rare — fictional scenery or genuine off-airport landings), FLARE excludes centerline and touchdown zone from the composite rather than handing out a free 100 on each. Older v1.1.x landings used the "full credit" rule and won't be retroactively re-scored unless support triggers a staff re-score for you.
• No NaN scores. Bad sensor data (NaN inputs from SimConnect) score 0 rather than crash.

Section 4 · Aircraft scoring profiles

Per-aircraft thresholds for 476 airframes.

A 200 fpm touchdown is well below a Boeing 737's certification threshold but at the upper end of acceptable in a Cessna 152. FLARE's per-aircraft profile system applies the right curves for the airframe you're flying — across 28 categories covering 476 default + payware aircraft.

Profiles are bundled with the desktop app as profiles.json. The same source spreadsheet generates both the desktop profile bundle and this catalog, so the numbers below match what the app applies in-flight. Last generated 2026-06-11T00:00:00Z.

How FLARE matches your aircraft

When MSFS reports the aircraft title (e.g. "PMDG Boeing 737-800 BCF"), FLARE walks four tiers in order — first hit wins. Every landing page shows exactly which tier and profile it was scored against.

If your add-on isn't recognized or lands on a profile you think is wrong, email support@flaresim.io with the exact aircraft title shown on the landing card — we add aircraft to the library in regular updates.

Per-aircraft scoring examples

Same telemetry, different aircraft, very different scores. This is the per-aircraft system's whole point.

The per-aircraft tail-strike pitch and TDZ window also adapt — see the catalog cards below for each category's exact thresholds.

Wind multiplier & tail-strike penalty

Two universal modifiers fold into the composite formula on top of the per-aircraft component scores: a crosswind multiplier (×1.00 – ×1.15 by tier) and a tail-strike penalty triggered when touchdown pitch reaches the per-aircraft safe limit (−25 pts). Both are documented in the grading section above; the per-aircraft pitch limits are listed inside each category card below.

The catalog — 28 categories

Every MSFS 2024 default and major payware aircraft maps to one of the categories below. Click a card to expand the full threshold table, the per-aircraft list, and the cited sources.

What FLARE doesn't grade (yet)

Helicopters, gliders, eVTOLs, and tilt-rotors are not yet scored against fpm/G-force curves. Vertical-landing and rotorcraft aircraft use fundamentally different metrics (vertical rate, lateral drift, rollout discipline) — fixed-wing thresholds applied to them produce nonsense scores. They appear in the catalog above as their own categories so the matching layer doesn't route them to an airliner profile. Dedicated rotorcraft and glider scoring is on the roadmap for v1.3.0.

Hot-air balloons (Cameron Z-90, Lindstrand 90A, FlyDoo, Ultramagic, airships) are scored as of v1.2.8 using a balloon-specific impact-rate curve — basket touchdowns are gentle by design, so the curve rewards near-zero descent rates and penalises hard drops.

Section 5 · Customer portal

The web side of FLARE.

Sign in with the email you used at checkout. Each row below corresponds to a real page in the sidebar.

Section 6 · Account & security

Strong defaults. First-class hygiene.

Sign-in & two-factor authentication

Sign in with email + password at flaresim.io/accounts/login/. We also support social sign-in with Google or Microsoft.

1. Open Portal → Settings → Security.
2. Click Enable two-factor authentication.
3. Scan the QR with any TOTP app (1Password, Bitwarden, Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator) and enter the 6-digit code.
4. Save the recovery codes — they're the only way back in if you lose your authenticator.

Passkeys

FIDO2 passkeys are supported as a primary sign-in method. Add one from Portal → Settings → Security → Passkeys: your browser prompts to register Touch ID, Windows Hello, or a security key. Passkey sign-in replaces password+code on a trusted device.

Email management

Portal → Settings → Email shows the email on file and lets you change it. The flow sends a verification code to both the old and new addresses — you confirm both before the change takes effect, so a stale or hijacked inbox alone can't take over the account.

Active sessions

Portal → Settings → Sessions lists every browser session signed in to your account — browser, OS, country, last-seen time. Revoke any session, or sign out everywhere with one click.

Notification preferences

Portal → Settings → Notifications exposes per-category opt-outs for every email we send: support replies, license events, expiry reminders, seat warnings, login security alerts, marketing (off by default), and the five debrief notifications. Transactional emails like order receipts can't be opted out — you need them to operate the account.

Data export

Portal → Settings → Account → Export my data generates a one-shot JSON archive containing your account, profile, every order and license event, every synced landing, statistics rollups, achievements, support tickets, and audit-log entries.

Deleting your account

Portal → Settings → Account → Delete my account. Erases your account record, profile, synced landings, public profile, leaderboard entries, and notification preferences. License records and orders are detached (kept for 7 years for tax purposes, with personal data stripped). Your local SQLite landing database on your PC is unaffected — that copy is yours.

Section 7 · License management

Two devices. Self-serve everything.

Moving FLARE to a new PC

Your license covers up to 2 concurrently activated devices. Swap freely between them.

A clean reinstall on the same Windows user account does not consume a new seat. A Windows reset, full PC swap, or new Windows user account counts as a new device.

Regenerating a license key

Use this when you suspect your key has been shared, leaked, or written somewhere it shouldn't be. From Portal → Licenses → (open the license) → Regenerate key:

• The old key is revoked instantly.
• Every currently activated device is deactivated and will prompt for re-activation against the new key on next launch.
• The new key is emailed to you and shown once on the portal page.

Capped at 2 regenerations per calendar month per license. Contact support if you need another in the same month.

Transferring a license to someone else

Gift your license, or hand it off if you sold the device it was tied to. From Portal → Licenses → (open the license) → Request transfer:

1. Enter the recipient's email and an optional reason.
2. Submit. The status becomes Pending and we review manually (usually within one business day).
3. On approval, the original key is retired, a new key is issued to the recipient (account auto-created if needed), and both parties get email confirmations.

License keys may not be shared, sold, lent, or otherwise distributed outside this flow.

I lost my key

Your key is bound to your FLARE account, not the email you received. Sign in at flaresim.io and open Portal → Licenses; click Reveal or Copy.

If you bought under a different email and can't access it, email support@flaresim.io with your order number — we'll move the license to a new account.

If you suspect someone else has the key, regenerate it — the old key is revoked the moment you do.

Refunded or revoked license

When an order is refunded — by you, by a payment dispute, or by a fraud flag — the matching license is revoked. The next time the desktop app phones home it responds with "license refunded" and stops accepting new landings. Your local logbook is untouched and you can still export it. To pick up where you left off, re-purchase from the pricing page; you'll receive a brand-new key.

Section 8 · Billing & refunds

Paddle is the merchant of record.

Requesting a refund

14-day no-questions refund window. Two ways to request:

We confirm receipt within one business day. Once approved, the refund is initiated through Paddle and lands on your original payment method within 3–10 business days. The license is revoked at the moment we issue the refund. Past the 14-day window, refund decisions become discretionary — reach out anyway. Full text: Refund Policy.

Receipts & tax invoices

Every order has a printable receipt (Portal → Billing → (order) → Print receipt) and a Paddle tax invoice (download link on the same page) suitable for VAT / sales-tax records. You can also resend the original receipt email to yourself; a short cool-down between resends prevents accidental duplicates.

Section 9 · Troubleshooting

The most common things that go wrong.

Activation errors

Sync issues

Runway detection

SimConnect won't connect