Just Flight release ‘Fly the Line’ virtual airline companion software

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The folks at Just Flight have, in recent days, just released their new ‘Fly the Line – Short Haul Edition’ flight sim companion software. The software is intended to give you a career style gameplay focused on short haul (we’ll talk about that) airline flying. Let’s have a look.

Choose how you experience a virtual airline

While some flight sims, like MSFS 2024, have their own built in career system, many civil aviation sims do not and folks have gone looking for different ways to bring a game experience to the sim. FSEconomy, X-CPL-Pilot, and NeoFly are examples of competing and available options. Well Just Flight have thrown their own take into the mix with ‘Fly the Line – Short Haul Edition.’

The software plugs into Microsoft Flight Simulator, X-Plane, FSX and P3D. You then create a pilot profile and then pick a real world airline company (or create your own). From their the software sets you up with a schedule a missions to accomplish. Virtual cash, experience (XP) points and skill points are awarded for successfully completing missions.

One of the best features that I’ve seen here is that the experience is broken out into a few different modes. ‘Career mode’ is the full experience where you start as a junior pilot and progress through the ranks earning points, cash, etc. Or if you hate that progression stuff but want to have some of the other features, you can unlock everything and use ‘Free play mode.’ A third mode called ‘Schedule mode,’ lets you just fly the schedules with real world airlines and routes.

The game lets you use whatever aircraft you have in your sim so there’s quite a bit of freedom as to what you use and how you use it.

The title of the software includes the mention of short haul, which, according to the FAQ is flights of 6-hours or less. It’s unclear if they plan a Long Haul Edition as a follow-up but it does seem like shorter flights are the bread and butter of flight simmers so this may work out well.

Fly the Line – Short Haul Edition is now available for $34.99 USD. If this sounds like something that interests you, visit the Just Flight webstore for more information.

3 responses to “Just Flight release ‘Fly the Line’ virtual airline companion software”

  1. PaperPilot Avatar
    PaperPilot

    Can I ask you a question about something quite unrelated to this? From one flight sim enthusiast to another, I was thinking about a sandbox flight simulator where you could fly commercial airliners that had to be made to a high degree of fidelity (like what you would expect from PMDG, Bluebird or Fenix), yet it had a highly detailed damage model similar to that of IL-2 Korea and Combat Pilot. But what would be different is that not only would you fly the plane but you would also have to deal with a lot of hazardous situations. Hazardous situations from merely instrumental or buttons and switches that don’t work or are broken, or incidents that could lead to structural damage from pilot error caused by you or your co-pilot or flight engineer, etc., or sabotage (such as attempted hijackings or A.S.B.P that you have to thwart), or being hit by SAMs or shot at by fighter jets, and having to emergency land a plane (if you can) and having to control your plane despite physical damage that can disrupt a plane’s laminar flow. And if you crash into the ground, the plane would disintegrate according to how it would in real life. You could also do free missions where you can operate under normal circumstances and fly wherever from and to you like (in the likes of MSFS and X-Plane), or work for an airline for virtual wages. And the base game would have one airliner but if you wanted to have more airliners you would have to buy them as high fidelity modules.

    Asking you, do you think it would be popular amongst virtual pilots? Do you think that airliner manufacturers like Airbus, Boeing or Embraer would approve your aircraft to have a licensed status when they can be destroyed or severely damaged? Do you think this game would be heavily disapproved by other flight sim developers like Microsoft or Laminar Research, or by the gaming world in general? What kind of challenges would a development team face? Would they have to have a huge budget?

    You can delete this comment if you want. Sorry for getting miles off topic, but I just wanted your opinion on this idea of mine.

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    1. Aapje Avatar
      Aapje

      I think that dealing with issues is one of these things that people think they want because it sounds cool, but that is not actually what most of these people actually enjoy.

      It’s also way more work to implement these, as each of these failures requires separate modelling and testing.

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    2. ShamrockOneFive Avatar
      ShamrockOneFive

      Popular? No, I don’t think that concept would be popular. What we are seeing growing in popularity is a desire to simulate emergency situations but the implication is nearly always that these are situations for which procedures and recovery options are available. For example, iniBuilds A350 does simulated GPS jamming, has simulated scenarios for a passenger onboard is sick and you need to land it, etc. That sort of thing is growing. But the actual crashing of the airplane isn’t really all that popular with that brand of flight simmer.

      Combat flight simmers expect it, of course, because causing or receiving damage to the aircraft and the associated emergencies therein are more part of that genre. Even there, only a few DCS modules really have any depth there. IL-2 does it better and a small subset of players even enjoy crash video compilations. But I don’t see the two mixing.

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