The pilot rewards system

The pilot rewards (points) system is an optional virtual airline feature that provides virtual airlines with the ability to automatically award a customisable amount of reward points for pilots who specifically fly routes that have been set up by the virtual airline.

Reward points will also be able to be configured to be rewarded for virtual airline achievements too (this is coming soon!)

The system works by checking any company routes that the airline has configured upon landing, if a route is found that matches the departure and arrival airport, and an optional amount of reward points (XP, $v etc.) has been configured for the route, FsHub will automatically award the pilot the full amount of points as long as the pilot has flown greater than 95% of the route (track) distance.

If the pilot has taken several shortcuts or simply flown DIRECT and therefore the distance flown is less than 95% of the route distance, reward points will be allocated to the pilot as a proportion of the maximum point allocation based on the track distance percentage flown and as such, it is within the pilot's best interest to fly the full route in order to maximise the total amount of points he or she will receive.

This system has been specifically developed to encourage your virtual airline users to regularly fly published company routes (to and from specific destinations); whilst this system can be used for any kind of virtual airline on FsHub, this feature is probably more useful and suited towards virtual airlines that are concentrating on larger commercial passenger and cargo operations as opposed to military, GA or smaller turbo-prop commercial operations.

As with most things in FsHub, we try to deliver features that aim to be optional and unopinionated in their use case.

The Pilot Rewards system, by default, is configured as “Experience Points (XP)” however, in order to cater for all users and add a greater level of customisation, virtual airlines can name (label) the “unit” of reward points to whatever they like through the Virtual Airline settings page (Crew Portal > Airline Details > Pilot Rewards), as an example you could use “Dollars/($)” or maybe something a little more creative such as “Flight Tokens/(FT)”.

It is important to note that this system is decoupled and completely unrelated to the Pilot Ranks and Pilot Achievement systems - all three of these systems are individually optional and operate independently to maximise the creative use of “any mix” of these systems by the virtual airline management team.

When this feature (Enable pilot reward points?) is enabled from the Virtual Airline settings page (Crew Portal > Airline Details > Options), any company routes that are set up for the virtual airline (through Crew Portal > Administration > Routes) that you are flying for can optionally be configured with a Pilot rewards value (this is a number between 0 and 1000 - or simply leave blank to ignore awarding points for this route) - this value is then awarded to the pilot when he or she flies and completes the route.

You may decide that you want to award (or pay) your pilots the maximum value for all routes (eg. 1000), you should however consider using these points to your advantage in future - As a virtual airline owner/management team, you should probably ensure that all of your published routes are flown, this is especially important if you plan to use the upcoming Corporate Airline Mode (CAM) (an optional advanced economy mode) features for your virtual airline as for any published routes that are flown less often/not at all will reduce your airline's AEI (Airline Efficiency Index), majorly impact your airlines' score on our inter-airline ranking systems in addition to your airline's profits.

For any reward points that the virtual airline pilot earns (whether this is XP, Virtual dollars, or some other fictitious point/currency), we provide RESTful API endpoints to enable developers and website integrations to be able to deposit, withdraw and transfer these reward points between the virtual airline users and the virtual airline (CAM) account.

As an example, the pilot's earned reward points can then be “spent” and/or “traded” through external systems - examples of such integrations include:

• Discord bots (eg. pay for greater access levels)
• Twitch bots (think “hydrate” etc.)
• Virtual airline livery unlocks (eg. through a custom website plugin)
• Pilot rank-ups etc. (eg. through a custom website plugin)
• Virtual trading (through third-party websites)
• VA events/challenges
• ….the possibilities are endless!

The REST API documentation can be found here: https://fshub.io/docs/platform/v3/rest-api

The Pilot Reward system is a simple “economy” mode which sees pilots' earn “reward points” for flying Virtual Airline routes (and optionally for completing Virtual airline achievements too), this feature is intended for virtual airlines that like a degree of “economy” or “career-mode” but don't want to go too extreme and therefore, this feature can be used independently but when combined with the Corporate Airline Mode (CAM) the running and simulation of your airline at a business level can really be enhanced!

If you're less likely to want to run and manage a “virtual business” and have to worry about profit and loss, then the Pilot Rewards system may be all you need or want at this stage.

You can learn more about this advanced mode here: Corporate Airline Mode.