The Map

The Map tab (Alt+M, or type MAP) shows the fleet as an air traffic control display would: coastlines on a dark scope, every airport in your schedule, and every aircraft in your fleet, each where it was last known to be.

What it shows

Day and night: the scope is lighter where it’s daytime and darker where it’s night, fading through twilight between them. The line sweeps west as the day goes on.
Airports in the schedule are small rings with a dot inside, with their IATA code and local time, e.g. 1405L; your base has a second ring. Point at one for its name and both codes, and how far its clocks are from UTC.
Aircraft on the ground are listed under the airport they were last reported at, by registration.
Aircraft in the air are solid diamonds with a data block: the registration, then the flight number and where it’s going.
Aircraft on order are dimmer, in brackets at the lessor’s airport until they’re delivered. A delivery flight is the lessor’s, and isn’t tracked.
Zoomed in, the world’s other large airports show as faint dots, and further in the smaller ones as small crosses, so you can see what’s around.
FIRs, flight information regions: the airspace each area control centre looks after, with dashed boundaries and their ICAO codes, e.g. EGTT for London. The FIRs button along the top turns them off and on.
Coverage: the edge of radar and VHF coverage, as a dotted line, and the latitudes beyond which there’s no SATCOM. The Coverage button along the top turns it on and off.
Range rings round your base, dotted, at 50, 100 and 200 nautical miles, to see at a glance what’s coming in. At 50 NM an arrival is in the terminal area, around a quarter of an hour from landing; 100 NM is near where it starts its descent; and by 200 NM, half an hour or so out, its crew are about to call the company to say they’re in range.

Point at an aircraft to see what it’s doing, and for one in the air, how long ago it was where it’s drawn and what said so.

The key in the bottom right corner says what each symbol and line is. The Key button along the top shows or hides it.

The world a company was started with holds its FIRs as well as its airports, so a world of your own (Worlds and Manufacturers… on the welcome window) can change them.

Known position

The map shows what Ops Control has been told, not where an aircraft is at this instant.

On the ground, an aircraft is at the airport its last movement message put it at.
In radar cover, it’s where the radar last swept it. It steps on every few seconds.
Out of radar cover, it’s where its last position report said, and stays there until the next report is in. Over an ocean that’s a jump every quarter of an hour or so.

Aircraft move at most four times a second, however fast the clock is running, and jump from one known position to the next.

Overdue

An aircraft in the air whose position nothing has given for longer than its reporting interval and five minutes is overdue. It’s drawn as the outline of a diamond, in grey, with OVERDUE in its data block, and Ops Control raises a Position report overdue Alert, which needs no acknowledging. When a report arrives the aircraft is drawn as usual again; the Alert stays in the list as a record. An aircraft on the ground is never overdue.

What to do about one is in Aircraft position reporting, in the CATS Training Materials.

Picking an aircraft

Click an aircraft to pick it. It gets a frame round it, the flight it’s on is drawn, solid from where it left to its last known position and dashed on to where it’s going, and a small box opens beside it and follows it:

its flight;
Link: the datalink its last message came by, VHF, SATCOM or HF datalink;
Report: its last position report: when it was sent, the position, the flight level and its estimate of touchdown;
Since: how long ago that was.

Request Report in the box asks the aircraft for a position report now, as typing POSREQ and its registration does. The request goes up on whichever link the aircraft is using, and the request and its answer are both in Messages. Over HF datalink either may take some minutes, or not arrive.

Click the aircraft again, click elsewhere or press Esc to close the box.

Flights are drawn as the crow flies, along the great circle: the shortest way between two points on the Earth. On the map’s projection (Mercator) great circles bow towards the pole, so a flight from London to New York heads out north-west over Ireland. Real flights follow airways, which Flight Dispatch doesn’t plan yet.

Moving around

Drag the map to move it.
Zoom with the scroll wheel, on the point under the pointer; with + and − or the buttons along the top; or by pinching.
Ctrl+0, or the button between − and +, shows everything in the schedule and the fleet. Until you move the map, it does this by itself as the schedule changes.

The scale bar at the bottom left is in nautical miles, measured at the middle of the map.