Description
Hey everyone,
-> Support for bugs and suggestions: https://api.preflightly.app/support/
Some of you might know me from a few years back. I went quiet in 2023, became a dad, life happened. I've been chipping away at something new in the gaps and I'm finally ready to share it.
Preflightly is a free, modern add-on manager and Route Finder for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Symlink-based activation, smart grouping, a full GSX Profiles page, and an Autorun for your companion apps.
If your Community folder has slowly gotten out of hand (hundreds of folders, liveries you've lost track of, sceneries that drag every startup), this is meant for you.
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⚠️ Coming from MSFSAddonsLinker or another add-on manager?
Preflightly is meant as a replacement. You can point it at your existing AL library on disk, no need to move anything back to Community/ first. Preflightly scans your library (or libraries, you can declare several), and creates the symlinks in Community/ itself. Once you're set up, the previous tool can be safely uninstalled.
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🗂 Source folders + symlink activation
Your add-ons stay exactly where you put them. You point Preflightly at one or more source folders (one big library, or your AL library + Orbx + Aerosoft One + your own region-by-region setup, whatever fits), and Preflightly only creates the symlinks between those folders and MSFS's Community.
Toggle an add-on on, a link appears in Community/ and the sim sees it. Toggle it off, the link disappears. Nothing is ever copied, moved, or duplicated. The library stays clean, MSFS only loads what you've actually enabled, and startup times drop accordingly.
Need to flip a whole page at once? A Toggle All button activates (or deactivates) everything currently visible, respecting your search and filters, several hundred add-ons in seconds.
🤝 Plays nicely with third-party installers
Orbx Central, Aerosoft One, Contrail, FlyByWire Installer, iniBuilds Hub, simMarket: Preflightly auto-detects them, lists them in Settings, and leaves their symlinks alone. They keep managing their content, Preflightly indexes everything in one place so Route Finder sees the full picture.
🛎 GSX Profiles page
Preflightly indexes every GSX Pro profile in your GSX folder and gives them their own page. Each profile is matched to the scenery it belongs to, so you can see at a glance which airports are covered, which profiles are orphans, and which sceneries still need one.
Click any profile for a zoomable map of the airport's stands (jetway gates, walking-pax, bus, cargo, deicing zones, VDGS halos), an operators card showing the ground handlers in use, and an Expert mode for the raw numbers.
Clean GSX finds duplicates and orphans and shows you exactly what it wants to remove before you confirm. When a scenery ships its own GSX profile, a one-click banner copies it where GSX Pro will actually load it. And on the Sceneries page, a Search ↗ link jumps straight to a flightsim.to search pre-filled with the airport's ICAO when you're missing one.
📥 Quick Import
Drop a folder, a ZIP, or a GSX profile onto the dashboard. Preflightly finds the manifest root inside nested archives, figures out what the package is, drops any embedded GSX profile in the right place, and asks before replacing an existing version.
Drop a ZIP that bundles several add-ons (a freeware airport plus its companion pack, a livery pack…) and it imports every one of them, with a per-add-on Replace / Skip choice. The usual five-step routine (unzip, dig for the folder, move it, deal with GSX, check the version) becomes one drag and drop.
✈️ Route Finder
Route Finder cross-references 70,000+ commercial routes against everything in your library. Not just managed add-ons, but also your Official and Marketplace/Asobo airports and aircraft. If MSFS ships an enhanced default airport and you've got it enabled, it counts as coverage. You don't need third-party scenery for every stop. And the bundled stock liveries that ship with the Asobo aircraft (KLM and United on the 787-10, etc.) count as available too.
Aircraft matching goes a bit further than a strict ICAO lookup. If a route calls for an A321 and you don't own one but you have a Fenix A320, it'll suggest the Fenix as a sensible substitute. Same family, close enough to fly the route with the right feel. When the matcher has multiple options it shows them all in a picker so you can pick the one you actually want to fly. It always prioritizes what you own (community and payware first), then falls back to variants and family matches.
Times are shown in Zulu by default (matching METARs, flight plans and SimBrief), with a Settings toggle for airport local time. Every route gets a live countdown to departure ("in 2h 15m", "12 min late") and a day / night / dawn / dusk tag computed from the real sun position along the flight. Airports show ICAO codes everywhere (EGLL, not LHR).
The idea is to stop bumping into "I don't have the right plane for this" and instead see what your library is ready to fly today.
🗺 Dashboard map
A live world map of your install: managed airports in yellow (or green if you don't have GSX), Marketplace/Asobo airports in blue. A halo around any dot means you have a GSX profile for that ICAO. Click any airport for details (scenery name, publisher, version, status) and a snapshot of coverage stats by country.
🧠 Smart grouping + conflict detection
After the first scan, Preflightly suggests starter groups: sceneries by ICAO region, aircraft by category. Handy when you want to activate a whole region before a session and switch it off after. It also reads each package's manifest to detect the type (aircraft, livery, scenery, GSX profile, dependency library) so asset packs don't end up polluting your scenery list. And if you try to activate a third-party airport that fights with an Official or another community scenery for the same ICAO, you get a warning before the symlink is created so you can pick which one wins.
🚀 Autorun for companion apps
Preflightly detects your installed sim tools (SimBrief, Navigraph, Little Navmap, vPilot, GSX, BeyondATC, ActiveSky, etc.) and launches them in sequence before your flight. No more opening apps one by one.
🗃 Your files, untouched
Preflightly doesn't move, copy or rewrite your add-ons. The symlinks it puts in Community/ are the only thing it adds to your install, and Reset removes them in one click. If you walk away, just uninstall, there's nothing to restore.
This is a passion project. The sim community gave me a lot over the years and this is my way of giving something back.
There's a feedback link in the app if you hit anything weird, every report is read and helps me prioritize fixes. Be gentle, I'm also running on limited sleep. 😅
PreFlightly
Preflightly is a free add-on manager and Route Finder for MSFS 2024. Your add-ons stay where you put them: point Preflightly at one or more source folders and it activates them via symbolic links in Community/, so MSFS only loads what you actually use. Plays nicely with Orbx, Aerosoft One, iniBuilds Manager and Addon Linker side by side. Drag-and-drop import, GSX profile handling, smart grouping, conflict detection, Autorun for SimBrief/Navigraph/vPilot/GSX, and a Route Finder that knows what your hangar can fly. Fully reversible, no files ever moved or duplicated.
Avis des utilisateurs
12 avis
Historique des versions
Preflightly 0.12.1 - A readable map, and Community add-ons you can manage THE MAP IS LEGIBLE - Routes are actually visible. They were drawn at 12% opacity, which measures 1.15:1 against the background - the map's own country borders sat at 1.09:1, so the data was six hundredths of a contrast point from being decor. Routes now meet the 3:1 WCAG asks of a graphical object that carries information, and the density of a big library reads from the number of lines rather than from their glow. - The map has a coastline again. Land against sea measured 1.08:1 - not a dark map, an undifferentiated one. That is why routes looked like they were floating in a void: there was no map underneath them. - Place names are readable, on every map in the app. Country labels sat at 3.34:1 against the land, below the 4.5:1 that text needs - on the Dashboard and the GSX maps too, not only in Route Finder. THE MAP DRAWS WHAT THE TABLE LISTS - It shows the routes you own, not just the ones already switched on. Filter by an aircraft you have and the table would list seventeen flights while the map said "No routes to draw" - it only ever drew corridors with both airports loaded in MSFS, and one of yours was off. It now draws every corridor where you own both ends, and says which are loaded by the weight of the line: full and bright for what MSFS has right now, finer and softer for what is one click away. Colour still means flight time, and the legend gained a Routes axis that spells the two out. Corridors reaching an airport that is not in your library stay off the map. The table lists them, with the missing airport in the checklist - but an arc to a place the map will not draw a dot for would be a promise about something you do not own. - The empty list no longer blames your setup. "Make sure you have active sceneries with ICAO codes" was wrong twice over: sceneries produce routes whether they are switched on or not, and the usual culprit is the Flyable filter Route Finder switches on for you. It now says which of the three it is, and offers Show all flights - there was previously no way to turn that filter off from the empty state. - The empty panel stops hiding your airports. It covered the whole map, so the dots for every airport you own were painted out - including the dimmed ones the message tells you to click. It is a card in the middle now. - The flight card no longer shows a flight the list has just declared nonexistent. Filtering everything out left the previous flight sitting there, Activate button and all. - Flights on routes without a published schedule count your liveries even when they are switched off. They were the only ones asking for an active livery, so they never showed as flyable on a library you had not turned on. ADD-ONS INSTALLED STRAIGHT INTO COMMUNITY - iniManager, Fenix, FSLabs and friends are recognised for what they are. The setup wizard used to file them under "won't be tracked" and tell you to move them into a library - advice that breaks those installs. They are indexed, they count towards your stats and Route Finder, and Preflightly still never moves, links or deletes them on its own. A separate message now covers the real problem case: a folder in Community carrying the same name as a copy in your library. - Decide what happens to each one: Manage or Ignore. The pop-up that appears after a Re-sync offered a single button, and it was the one that hides things - so ignoring looked like the only thing you could do. Manage moves the folder into your library and leaves a link in its place, so the add-on gets an on/off switch, groups and everything else, exactly like the ones you installed yourself. This is the only place Preflightly ever moves a file; it does it one add-on at a time, and only because you asked. If the link cannot be created, the folder goes straight back where it was. Ignore hides it everywhere and stops reporting it, and can be undone from the same row or from Settings. - Folders belonging to Fenix, FSLabs, PMDG or iFly are flagged before you move them. Those installers rewrite their own path, so moving their folder breaks the install. The warning does not block you - it is your library - it just arrives before the move rather than after. - Ignore a Community folder whenever you like. The option existed only in that pop-up; past "Got it" there was no way back. It is now on the add-on's own row too. - Add-ons dropped into Community2024 are detected too. Only the main Community folder was ever scanned for these, so anything installed in the other one stayed invisible after setup. - Liveries installed by iniBuilds Hub or Orbx land in the right table. They were filed as "Other" for good, with no aircraft, no airline and no ICAO, which also kept them out of Route Finder. And Preflightly no longer records the third-party tool's own folder as something it may delete. YOUR LIBRARY STAYS IN STEP WITH YOUR DISK - Delete an add-on's folder and Re-sync now forgets it. The row used to survive every Re-sync - counted in your KPIs, offered to Route Finder, impossible to remove. Add-ons you had never switched on were invisible to the check, and one you had switched on was parked in a state nothing ever looked at again. - An unplugged drive is not read as a deletion. Re-sync checks that each source folder could actually be read before concluding anything is missing, so a disconnected external drive or an offline NAS leaves your library exactly where it was. - Re-sync in Settings does the same work as Re-sync everywhere else. It was a partial reimplementation: it skipped the source-folder rescan and never indexed add-ons sitting in your Community folder, then announced "Already in sync" while there was still something to report.
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Se connecterCommentaires(94)
1 day ago
The biggest one
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Please allow us to enter/edit addon information like the title or developer or painter since many addons lack of correct information and then you have to remove the addon from Preflightly, edit manifest or livery.cfg, and reimport. An edit metadata feature would be so, so great! ❤️
General
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Is it possible to add a tag system to a future update? So for example I could set a livery to a group like "Europe" something more overal, but set tags like "Germany", "Lufthansa", "Airbus", "Short Haul", etc... to add more specific information and probably make searching/switching addons on and off a little easier. For example the current group selector could be a drop down with a label drop down selector next to it.
Sceneries
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If you can find a way to show any Marketplace airports owned on the map that would be awesome. Some show up. For others I had to install fake sceneries just to use them in Preflightly without ever activating them.
GSX
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More and more GSX profiles get extended with custom handler scripts. Please allow Preflightly to copy the _handler.py files as well when you drop an .ini file into the Dashboard drop area. That'd be lovely.
Aircraft/Liveries
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Is there a way for you to split Fenix A319 and A321 into 2 categories? Currently they are put together as "Airbus A320 — Fenix Simulations" and if the livery name does not suggest it its not clear what airframe the livery is for.
A321 NEO/LR liveries are mistaken to be "Airbus A321"
Source Folders
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Instead of auto-labeling, maybe we can set labels ourselves to differenciate between addon sources that have not been labeld by the system more easily. Example would be my HUES app that is shown as "Main library" in the Liveries tab.
External Apps
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If we would have a group/tag system for external apps it would be possible to have a drop down button on the dashboard to start a scenario of apps - just a very rough idea 😊
Best
Papa
1 day ago
Thank you for your feedback; I will look into it. Marketplace content is my priority for the next update, although it is complicated due to DRM.
1 day ago
I've been quiet here over the summer. 0.12.0 is what I was doing instead, and it's a big one.
The headline is cargo. The route database now carries freight schedules, FedEx, UPS, DHL, Atlas Air, AeroLogic and the rest, so a 767F leaving at three in the morning is a flight you can pick like any other, with its own flight number and departure time. A CARGO badge marks them in the table and on the flight card, and a new Flight type filter narrows the list to passenger or cargo.
The other big one is the map. Route Finder now has a Table | Map switch, and the map draws every route you can fly right now as a great circle over your own airports. Route colour tells you the flight time in five bands, hovering an airport lifts all of its routes out of the crowd, and clicking one loads it into the flight card exactly like clicking a table row. It reads the same filters as the table, so narrowing by airline, aircraft or duration narrows both. Click an airport you own but have switched off and it draws, in dashes, the routes you would gain by turning it back on, counting only the ones where the aircraft and the livery are already there.
A few other things landed too:
Add-ons installed straight into Community by Fenix, FSLabs, PMDG or iFly finally count. Preflightly listed those folders in a popup and then ignored them everywhere else, so Route Finder called an aircraft missing while it sat installed in your sim, and your library totals came up short. They now carry an In Community badge instead of a switch, and Preflightly never moves, links or deletes them.
Isolate mode asks first. It used to switch off every add-on the flight didn't need with no confirmation and no way back. It now shows you exactly what is about to go dark, the button says how many, and Restore them sits under it afterwards.
Step through every flight of the same route. Los Angeles to Seattle has 42 departures a day in the database and picking that route handed you one of them; arrows above the flight card now walk through the rest, and a return button shows the other direction.
A Lighting filter for day, night, dawn and dusk flights, and Route Finder now opens on the flights you can fly rather than all 63,877 in the catalogue.
Big libraries open fast. A 3,000 add-on library took eight seconds to appear and 2.4 seconds to react to a keystroke in the search box; it's now 1.5 seconds and 0.3.
The whole app is usable from the keyboard, and Preflightly tells you when MSFS is running instead of letting you click and get an error.
Please run a Re-sync once after updating. That's what indexes the add-ons sitting directly in your Community folder, so your totals and Route Finder pick them up.
I owe you an apology on support. I haven't replied to everyone. The amount of feedback after 0.11 was far more than I expected and I fell behind on answering. I do read every single report, and a lot of what's in this release came straight out of them: the Fenix and FSLabs aircraft not counting, isolate mode switching off your library without asking, Route Finder opening on a catalogue of flights you couldn't fly. Please keep sending them even if you don't hear back from me right away.
The feedback link is in the app and at https://api.preflightly.app/support/. Thanks for sticking around, and happy flying.
4 days ago
Great app but it doesnt recognize every aircraft and livery...
12 days ago
4 days ago
13 days ago
26 days ago
about 1 month ago
2 months ago
2 months ago
I already sent several emails to the creator without response, Rating would be 3* if he would respond and 5 * if he would fix that problem.
2 months ago
2 months ago
2 months ago
2 months ago
3 months ago
One thing i would like to suggest, the scenery indexing process in MSFS leaves a lot to be desired and can quite often end up causing issues with lost navigation data, runway issues etc etc after you make constant changes to the community folder. It would be great if there was an option in PreFlightly to remove the scenery indexes when you make changes to the community content before MSFS is launched, so they can rebuild.
I'd also be keen to see more consitency in the data passed from the route finder to simbrief so you always have correct ICAO for the airline and callsign + reg populated - not just the flight number.
3 months ago
3 months ago
3 months ago
3 months ago