Flight Logger 1.13.0: The Take-off, the Touchdown and the Go-around

Version 1.13.0 of the Flight Logger is out now. If you already have the logger installed it will offer the update the next time you open it, and it can also be downloaded from the Flight Logger page.

This release is about the three moments the logger has to read at speed, and had been reading wrongly: the take-off, the touchdown and the go-around.

A bounce on the take-off roll no longer ends the flight

A touchdown is an airborne reading followed by an on-ground one, and a bouncy rotation produces exactly that: the wheels leave the tarmac at five feet and the next reading has them back on it. Nine reports between June and August filed one minute of flight time this way, one of them New York to Denver. A landing now requires the aircraft to have flown first, which a hop over a runway bump is not.

The take-off is recorded once

A go-around re-reported the take-off, so the departure time became a few seconds before the touchdown and the sector's flight time collapsed with it. The take-off weight, fuel and departure weather were being taken from the missed approach for the same reason. And a go-around that never climbs away now returns to the approach: the take-off phase led only onward to the climb, so an aircraft that levelled below 1500 ft flew the whole descent back to the runway in the departure phase, where the arrival rules were never applied to it.

X-Plane landing rates are measured at the wheels

The rate was sampled off a five-second tick, so the flare fell between two readings and what was reported was the approach descent. One landing was filed at -857 fpm while an independent tracker recorded -178, on a touchdown registering 0.96 G. Across the network, X-Plane arrivals averaged -397 fpm with 40 per cent worse than -500, against -234 and 7.8 per cent on MSFS 2024, which made an X-Plane pilot around five times more likely to be flagged for a hard landing.

The rate is now latched at the moment the wheels touch, from the two X-Plane readings that matter, read forty times a second instead of twice. On the first flights flown with it the reported rate agreed with that same third-party tracker to within 1 fpm. Rates already recorded on X-Plane flights have been reviewed, the false hard-landing violations removed and the pilots concerned written to. Microsoft Flight Simulator is unaffected: it has always been able to report the touchdown directly.

The cabin speaks the airline's language

Which language your cabin announces in is now the airline's decision, set on the website rather than guessed inside the app from a country list, and it travels with the flight. Ten more languages have full crew scripts, for 21 in all: Serbian, Croatian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Swahili, Sinhala, Chinese in both Mandarin and Cantonese, Hindi, Russian and Persian, each written in its own alphabet rather than transliterated. An English-speaking crew now reads English in its own accent as well, so Australian, Irish, Canadian, Singaporean and South African crews no longer all sound American.

Nineteen further languages have a voice but no crew scripts yet, among them Japanese, Korean, Greek, Polish and Thai. Airlines set to one of those read the English announcement in that accent, and are named that way on the website rather than offered as a second language.

Reporting a crash

Cancelling a flight because the simulator crashed now sends the app log with it. The crash happens in someone else's program, but our log holds the run-up to it, which is what tells a real crash apart from the logger losing its connection to the simulator. It is the commonest reason a flight is cancelled: 455 in the two months to 6 September.

As always, if something the logger records does not match what you flew, cancel with a description or send a bug report from the app. Most of this release came from pilots who did exactly that.