Everything from the 24 September update is now live, along with winds aloft from our own gridded weather platform, restored map arrows, a faster traffic pipeline, and security and platform upgrades.

This release takes the development branch to production. It includes everything described in the 24 September update: the planning page as a map, route planning then pre-flight then fly, recentre that keeps your zoom, steadier memory use during airspace sync, and priority-based offline airspace. On top of that comes the work below.

🌬️ Winds aloft from our own weather platform

Winds aloft now come from VelaAir’s new gridded weather platform. It ingests the the global model at 0.25° four times a day, and external providers as a fallback. Winds are specific to your area, your level and the forecast hour, and the forecast steps through real frames hour by hour (F1364).

Wherever you see winds aloft, the briefing shows which model and run produced them, and credits the provider. With no route or map area to forecast for, it tells you to plan a route or open the map.

Weather briefing: the winds-aloft table showed wind speeds in metres per second under a knots label, so speeds read about half their true value. They are now shown in correct displayed units.

➡️ Clearer arrows on the map

The wind arrows on the map are back, along with the above/below and climb/descend arrows on traffic labels, so “1,200ft” now tells you at a glance whether it’s above or below you. Your app picks this up automatically on the next launch (F307).

🛩️ Traffic: faster, fresher and more complete

• Fresher positions: the traffic pipeline processes each batch in a single pass and drops stale positions, so the traffic you see is as close to live as possible (F1372).
• Health monitoring: it now reports its health to our monitoring, with alerts on lag and errors, so we can act before you would notice anything (F1371, F650).
• Coverage follows you: the traffic sources now poll around where pilots are actually flying (F701).
• Pushed updates: traffic is pushed to you as it changes, instead of waiting to be asked for (F679).
• Unknown altitude: it is shown as unknown rather than assumed to be ground level, and the stealth-aircraft alert appears as a banner and ring on the map (F477).
• Cleaner picture: a VelaAir pilot’s position is only shown while it’s recent, and position-less Mode-S reports no longer override aircraft with a known position (F567, F691).

🛠️ Under the hood: built to scale

• Traffic lookups: each server now builds one shared picture of the sky, refreshed every second, and filters it for each pilot. A lookup that would have needed about 16,000 database commands at 10,000 aircraft now takes about 30. That headroom is how we plan to serve many more pilots at once (F1379, F1380, F1381).
• Background services: they now have the memory they need, for steadier scheduling (F650).
• Offline profile: your Profile shows its last-known details when you’re offline (F801).
• Performance notice: the notice over the heading tape now fades after 10 seconds or on a tap, and stays away for the rest of that flight (F1404).

🔒 Security

• Dependencies: we’ve applied security updates across the API’s dependencies, part of our continuing work to keep the platform current (F1382).
• Software bill of materials: every release now archives a full record of the software it’s built from, across the app, web, API and glasses (F1383).
• Payments groundwork: the foundations for paid tiers are in place, with guarded payment keys and subscription webhooks that set the right tier from the plan you choose (F1386, F60).

🔭 Coming next

• Winds aloft anchored on your planned departure time (F1407).
• A winds map layer that keeps a steady number of speed-encoding barbs on screen at any zoom (F1408).
• More places where missing data is shown as unknown rather than zero (F1387, F1389).